OPINION: Sorry, wrong number -- and wrong phone
Aug. 6—Baby Boomers often post memes on social media, crowing about their superiority because they know what a "rotary dial phone" is. The young whippersnappers, they say, can't tell a classic telephone from a telescope.
I'm a Boomer myself, but I try not to gloat about techological artifacts. After all, we have to get our Millennial kids to show us how to use smart phones, figure out how to deal with remotes that operate our flat screens, and navigate apps on our iPads. Just because kids these days would rather sit at computer screens and "game" than run barefoot through the grass and chase fireflies doesn't mean we should disparage them.
There were phones in all shapes, sizes and colors in my day, and some had character, though not as much as those from our grandparents' time; those were wooden boxes with funnels you had to lean into for talking, while holding up the bell-shaped receiver to your ear. There were "operators" who sat on stools in front of switchboards and pushed plugs into jacks to connect this person to that one, or said — like Lily Tomlin in "Laugh-In" — "Number, puh-liiiiizzze." One ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingies...
We moved from Choctaw to Fort Gibson when I was 6, and within a year were living in an old farmhouse in the Arkansas River bottom. At first, we had what my dad called a "party line." I assumed this was to be used when people had "parties"; my imagination didn't go much past the kind where kids brought presents to a friend with a birthday, and everyone got to wear pointed paper hats and eat cake. I quickly learned it meant every time you picked up the receiver to invite your friends to a sleepover, the old lady across the field was yacking to another neighbor about her hemorrhoids.
Frugal as he was, my dad soon began to suspect people were listening in on his conversations; he could hear someone breathing, he said. So he sprung for a "teenagers' line," as it was listed in the phone book. Before this happened, there were two phones in our house: a red, rotary-dial desk phone. We kids were allowed to choose the color, and I'm pretty sure our father only acceded to our wishes because he was a fan of James Coburn's "Our Man Flint" movie. Then, in my parents' bedroom was a "princess phone," also rotary dial. It was boring and white; my dad nixed the pink we recommended.
People who know how cheap my dad is have always found it hard to believe he allowed my sister Lisa and me to have our own phone. He tried to avoid phone conversations, but my sister and I had a lot of friends in those days, and we spent a lot of time tussling over phone privileges. When we got our first boyfriends simultaneously — me at 16, she at 14 — things got worse. We fought so much over gab time that our dad decided to give us a schedule: I could talk to my boyfriend from 5 to 8 p.m., and Lisa could talk to hers from 8 to 11 p.m.
The problems continued. We had to wait for the boys to call, and when they were late doing so, we lost some of our allotment. And our father would not let us call boys; only disreputable girls did that. My mother also had a mantra: If you "did it" with a boy, he'd never marry you, and calling a boy instead of making him call you suggested you were willing to engage in an activity that would deprive you of matrimony. It never seemed to occur to her that nuptials might not be our goal, but in any case, it turned out she was wrong on both counts.
Lisa and I fought for every second of our phone time. If I was talking at 8:01 p.m., she was tattling; she'd run downstairs and I could hear her yell, "Kim's still on the phone and it's MYYYY TURRRRRN!" Naturally, if she was malingering at 11:01 p.m., I'd march downstairs into my parents' bedroom and awaken them to rat her out. It finally occurred to my dad his parents might get sick and they couldn't get through, or one of his siblings might be extending an invitation to a fondue party and would be frustrated by the endless busy signal. Whatever his reason, we got our own line. The same rules applied as far as the schedule, and the same squealing ensued when one of us pushed the envelope.
My parents moved to their current abode when I was a senior in high school. They again put in a kitchen phone, but since the kitchen was done in shades of blue, the phone was a powder blue, rotary wall mount variety. I'm not sure if they still have it, because they gave up their land line a few years ago when they figured out how to use their cell phones. I still remember the number: 918-478-2827. Or as they said it back in the day: "Greenwood eight, two eight two seven."
My husband and I also ditched our land line last year, when a neighbor scored an AT&T cell tower on his property. I was sort of sad to part with it, because we'd had the number since before we got married in 1987. But I didn't mind giving up the $58 a month charge, since no one ever called it but telemarketers, anyway. We still have the cordless radio model, with buttons on the receiver. It's been years since I've seen the buttons on a cradle.
A young person asked me the other day why, when he called a business, the recorded voice would say, "For the boss, dial 1; for the supervisor, dial 2; for the janitor, dial 3." He had heard of rotary phones and understood what a "dial" was, but he didn't get why they didn't just say, "For the boss, touch the 'one' key." I said, "Think about it; that's unwieldy, and old people wouldn't understand buttons, much less keys." He then suggested the voice say, "Hit 'one.'" I countered with, "Hit one what? One annoying person? One fly ball?" He sighed and said, "How about 'push 'one'?" I shook my head but conceded, "I guess pushing someone is better than hitting him."
Kids these days. They don't get it. Maybe we should just "Dial M for Murder."
