Telephone memory lane

My housemate brought back an old fashioned telephone from the states after the owner passed on. It brought back memories of other phones. To use it, there is a dial on the bottom.

I still remember my childhood phone number (about the only one I do.) 944-0188. Back then there were private and party lines. We had a private one, but we gave an operator the number of the person we were calling. Being an operator was considered lifetime job security in the 50s. So much for job lifetime security.

The day I went for my driver's license, the first phone call I made, the operator, who was also in my driver ed class, asked "Did you get it?" 

Somehow mobile phones just don't have that connectivity--but they do have more privacy. Now it maybe the government listening in, not an operator.

A former housemate gave me a Snoopy phone to keep me from taking myself too seriously. It worked. Snoopy may be long gone from my telephoning moments, but I still don't take myself all that seriously.
 
 And then there were the princess phone both dial and push button. Push buttons were pretty snazzy not to mention that they came in different colours to match the decor of the room. This was long before you had portable phones much less mobiles. Now sometimes it is necessary to use the mobile to find the portable receiver and vice versa.

Then there were the old French phones that I used when I first moved to Europe. I'm not talking the elegant porcelain ones of the movies but the box kind that had an extra ear piece so that two people could listen at the same time. That was also the period of the Minitel, which was an ancestor of the web...sorta like a pre-Neanderthal is the ancestor of humans.

Thus this morning when I had to call up to the chalet where I'll be going tomorrow, I used the old rotary dial only to remember how long it took and the click-click-click the dial made as it went back to zero. All this for a woman that really doesn't like to talk on the telephone.

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