Dear Editor,
Do you miss the old telephone days? They weren’t that long ago. Back in the old days, all we had were landlines. You may still only have a landline but it’s becoming rare as more people depend solely on cell phones.
When you traveled in the past you had to find a pay phone to make a call. Pay phones were not that easy to locate and they were expensive. Today, pay phones are rare.
Hotel telephone calls were terrible. It cost a fortune to make calls from a hotel room. If you made several, you had a big bill to pay when you checked out.
Long distance calls used to be the pits. We have all had family and friends who lived in other counties or other states. You couldn’t talk to them very much because it could easily add $20 – $30 to your bill. Thirty years ago, that was a lot of extra money for a phone bill.
Today is the golden era of mass communication. We pay a price for our cell phone and we talk on it all month. I realize it depends on the plan you have. Overall, people use their phones and call wherever they want to call and talk as long as they want to talk. For just a very small monthly fee, I can talk to someone in most in any country at any time of the day, most of the time.
We’ve grown very reliant on our cell phones. We have to know where they are every minute of every day. Life becomes a dilemma when we can’t find our cell phones.
I have hundreds if not thousands of treasured family pictures on my cell phone. I contact all my family and friends on my cell phone. I don’t know their phones numbers. I punch in their name and their phone rings. All my work associates are contacted via my cell phone. I stay in touch with them by simply sending them a text or sometimes calling them. I would not know how to contact them if I lost my phone. I do most of my work each day on my cell phone. I can gain access to my websites and other business support sites to do a lot of the work that pertains to my vocation. I send and respond to emails on my phone. My wife, children and I stay in contact through my cell phone. The navigation feature tells me how to get to places I haven’t been before. Occasionally, if I get lazy, I pull an app up on my phone and about 40 minutes later I have food at my door. I check my airplane travel on my phone. I make sure my flight is on time and verify my seat assignment. The list goes on and on.
When my cell phone dies or is lost, it becomes a big problem. It becomes a problem not only for me but for other people who count on me to fulfill various work commitments and assignments. Of course, we all doodle on Social Media. Without our cell phones or tablets we would miss out on all the “junk” that we constantly see on Facebook, X, Instagram, and etc. Without your cell phone, you might not know what everybody else is doing. Back in the old days, the only way we knew what everyone else was doing was to listen in on our eight family party lines. If you don’t know what this is just ask an older person.
Often, the cell phone becomes a hassle. Multiple text messages from unknown people, politicians, scammers and others can become wearisome. We delete, block, unsubscribe and we still receive them. However, we can turn our phones off. We should definitely do this more than we do.
Please consider turning it off during your Thanksgiving dinner. Also, why not consider turning it off when you are having a dinner with your spouse or friend or family. Give it a break. We’ve all seen couples sitting in restaurants with each one of them starring at a cell phone. Give it a rest! Talk to people and make some personal connection with a real person.
We can all “live” life for an hour or two without looking at our phones in order to have some real conversations with real people. However, you’ll be comforted knowing it’s in your pocket or purse for your full attention at any given time.
Dr. Glenn Mollette
