I am far from being the master of my own technology.
In fact, like techno-phobs before me, I watch my offspring
master their devices, then when I feel ready, I ask them to teach me what they
know (but in small bytes).
Frankly, I am unsure I will ever
be ready for a 4G Smartphone or any type of 'tablet’ -- yet here I am,
launching a blog.
When my kids were little, I wrote humor columns for several
years. But just when blogging got popular, I became employed as an English
teacher, so my writing was set aside.
Fortunately, after eleven years, the economy tanked and the
charter schools I worked for struggled, so I have been gainfully unemployed for
the last several months. Here
I am, asking my offspring to teach me to blog.
Remarkably, it is at this juncture that I look with
nostalgia at mankind’s earliest version of blogging: the cordless telephone. It was the first technology where ‘data’ was transmitted without
the use of cords.
Oh, all right, it wasn’t. There were other ‘wireless transmissions‘
like… oh, Aboriginal Drumming, or photography. Maybe radio. And
television. Likely, the walkie-talkie
and the atomic bomb so let me rephrase: it was the first technology I
personally used to transmit information to another person without being
connected to a cord.
Today, I rarely use a traditional telephone in any
historically-sanctioned way (ie: to talk to someone using my voice). In fact, last month I got out my
Fiskers shears and personally severed our landline, then cancelled the house account.
In the last ten years, I’ve communicated largely by upsetting
folks with emoticon and context-free emails, and most recently, mis-texting. I am the only person I know who labors
over a text message at the rate of nine letters per minute until both
thumb-calluses thump, only to receive instant and multiple phone calls with
angry voices on the other end.
“Mom, stop
texting with made-up shorthand. I
mean, what does this even MEAN? ‘Gt L rng-sx b/c 241’ ?”
“Honey, it means I got Leah running socks because the sale
was two-for-one.”
All of this leads me, quite regularly, to just shut off my
cellular phone.
This aberrant behavior caused me to ask myself, “Carolyn, where
are your roots?” because back in my previous life, I was a proficient
phone-a-holic.
I now wish to use as Oral History this blog to preserve my
phoning culture: I wish to
document what it was like to use a cordless telephone, or what I consider ‘My
First Real Blog.’
My First ‘Real Blog’
It was June of 1995 when my husband brought home our first
cordless phone. It was a Father’s
Day gift to himself. He was tired
of getting strung up in phone cords stretched like tightrope through the house.
And when someone hung up, the cord whirled back to the cradle from Recoil-Tension
and smucked him in the face.
(Remember those ‘whip’ sounds you heard in Kung Fu movies
when the protagonist spin-kicked the bad guy? That was a phone cord
retracting. Whooh-Whooh-Whooh, THWAP.)
I’d always insisted on a fifty-foot cord. That way, I kept conversations going
from any location AND lashed my family to shreds.
Tragically, phone cords weren’t very durable. After
stretching 50 feet out to one hundred countless times per day, the receiver got
choked to the cradle by a fist-sized knot. Slinkies lived longer.
My husband added up how much money we’d spent on replacement
cords. He said it was enough to
buy a bass boat.
It was actually enough to buy a cellular phone for my mini-van
and a three-carat diamond waterfall ring with a concealed speaker-phone inside.
How I marveled at the hi-tech advances the telephone had
made! Remember how Cro Magnon women had to speak into rocks with pinecones
pressed to their ears? I mean, why
not give birth AWAKE? Or make
crust with rolling pins?
I guess the technology was pretty archaic when I was a
child. My very first telephone was
a classic late 50s model, the Black Beauty 900: a sleek, formidable desk phone
featuring resilient rotary dial-action and a thick, strapping shank of black
cord. You could use the receiver
as a bludgeoning device and subdue cat burglars and whales. No one needed home security systems as
long as they owned a phone.
But how I loved that cordless! Though I admit, it was disappointing when we couldn’t use it
right away. All six of us circled
the phone every hour to watch the battery charge.
“Do you think it’s ready yet?” my teenager panted, flexing
his dialing finger.
