Really Smart Phones

I’m sorry, but after owning a “smartphone” for twelve hours, I still gotta rag on it a bit.

Yes, I own a cell phone. I love it. I’m still amazed at the fact that I can call my friends or mom and dad while riding on the Amtrak to Springfield at 100 mph. I think about how amazed Abraham Lincoln or Mary Todd would have been at doing so. 

They also would have thought that texting is an idiotic, stupid, inefficient endeavor. Can you imagine Mary Todd texting on a phone when she could have been verbally berating someone?

She probably typed on a manual typewriter at 50 wpm. Normal speaking voice is at 250 wpm on a cell phone. We text at less than 10 wpm.
You do the math.

Texting = as far as I'm concerned, it's an inefficient, time-consuming activity done by those who have atrophied to the point of hiding their true personalities behind lower-case letters. 

I wish I could program my phone so that if anyone texted me, they’d get an automatic response that read,

“I’m sorry, but I DON’T TEXT!
Ever!"

I really wish I could load that as an automatic response to anyone who texts me. 

One would think there’d be an app for that. 

I have some really cool retro phones in my apartment.

Here’s a 1964 Trimline rotary-dial phone in “harvest gold.”

My apartment was completed in 1964 and I still have the original harvest gold refrigerator that came with it. I thought it would be cool to have a matching telephone. 

Just think -- this phone is 47 years old. And I remember when this phone was "cutting edge." To me, it still is. After all, how fast must we give up the notion of what's "cutting edge?"

It’s really fun to be cooking in my retro kitchen, decide to call someone, and really crank out eleven numbers on this puppy. I love this phone.

Here’s my blue Trimline phone that matches my Kandinsky prints. 

Again, this thing is so reliable. My cordless phone often runs out of battery power, but I can always depend on this thing and its 20-ft yellow cord.

Here’s my pride and joy. 

A 1937 vintage Western Electric Model 302 desk phone, commonly known as “The Lucy Phone” since it was the one featured in the living room of “I Love Lucy.”

It still works, too. As a matter of fact, when my cordless phone runs out and I pick this monster up, the person on the other end always says, “Oh, you sound so much better!"

This was also the same phone that my grandfather had in his oak-paneled office when I was a kid.

I can still see him talking on this phone. We were always supposed to leave him alone and be really quiet while he was on this phone, for he was probably on “long distance” and conducting “serious business.“  

Oh my goodness, you never wanted to interrupt my grandfather while has was doing “serious business” on this black office phone! (Knowing my grandfather, he was probably talking to a bookie or conducting some slightly illegal business -- thus the private phone in the oak-paneled office.)

But I have this phone now and I love old thing. It’s 74 years old, for crying out loud and still works as good as the day it went into service. 

I ask you, how many smartphones will be working 74 years from now? How many of our grandchildren will remember the devices we used and the memories that went with them?

Sigh . . . there'll probably be an app for that. . .