I love Jerry Seinfeld's comic bit about phones. It is hilarious and I laugh every time I listen to it. "We have gone nuts with the phones!" And it's true. Remember growing up how we had phones that were plugged into the wall and you had to talk to people in the kitchen in front of your family while your mom was making dinner and your brothers were doing their homework one inch away from you? Well, I do. And remember the humongous ultra-long telephone cord that could stretch ten miles through the house so you could talk behind a closed door, if need be?
And how embarrassing was it to have your dad answer the phone if a boy called and he had to yell throughout the house looking for you? So many phone mishaps, I can't even tell you!
My mom would be trying to hide while talking on the phone and I would sometimes just head into the other room and carefully and quietly pick up the receiver and listen in. Rude! Don't worry. I never heard any juicy gossip. It was always having to do with visiting teaching or something Relief Society-ish.
And before answering machines, phones would just ring 96 times before you had the good sense to hang up. Just making sure no one's there! Certainly somebody would have picked up by the 25th ring.
And don't even get me started on the crank-calling my friends and I would do. You could never get away with anything like that now-a-days. In 8th grade, my best friend, Lisa, and I used to call up Bobby Holmes on a daily basis and when he answered, we'd play Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say 'I Love You.'" I'm sure he figured out eventually it was us. But we were so in love with him, this was the only appropriate and obvious thing to do.
Ah, so many memories of the phone!
If I showed a picture of this phone to my kids now, they would not know what this is.
In contrast, today I showed a picture of a xylophone to Christiana today and she takes the picture and holds it up to her ear and says, "Hello?" No, this is a musical instrument; not a phone!
We have gone nuts with the phones!
