I am showing my age, but here goes. Do you remember as a young person using an actual corded phone to call your friends? There were no cell phones, no text, no email, and until a point no cordless phones. You actually had to pick up your corded home phone, complete with a 100 foot cord that we added, to call your friends. I don’t know about you, but we would sometimes talk for hours. What I remember most is the laughter we would share. Oh, and then we got call waiting, three-way calling, and *69. I am laughing just thinking about it!
Then came technology. We got pagers/beepers. Hilarious! We would get a page and have to find the nearest payphone to call someone back. We even developed litle codes on the pager messages. Oh my goodness! Further on, we would email our friends. Then came cell phones. Now the first cell phones were so bulky (and expensive) that we couldn’t really use those except in emergencies. Technology evolved, and then came text messages. We became texting fools. Long gone were the days of picking up the phone to actually call our friends. We would just text. We thought that was oh so cool! Then came social media. Well that was it! Between text messages, social media, and messaging apps long gone were the days of picking up the phone and calling our friends to have an actual conversation.
We all have busy lives, and we sometimes save conversations for face to face interaction. Sometimes we get so busy that those interactions rarely happen. Look at us right now. With social distancing, we can’t have that face to face interaction. For the past few days I have been thinking about this a great deal. What happened to the old fashioned phone call. While I am guilty of texting just as much as most people, I make that effort because obviously the person I am texting is on my mind at that moment. I sometimes think that so much can be lost in translation in a text message though. You can’t gauge emotion in a text message the way you can in a verbal conversation.
Today I think we should all put forth a little more effort. You don’t know when things will go back to normal and I think an old fashioned phone conversation may be just what some of us need. It worked for us “back in the day”, so I think it would be great today. Pick up the phone!
What do you think?
