Messaging in the modern era

Way back in the Stone Age, i.e. the seventies, when I was a child the house I grew up in had one phone. That one phone hung on the wall in the kitchen and when it rang it rang loudly as it had real metal bells inside of it. There were no buttons on it, it had a dial and you could hear clicking as you dialed. If you dialed a one you heard one click, if you dialed a nine, you heard nine clicks. If I went a half block down the road to my Aunt and Uncles house I would find a party line. A single ring meant the call was for my Aunt and Uncle, a double or triple ring meant the call was for someone else on the party line. If a neighbor on your party line wanted to be nosy they could pick up their receiver and listen in on your call. If you wanted to make a call you had to wait until your neighbor was off the phone.

In the eighties when I was a teenager my Dad broke down and had two extensions put in the house at my Mom’s request, actually it was a demand. We now had three phones in the house. Dad even sprung for touchtone service.

When I was in the Army, Ma Bell had been broken up. My Dad, being adventurous sent me a calling card from MCI so I could call home from wherever I was in the United States. Just his luck, I got stationed in Germany. Other than my inability to figure out the time difference between Germany and Wisconsin my parents hated it when I called home. The cost was astronomical. As I recall I would stand in a phone booth with two hundred Deutschemarks in five mark pieces, about one hundred dollars. That was enough for about a fifteen-minute phone call. I was plugging coins into that payphone faster than the eye could see. That is of course until I found out I could call from Germany collect…my Dad was “thrilled” with that discovery.

Fast forward to the late nineties, and my first cell phone. I mainly got it because I could not get a phone from what was then Wisconsin Bell as they had me mixed up with another Mark Andersen, who owed the phone company a fairly large amount of money. That phone was my main phone and was fairly large. I used it for one purpose and that was making voice calls.

In 2005 I was newly divorced and dating again. In the time I had been in a relationship the world of singledom had changed dramatically. After exchanging phone numbers with a woman we would text instead of call. At the time, I found texting cumbersome and quite honestly a pain in the ass to do. I only had twelve buttons on my phone and trying to type a message quickly that was coherent was a challenge.

Fast forward to today, I have an iPhone 4 which has a full keyboard. Texting is a breeze and many times the preferred method of staying in touch with friends and family. The downside is that I am constantly connected to the world. My e-mail, phone, text messages, facebook, music and the Internet are at my fingertips all of the time. There are days when I long for the time when there was only one phone in the house, and when you left the house, the phone stayed home.