More than you want to know about Dale

Progress?

When I was a small child, my house, like most of my friend’s houses, had a telephone. That’s right, one telephone. In many cases it was a black Western Electric 500 set. They were, of course, rotary-dial, since touch-tone wasn’t available in our area yet. My parents opted to spend the extra money to have a beige telephone. Yes, that’s also right, if you wanted a telephone in a color other than black it cost extra. Our telephone was on a small table just inside the front door. If you wanted to make a call, that’s where you went. When I was seven, we moved into a 2-story house and actually spent the extra money (every month!) to have two telephones, one upstairs and one downstairs. Oh, did I mention that we had to rent these phones from Southwestern Bell? You could not legally connect a privately-owned telephone to their lines. When I was fourteen we moved one more time. This time we kept the two phones, but had one of them fitted with a plug and had jacks in two of the bedrooms. This was seriously cool because I could use the phone in my own bedroom with the door closed.

Family vacations were interesting. My family did a lot of traveling by car. We used AAA tour guides to find motels in the cities where we would be staying. Often we could simply show up and find a room, but in some places we felt it necessary to call ahead. That meant finding a pay phone and hoping that the motel we picked had a toll-free number. Otherwise we had to stick in quarters to pay the long-distance charges.

Deregulation of the telephone industry put an end to the Bell monopoly and allowed people to actually *buy* their phones rather than renting them forever, and things have never been the same since. Soon, houses had telephones in every room.

I bought my first cordless phone in 1983. That was quite a revolution. I was no longer constrained by cords and could walk almost anywhere in the house. The next year I discovered that my phone happened to share the frequency with several nearby baby monitors. That limited the range and had some interesting side effects.

My first cellular phone was a Motorola DynaTAC. It was referred to as a brick, because that almost described the size and weight. However, it was far more portable than the bag-phones that were its major competitor. As cell phones go, I was a fairly early adopter. I got odd looks if I was walking along and my phone rang or, Heaven forfend, I was actually out in public *talking* on it.

These days everyone I know has a cell phone (or sometimes two). It is assumed that everyone is reachable all the time. I know people on campus that pick up their cell phones to make a call the moment they are out of class. It’s hard to even say “hello” to anyone on the sidewalk, because they are often on the phone.

No one even considers long-distance charges any more (remember when television had ads for long-distance companies?) because they are included on all the major cellular plans.

The reason I wonder if this is progress is twofold. By making ourselves always available we have set unreasonable expectations. If someone doesn’t answer their phone for four hours we wonder if they are okay. Maybe they just wanted to be alone for a bit, to go on a walk in the woods or even spend quality time with a significant other. The second reason is that by spending more time talking remotely to people we know, we ignore those around us. This is true whether walking across campus or standing in a checkout line. People used to *talk* to each other.

I sometimes miss the one rotary-dial telephone in the living room.