One Ringy Dingy

Yesterday I was watching an old Betty Davis movie (I know, the "old" is redundant) and in one scene her phone was ringing. It was one of those old phone from the 1940's that you can now buy touch-tone replicas of for several hundred dollars. Betty sashayed through her living room in her formal gown and got to the phone by the third ring.

How times have changed! Now we carry phones in our pockets. I remember when I was a little girl living in Tucson and we wanted to call family in Chicago. First you had to get the operator and give her the number. And, if you were really rich, you could make a "person-to-person" call! We weren't so just gave her the number.

We also had a cute trick we would do when we came home from a vacation. We would call our family and ask for ourselves which was the code for "we made it home safely." Clever, don't you think??

I sort of miss the old dial phones. It was such fun to dial a number with all small numbers because you could go really fast. Of course, if you had the dreaded 9 or 0 in the number, it increased your dialing time. There weren't any musical notes when you dialed a specific number like on touch tones, but the sound of the dial returning to it's home base was pretty cool.

My grandparents hated the push button phones. Dang new-fangled things. It was so much easier for them to hook their finger into the number 3 slot on the dial then to push the number 3 and maybe hit the 2 or 6. But they finally got used to it.

When I started working at Stanford there were a few physicians who actually had car phones that they could carry around. All cell phones were called car phones initially because rich people had them in their cars! It never occurred to us that having a "car" phone in your pocket was a bit silly.

And who could forget the invention of the cordless phone! Took me awhile to get used to that one. I would always put it back in the cradle and then have to run to get it when it rang. Drove my kids nuts. Now I've learned. Old dog - new tricks. Plus we have phones and cradles in every room in the house!

My first cell phone was one I bought through AAA and it had an emergency button to call AAA. Only bought it for emergencies - I think that was the line we all used in the beginning. The phone weighed about 3 pounds and was the size of a loaf of banana bread! But it worked.

I've been through Motorols, Nokia and Treo and now am totally in love with my iPhone. It does everything but wash windows and someone is probably working on an app for that!