Remember the days when your house had only one telephone? It was attached to the wall and you only had to dial 5 digits to make a local phone call? Ours was in the kitchen and came with a long enough cord that you could reach the stove AND fridge. Amazing! There were only two area codes in Massachusetts back then (617 for eastern MA and 413 for western MA) and it was most exciting when that new feature, call-waiting, was introduced (even though it managed to confuse my parents to no end). <\/p>\n
Well, those days are long gong. A local call now requires the memorization of ten digits, not five. We have overlapping area codes in the same parts of the state and you’re no longer relegated to the kitchen to make a phone call (you can be in the car, on a train, out for a walk). Most people call this progress.<\/p>\n
I call it hell.<\/p>\n
I hate phones. I hate talking on phones. I hate the sound of telephones ringing. I hate listening to other peoples’ phone conversations. I don’t even have a home phone. But here’s the problem:<\/p>\n
My cell phone contract is expiring on Monday. My current phone is a simple flip-phone (though, I must admit it overwhelmed me two years ago when I got it). Randy has offered to have me join his contract – which will only cost $10\/month. A deal! But switching from Verizon to Cingular – I mean, “the new” AT&T – requires that I get a new phone. And not to sound like my 79 year old father, but they just don’t make them like they used to.<\/p>\n
Since I hate speaking on the phone, I figured I wanted one that would be easier for text messaging (which, in itself, is something so high-tech compared to my childhood rotary dial phone). Randy picked one out for me and a Samsung Blackjack arrived in the mail this week. Oh, it sure is pretty. In the space of about 1 centimeter they’ve appeared to squeeze in practically an entire computer keyboard, monitor, and camera. The problem is I can barely find the numbers to place phone calls – they’re mixed in with the letters of the keyboard.<\/p>\n
Randy says I just need to take my current address book (which is in an old-fashioned paper address book, thank you very much) and type it into Outlook Express. Then I’ll import the Outlook Express version into my cell phone. Then I won’t have to dial numbers, I’ll just have to search my database of phone numbers to place a call.<\/p>\n
That’s progress?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Remember the days when your house had only one telephone? It was attached to the wall and you only had to dial 5 digits to make a local phone call? Ours was in the kitchen and came with a long enough cord that you could reach the stove AND fridge. Amazing! There were only two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1550\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}