It took twelve hours to take a charge. None of us slept that night. The next morning was like Christmas
Day. I raced down the stairs to
find the kids already awake, taking turns dialing Peru from the street.
“That’s MINE!” I shouted from the dining room window. “Bring it here!”
“But we just reached the Embassy in Lima!”
“Hang UP.”
By 5:00 AM I had left a message on every answering machine I
knew.
“Guess where I am?
I am standing on my DECK talking to you on a CORDLESS PHONE! Call me.”
“Hi! I am talking to you from my neighbor’s lawn tuned to
frequency 8. Pick up your
phone! You can hear Francine and
Bart moaning over their baby monitor.”
After six weeks with my cordless, I received the Civilian
Cord Free Phonist Award from AT&T.
This was a special honor. The level of proficiency required for the
phoning arts is not widely recognized.
In fact, AT&T projected that my Cord-Free Phone Bill would reach
five digits by 1996: a record for private citizens.
They also had my pushbutton dexterity studied by Swiss
Geneticists. For instance, I was so adept at hitting mute, no one heard me
snapping the kids with old phone cords when they made the cat ‘walk the plank’
to the pool. Callers thought I
lived alone.
And I was always the ‘fifth caller’ at WAAF, due to redial
precision timing, about which the Blue Angels Stunt Jets fantasized.
And no one to this day can call-wait like I can. I ‘click’ off one caller, speed-talk
the intruder away, then return to the first call before they know I was gone.
“Yes, Mr. Hamburgh, our son required several stitches from
the boulder located at the foot of your Wonder Burger slide that collided with
his skull this morning. He’s in
pain, but there was no concu—“
-
b-e-e-p -
-click-
‘—hi, hon –
three stiches – get milk and eggs.’
“—ssion. The
Xray says he’s fine so our lawyer will not need to -- what do you MEAN your boulder is damaged?”
It was determined by the Geneticists that I possess a
special chromosome. It’s the same
one that gives CPAs the power to mach-speed their fingers over adding machines
without looking. Gifted Dialists
do this, too. (We’re also good with things like beer can tops. And triggers.)
Unfortunately, we also possess an Amnesia-Gene that prevents
us from knowing where we left the cordless phone. This causes mild anxiety where we kick down doors and
convulse from delirium tremens and get handcuffed and spirited by ambulance to
a center for Phone Abuse.
In summer of ’95, Dr. Hattivan told me I was “in denial.”
“ADDICT!” I spat, wiping my nose with my sleeve. “I’m no addict. I USE my phone, I’m not addicted. Was Jane Goddall addicted to
gorillas? Was John Glenn addicted
to space? No, we are dedicated,
committed professionals! GET ME A
PHONE SO I CAN … BE COMMITTED. I
want to call… for pizza. Pick a
number, any number, I want – just to touch a phone. How about the jack?
Could you please show me a phone pole from my window bars? Please?”
After 30 days of aversion-therapy, I hated telephones. Each time my cordless rang, I went to
answer the door. When I finally
reprogrammed myself to lift the receiver when the doorbell buzzed, most people
stopped phoning completely.
And if they did phone, I was mystified by things they called
to say. “Hi!” they would say,
“What are you doing?” they would say.
“Right now I am talking to you. What do you want?”
“Nothing. Just checkin
in. So, how ya been?”
“Fine. Is there
a reason for this call or do you like invading my privacy?”
“Uhh—oh! I get
it! I’ve called at a ‘bad time.’
(muffled giggle) Why don’t I just
call b-a-c-k
L-A-T-E-R!”
“You live next
door. Why don’t you come over to
visit?”
“Ummm…now? …. Well. Thanks anyway, but -- I’m just not that
progressive.”
-click-
People changed during my rehabilitation.
Phew, you know, starting this blog with a Cordless Retrospective
was therapeutic. It’s not that I’m tech-phobic because I am inept! It is because I am in recovery!
As long as someone can jam these words onto my Pilot Blog
for me, and also my daily blogs thereafter … I think I’m gonna like
blogging.
