Remember back in the old days when the worst part about a telephone was the rotary dial? I do, because I’m old as dirt. But to compensate, you only had to dial the last five digits of a number, instead of all seven.
Today, you have to punch in 10 digits to call the person next door, but you actually don’t do this at all, because they’re in your contacts list and you just tap a few buttons. If you had to actually enter their phone number, you would have no idea what it was. You might not even understand numbers themselves.
So in a way, phones are better now, because dialing is more convenient than ever. BOOP BOOP and done.
BUT…spam. I also remember never getting spam calls. Now I get them all the time. This is not an improvement. But because phones now accept text messages, I can also get my spam in text form, too. And do. Constantly!
Also, remember before we had voicemail trees? Where you could talk to an actual person because an actual person would pick up the phone when you called? It seems quaint now.
I had to call a bank, not for myself, but regarding someone else. I got into a voicemail tree. I spent some time with this pseudo-person-sounding thing. It was confused and befuddled by my inquiries. I tried rephrasing. I thought of using some snooty British accent. Finally, I pushed the 0 (zero) key, hoping it would still work as a “Please for the love of all things holy, let me talk to an actual carbon-based unit” button. And it did! The “digital assistant” put me through to an actual person at some central office, probably a couple of thousand miles from the local branch I wanted to book an appointment at (she confirmed her centrality, but did not reveal where she was located, nor did I inquire). She could not book the appointment for reasons, so I ended up speaking to three different people and being subjected to terrible hold music that played on a short loop and sounded like it was recorded from the FM radio in a ’73 Gremlin. In the end, I finally had an appointment. Hopefully. They could not give me a local number in case I had to cancel or was running late or anything. Apparently they only communicate through telepathy or email with local branches.
Back in 1975, I would have called the local branch directly, spoken to someone who would have picked up after the first ring, then had the appointment booked in a few minutes. Except I was 10 years old in 1975 and didn’t even have an account back then. But I could have theoretically done this.
My current phone is pretty good at checking the weather, though, and it lets me take photos of me shaking my fist at the sky, futilely. So in some ways telephones are not bad.
