Thursday 12 May 2016

Off topic, but...

click to enlarge
Topical nonetheless. Just a few days ago I finally got around to ditching the landline. Unimaginable just a few short years back. A couple of years ago I got the shock of my life to see the plastic boxes with rotary dials on display as part of a communications exhibit at MOTAT (Museum Of Transport And Technology). I was shepherding a class of ten-year-olds through, and they were totally fascinated ("how do these things work?") Good grief, I remember the sacred black box that sat on its own dedicated "telephone table" as a kid, and how thoroughly modern I felt when I picked up my first push-button model for the flat in the nineteen mumble-mumbles.

Apart from that, the maths was compelling; paying hundreds extra each year for advertisers to interrupt evening downtime to solicit business was increasingly stupid. No more real estate agents at 7.00, hallelujah.

The mourning period lasted all of 5 minutes.

2 comments:

  1. I got my first push button phone when my boss insisted that I needed it to "page" him, and my first cell phone when I saw people in the supermarket who were obviously on welfare using their cell phones. I had also become tired of smelling urine and almost stepping on hypodermic syringes in public phone booths.

    Who knew that back in the day, when we saw Dick Tracy speak to Sam Ketchum on his two way wrist radio in the Sunday Funny Pages that we would one day all have our very own cell phones?

    BB

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  2. glad to see that you have discovered "Bloom County". You actually do like Texas humor.

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