…..Telephone…..phone……bag phone…….car phone….cell phone and now iphone. Has any instrument gone through such an evolution while continuing to play such an integral role in my life?. Just as there have been many versions of Tamara, there have been transformations of the phone that I never could have imagined.
………I was like many of my generation, to us the phone had only two purposes: to talk and to listen. But that was huge!
……..My first phone is imbedded in my memory as one of my very favorite Christmas gifts. I awoke the Christmas of my thirteenth year to discover my very own, pink princess phone under the tree. I spent Christmas day calling all my friends to let them know I was talking to them from my bedroom. I was a fledgling teenager and no longer would I be furtively looking to see who could overhear my conversation.
……The phone was so important to families in the fifties and sixties that an entire piece of furniture was devoted to talking on it. It was a chair with a table for the phone. Ours also had an ashtray, a notepad and pen, and a pack of cigarettes so that my mother (who was a phone talker) wasn’t caught without the necessities at her reach when she started chatting.
……. As the years went on longer cords made their debut and you could hide in a closet to talk. Or, when I became a mother, my kids knew to the inch where they could do their dastardly deeds beyond my reach when I was on the phone And, then we got portable phones and all bets were off.
…..And, then the communications world went crazy. Cell phones were created and the ability to stay connected morphed into “I can’t ever get way from my job……kids….parent……” The phones changed, and had infinite possibilities, but not for me. I stayed true to my original concept. I talked, I listened and ventured out of my comfort zone only to text or take pictures.
…But, I soon learned I was the exception. the rest of the world embraced the increasing opportunities to reach out and touch the world with their fingertips.. Suddenly, I was a phone dinosaur. Illiterate in the world of applications and connectivity. .
…..it was a secret I held close. My friends could do everything on their phone, especially my good friend, Lynn, who couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting her pictures and began asking questions about what applications I had set up ?(none). Do you have that number in your contacts? No, all my contacts are in a little book, actually in my head. What, your phone is not connected to the internet. How do you get the news? I finally gave up the game and confessed.
“Nope. Nothing’s set up. I didn’t need all the bells and whistles.”
……..Lynn was aghast as she looked at my phone, “ You have all the bells and whistles. You just need to activate them. Give me your phone.”
……I had been found out to be a phone fraud and I meekly turned over the phone knowing life would never be simple again.
…What began was a five-hour process that included conversations with the Apple adviser. The project started at my house and had to be moved to her house because we needed a Mac laptop to proceed. What started as a quick fix for Lynn had turned into a challenge that she was not going to give up on..
…..And, me? I didn’t quite grasp why I would need all these applications but if Lynn said they were necessary who was I to argue?
…..Suddenly, we were done and my phone could do anything. The world had opened up and my iphone became my window to the world. Now to figure out how to operate those applications.
