Eight Feet Deep

Hello?

Remem­ber the old days when you had a tele­phone installed and the man from Ma Bell did all the magic stuff he did and ta-ta!? You got your­self a real tele­phone. A big momma with a rotary dial and built sturdy enough to beat an intruder half to death.

Well, a lot of much younger folks might not. I do remem­ber rotary dial phones. The first phone that I can remem­ber in the sec­ond house in which I grew up was a rotary dial. A note: The first house I lived in — from birth until I was around 10 — didn’t have a phone that I can remem­ber. I seem to remem­ber hear­ing my par­ents had a phone at some point in time in “the old house” but I don’t remem­ber it. Nevertheless.

My first phone, after I got out of the Navy and worked as a fire­fighter, was a touch tone. That had the same key­pad lay­out you see to day. Those type of phones also were a tran­si­tion to life with­out a cen­tral switch­ing office with actual humans who would dial the num­ber for you. Can you imag­ine that?

Of course, I am not old enough to remem­ber depend­ing entirely on an oper­a­tor for a call. But you would have to call an oper­a­tor to make a long dis­tance or col­lect call, as well as for local infor­ma­tion. The mother of a friend from high school worked as an oper­a­tor in the lit­tle tele­phone build­ing in my home­town. I could always tell her voice when I dialed “O.”

This was before the days of recorded voices telling you which num­bers to punch, dri­ving a sane per­son half mad and and a mad per­son insane. That was what hap­pened today. It’s kind of involved, but these days when you deal with a cell com­pany, it’s always that way. I don’t have a land line these days, BTW. (Oh come on, you know that means “By the Way.” Get with it!)

I recently switched my phone ser­vice from T-Mobile to Ver­i­zon because Ver­i­zon pro­vides my wire­less Inter­net.—> I went to the Ver­i­zon store and got a new phone, but not the one I wanted. —> The phone I bought had a faulty cam­era. (Wow, when I was a kid I could have never imag­ined a cam­era on my phone. I couldn’t have imag­ined a phone one takes every­where.) —> I got into an argu­ment with the store guy because I didn’t feel like I should have paid a $35 restock­ing fee to make a basic dollar-for-dollar trade. —> I raised a lit­tle hell with Ver­i­zon, then I raised a lot more hell. —> The com­pany waived the restock­ing fee and sent me a “new” phone. It wasn’t new, how­ever. It was used and a Black­berry. I didn’t want a Black­berry. The phone I wanted already had mobile Inter­net access. Wow. What’s an Inter­nets? —> Today I finally got my phone. I pro­grammed it but had to call Ver­i­zon six times to get every­thing I needed done.

And there you are. I live in a time I never imag­ined as a kid except,  per­haps, when play­ing like I was Dick Tracy from the “Fun­nies” and the weird-looking detec­tive who wore an inter­ac­tive TV on his wrist watch.

So today, we have tiny lit­tle tele­phones that can com­mu­ni­cate over a wide world and find out damn near any­thing — although you have to be care­ful as to the verac­ity — and write lit­tle mes­sages damn near any­time. You can take pic­tures and just send them right over the phone. I can even make a video. On my phone!

But to do all of this, we have to go through our own lit­tle brand of Hell. Instruc­tion books one receives when you get a new phone, or com­puter or TV are basi­cally lit­tle pam­phlets that don’t instruct. When one calls “cus­tomer ser­vice,” the path is lit­tered with voice “prompts” at every turn, fol­lowed often by wait­ing to speak with some­one which can some­time last hours. Finally, you might talk with some­one who works who knows where and who knows what they are talk­ing about, or not.

This all leads me to ask: What price for mag­i­cal meth­ods of com­mu­ni­cat­ing on devices which are built as much as for con­ve­nience as they are for the actual act of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with someone?

Some­times, I think the answer to such a ques­tion is “a lot.”

You could get Miz Jeanette, the oper­a­tor, by sim­ply dial­ing “O.” You could speak with a per­son you know. If you were a few cents short to make a call at the pay phone out­side the phone com­pany, it wasn’t a big deal. You didn’t have to yell and raise nine kinds of hell to get results in your favor. That was unthink­able. You could get results, most of the time, by being polite.

It’s too trite to para­phrase Bob Dylan that the “times, they are a’ chang­ing.” But I did. Damn. I got to go and check my e-mail.

Your what?