I was visiting that repository of all wisdom and knowledge over the weekend.
The Internet.

No one calls it the World Wide Web except Al Gore.
But then he invented it.

Anyway, there was a picture of a dial phone.

Remember them?

I still have one – somewhere in a box in the garage.

It’s part of my stuff.
Those are the things men need around them, just in case.

Given enough time I can probably pull just about any wonderful thing from a box – somewhere in the garage.

And to think the wife wants me to throw those out.
Perish the thought.

Anyway, I started to ponder some stuff.

If you’re over 50 then there was most likely one these phones in your house when you were a kid.
Only one.

Probably close to where everybody was always hanging out.

You had to use it in front of your parents to speak to your friends.

That’s why teenagers back then mumbled.
Everybody got frustrated because it was hard to overhear what you were saying.

That’s when your mother started nagging at the dinner table about how you need to speak up.

And you had like 5 minutes before someone started yelling at you to get off the phone.

People on the party line were probably listening.
I did that as a kid but never heard much of interest.

We did stupid things like call random numbers and ask the person, “Is your water running?”

“Yes.”

“Well you better catch it before it gets away.”
<click>
Giggle.

God were we stupid.

And you actually had to actually remember everyone’s phone number.

I remember 39-137.
I have no idea who it belong to back then.

Since cell phones weren’t invented yet, there was probably more than once your friend was going to be late meeting you, but couldn’t let you know because you were out waiting for them already.

Then when you took a picture you had to wait to finish the roll of film and send it off somewhere to be developed before you could see it days later.

And then half of them would turn out to be junk.

And if you liked music videos, you just had to sit and wait until MTV happened to play it.

It was easy to tell when the batteries were dying on your Walkman because the music started to get weirdly slow.

You had to buy an actual magazine to find out what was on TV.

If there was nothing good on channels 2-13, there was simply nothing.

You couldn’t settle arguments by Googling to prove you were right.

Who says things were better in the good ‘ol days?

I’m still grumpy though.