Attached to Old Tech
Question: How many Boomers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Four. (One to change the bulb, and three to talk about how good the old one was.)
Young people often marvel at the path we’ve travelled.
They could not conceive, for instance, of party lines. I grew up in a Chicago suburb, about three blocks from the Chicago city limits. This was the 1950s. We had a telephone, of course, but it was on a shared “party line” with a family down the street.
Which meant that if we wanted to make a call, we’d pick up the receiver and either get a dial tone or hear the conversation that our neighbor was having with someone.
Dial tone, fine—we’d use the rotary dial to put in the seven-number telephone number of the person we wanted to call, no area codes back then. If we’d pick up the phone and hear a conversation that was already in progress involving our neighbor, we’d quickly hang up, wait a bit, then try again later.
If our telephone rang, we’d race to the phone to answer the call. If the call was for us, cool. If it was for our party-line neighbor, we’d ask the caller to hang up and dial again, and this time we wouldn’t pick up.
How crazy was that?
My family was so excited when we got our first “us-only” telephone line. Then the world became confusing again when three-digit “area codes” became common. (But only for long-distance calls; if we were calling someone in our area, we still only needed the seven-digit telephone number.)
Then the world became even more complicated when we needed to dial the three-digit area code even if we were just calling our old neighbor down the street. Whose idea was that?
Advances in communication technologies accelerated rapidly. During this period, I never could get up the motivation to discard our old rotary-dial phone. Yes, push-button phones took over, followed by portable, battery-operated phones that we sometimes took in our car, followed by flip-phones and iPhones (in multiple versions).
But I kept that rotary-dial device on the counter in the kitchen, just because I liked it. Until the day a friend came over with a 10-year old son. The kid saw the phone on the counter and immediately asked about it.
I told him that what you do is pick up the receiver, hold it to the side of your head so that you can both listen and talk at the same time, and then dial the number you want to call.
He picked up the receiver, put it to his head, and then tried to push the numbers on the body of the phone. He looked at me with surprise and disgust that nothing happened.
I then decided to move the phone up to the attic. (Still there—anybody want it?)
I’m such a Boomer, continuously reluctant to give up technologies that had worked well.
I was helping to take care of my grandson last weekend. He looked at my wrist and noticed the watch I was wearing (photo of the watch attached here). My ever-reliable Timex.
I tried to explain the functions of the long hand and the short hand, and the second hand. He looked at me and asked why I was not wearing a watch that just would tell me what time it is. When his parents came back, he took them over to me to show them the silly round thing I was wearing on my wrist.
Which calls to mind the first time that I tried using a digital watch that had a microphone and a speaker embedded within it. A device that would allow me to make a telephone call by simply raising my wrist to my mouth. I tried it once, and felt like Dick Tracy. Next morning I tossed it in a drawer and put on my Timex.
Roger Waldon is a Chicago native who moved to Chapel Hill in 1972 to obtain a masters degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina. Fully intending to return to Chicago to begin his career he, like so many others, found the Chapel Hill vibe and character to be irresistible. Still here, 50 years later. He went on to serve as Chapel Hill’s Planning Director for two decades, before deciding to work as a planning consultant, assisting communities throughout the southeast.