When I was your age...

I got my new cell phone yesterday. It is small and light, which means I will probably lose it a couple of times before I make my first ten calls. While I was busy making entries in my phone book (which holds 500 numbers...who knows 500 people?), it occurred to me as it often does that this is a VERY COOL time to be alive.

WARNING - WIWYA (When I Was Your Age) Moment

A little background...I am in my forties and have been working in offices since I was a junior in high school. My first experience with a new "high-tech" innovation was the photocopier. The boss at my first job apparently thought the copier was radioactive. He would place his original on the glass, close the cover, hit the Copy button and jump away so the light that escaped the cover would not touch him.

I have seen the world change a lot in my life and it is important you know about it so you can understand the older people around you a little better. So an occasional WIWYA story is for your own good. I promise not to embellish too much. For example, your aunts and uncles and I did walk to school, but it was not 20 miles uphill both ways in the snow with no shoes (that was your Grandpa).

Anyway, when I was growing up telephones were not exactly a new invention. We always had one (but just one). Ours was a wall-mounted model, black (of course), with a rotary dial (little plastic squares with numbers and letters on them were not invented yet). Our solution to not having an extension was to place the phone in the geographical epicenter of the apartment, between the two bedrooms, and buy the longest handset cord available. You always knew where the phone was and who was on it...you just followed the black curly wire. The phone was hard-wired into the wall (no modular plugs). There was ONE phone company (Illinois Bell), and when the phone broke you had to wait for an engineer to come out and fix it.

Imagine...no wireless handsets, no caller ID, very few long distance calls (too expensive), no cell phones, PCs or Internet. We wrote lots of letters! The entire nature of human communication has changed since then.

The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago had an exhibit sponsored by Illinois Bell that displayed the history of telephonic communication (our Uncle Flip worked there for many years). The most popular item in the exhibit was the "picture phone", which was not a phone that took pictures but rather two large booths connected by a closed-circuit TV setup. I am not sure if the telephone exhibit is still there, but if it is our old black wall phone is probably one of the artifacts, complete with the hopelessly tangled cord.