INCOMMUNICADO

I’m not sure what causes certain memories to pop into your head when they do, but one popped into my husband’s head the other day. He asked if I remembered having a party phone line when we first moved to Colorado. Do I remember? Of course! It was 1991, nine years before the turn of the century! The 21st century! Here we were, suddenly propelled back to the 1960’s!

I remember as a kid we had a party line. You had to pick up the phone and listen to make sure you had a dial tone before dialing, or whether someone else was already talking on the phone. This is completely different from an extension, which is just someone else in your house talking on the phone. If that was the case, you could just yell, “Get off the phone! I need to make a call!” On a party line, this was someone else, perhaps a neighbor. You couldn’t exactly tell them to hang up. You had to wait. Sometimes people weren’t really good at waiting and they would pick up the phone every 30 seconds to see if you were done. You got the message and if you were polite, you’d finish up your conversation, so they could use the phone. Barbaric!

The problem with the party line we had was it was 1991, and the Persian Gulf War had just begun. My brother-in-law was in the Army, stationed in Germany, and had been deployed to Iraq! I needed to talk to my sister, give her love and support. If you have ever talked to someone in the military on the phone, or their family, especially during times of war, they are very cautious about what they say. I knew not to ask many questions and my call would be short, since she was in Germany too. The minutes on the phone ticked by in dollar bills, not cents. Now, add to that someone on my party line was interrupting this very important phone call every 30 seconds by picking up their phone! Irritation is not a big enough word. Why was I living in the Dark Ages!?

That didn’t last long and it was only a matter of a few months before we caught up with the rest of the free world, and had a “private” line. Fast forward to the age of the internet. I don’t know when DSL was invented, but it is right up there with indoor plumbing! However, in 2004 we were still part of the dinosaur age, using dial-up. You remember the screeching tones of dial up. No way of connecting to the computer without everyone in the house knowing you were doing it. Then there is the patient factor of waiting for it to connect, but the biggest problem, it tied up your phone line. Unless you had a dedicated line just for your computer, you were essentially on the longest phone call ever if you were surfing the web.

2004 was the year our son went to college in Florida and got slammed back to back with Hurricane Frances and then Jeanne. He spent Frances in a hurricane shelter, but the damage at school was significant, and he needed to come home for a week while they cleaned up. He had a cell phone, but I didn’t, so I called and told him to head for Orlando. I went to work on the computer to see if I could get him a flight out and would call him back. While I was on the computer looking for flights, which were non-existent, and then looking for a hotel room for him until he could get a flight, we were incommunicado! Not exactly where you want to be in an emergency. When the flyer got put on our door that DSL was now available in our neighborhood I didn’t need to think twice. I didn’t even care how much it cost. I just knew that we needed it! However, in 2008 my son moved to Maui, and was back to dial-up! 2008 people!!!

We went from hardwired land lines, with the long curly cords that were always a tangled mess, to portable phones that were far more convenient, but wouldn’t work in a power outage, to cell phones. When no one was looking, the pay phone went the way of the dinosaur, so if you’re still one of those people fighting change and refusing to get a cell phone, good luck with that when you’re out and need to make an emergency call. Cell phone have now even usurped the land line in most homes, replacing it completely, unless, of course, you live in a remote area that gets lousy cell service.

Wow, look how far we have come….good, bad, or indifferent. I say good, or at least it has been for me. I do think we could use a couple of pay phones around, just in case your cell phone is out of battery, but then who carries change anymore?