Phone Home

 I bring a message from another time. There were once such things as phone books. They were delivered to your home and if you cared to check, you could find your name, address and number inside. Listed alphabetically by last name, it was the way you located people. This was an age in which the telephones themselves were installed into your home. Someone would come out from The Phone Company to attach it to the wall. Yes, you read that right: The Phone Company. There was one. No discounts. No deals. If you didn't like your service, you could complain. To the other people stuck in the house with you. The up side of this was that no one ever lost their phone. "Have you seen my phone?" 

"Yes. It's bolted to the wall over there in the kitchen."

Eventually there were advancements made, like extensions. You could have a phone in  your bedroom You could use these to listen in on your brother's conversations with his girlfriend. If you were so inclined. And could keep your hand over the mouthpiece to muffle the snickers. And then came the modular jacks that allowed you to select the kind of phone you plugged into the wall. The Phone Company still had to come out and engineer this tricky bit of electronics, but it did allow the relative freedom of adding a slimline touchtone device in one of nearly three colors, most of them earth tones. However, this did allow you to move away at last from the tedium of dialing a rotary phone.

That's why we still call it "dialing." There really was a dial associated with this interaction. There were some cool things associated with the rotary phone. Like letting your finger ride back to the number that you started with each time you pushed that plastic ring around to the restricting hook that was the eventual destination of all dialing attempts. Some were so clever that they could use a pen or pencil to do the work of that digit. Dialing long distance? That could be a very strenuous exercise, involving upwards of ten separate actions. Long distance, we were told, was the next best thing to being there. This was a big sales job, because if you were dialing anywhere out of your local area, you were going to be charged extra. If you wanted to save money, you could call in the middle of the night. So the next best thing to being there would probably be when both of the calling parties were awake and receiving calls. Regardless, a good portion of all these conversations included protestations of "how much this must be costing you." Maybe it wasn't really the next best thing to being there after all. 

Yes, I know there was a time when this was accomplished with tin cans and some string, or just hollering from the front porch. And before that, the patch of dirt in front of the cave that was the predecessor to the modern-day "front porch." And yes, there was a time when cans were made from tin. If you wanted a soda, or a pop, you had to peel a tab completely off the top of the can and then find a place to discard it. Like the ridiculous chain that someone in your family insisted on making. Which was really nothing to call home about after all.