This evening, Cole was on my cell phone talking to Mom, who was also on her cell phone. About three minutes into their conversation, I overheard Cole say, "Nana, you're breaking up..." I was more than a little stunned to hear my six year old say that. Like he's a regular pro at speaking cell phone talk. You're breaking up? How does he even know what that means?? I started thinking about all the things that are different now, and how far technology has come in the short amount of time that Scott and I have been together.
When I started dating Scott in November of 1996, neither of us had cell phones. None of my friends had cell phones. We didn't have email addresses, we didn't even own home computers. Why would we? We didn't shop online, we didn't sell online, we didn't advertise online - we didn't even know what online was, really. My brand new Ranger pick up had a tape deck, not a CD player - and certainly not an MP3 player as those weren't even invented yet. Our television screen wasn't flat, and it certainly wasn't big. We were thrilled with basic cable, and considered the 24 channels that we got as quite a lot. We didn't yet know what a text was, what an IM was, what voice mail even was. Everyone had a recorder on their phone - with little, tiny tapes that constantly broke or ran out of space, and we left people messages. Not voice mails. Stamps cost $0.25, and it was the only way to get your bills paid. We didn't have DVD, DVR or Tivo, we had a VCR. We didn't have a fax machine, and really didn't have any need for one. Why would we need to get paperwork to anyone, and why would it need to be there that quickly? Fax machines were for office buildings, not regular people.
Fast forward to now. We have a life full of technological marvels that we take for granted each and every day. We have plasma televisions the size of a small movie screen. We have surround sound, Blu-Ray players, the ability to pause live television. We have computers you sit on your lap, computers that masquerade as cell phones. We have minute plans for cell phones that are sold by the thousands of minutes, not in increments of 30 minutes. We text to instantly get a message to another person on the other side of the universe, and we email instead of picking up the phone and calling someone. We have the ability to store thousands of songs on a device that is smaller than a credit card. This is our "new" normal. But listening to Cole talk to Mom tonight, and make mention of him having a hard time hearing her because she's "breaking up" made me stop and think. This is his only normal. He'll never know a world like there was just twelve short years ago.
Wow, did that ever make me feel old.
5 comments:
You feel old??? How about us folks! When I was Cole's age, we had one big old black phone on a little stand in the hall. And......imagine this........to communicate with Grandma, we wrote letters. And, our television got two channels and we put a plastic film on it that made it look like we had color!
It's funny that your blog was about that because when he said that I was breaking up, my first thought was "how does he know what that means?" Oh well, at least he doesn't pull an "Abbey" on me. When she's done talking to me, she either hurls the phone across the room or hands it to you and lets you know she's done with the phone now. Usually I'm in mid-sentence.
And speaking of phones - I remember when Grandpa thought it would be cool to hook up this old phone that hung on the wall and you turned the crank on the side to connect to ring an operator. (Just like on Green Acres). Anyway, he got it all hooked up, cranked away, and the operator came on and told him to disconnect it immediately. ha ha
Great blog!
I had a cell phone in 1996 because I'm cool like that. It was a huge Motorola flip phone and I was the first of my friends. Somehow I convinced my parents that I NEEDED it for safety and promised to pay the bill each month. Oh, and we all had pagers (well, I had one until I dropped it into a giant cup of Dr. Pepper - it didn't survive) which was so incredibly dumb because I was with the people who paged me pretty much 24/7.
We got our first PC when I was in 5th or 6th grade. My cousin and I got Prodigy (remember that!!??) one Christmas and we chatted with each other. We thought we were SO cool. As for as the world wide web, I remember my cousin Mark telling us all one Christmas (I think he was a freshman in college - he's in his 30's now) that there was the coolest thing, where you could type in "sports car" and pull up pages and pages of information about every sports cars ever made. I thought he was a wizard.
So funny to think that kids now will someday laugh about our current technology and how dated it is! They'll be pushing buttons, spitting out piping hot meals and laughing about how "Mom used to stand there for hours making this!"
Seriously what we would do if the world's power went out. like all the satellites went down and there was no communication.
i too had a cell and a pager in high school because i was cool like that. i was only allowed to talk after 8pm.
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