On Father's Day, we were having lunch with our youngest granddaughter and her parents. I told her that Mother's Day was the biggest day of the year for restaurants, while Father's Day was the biggest day for collect calls. I was hoping that joke would elicit at least a chuckle. Rather, a puzzled look and .. "What's a collect call?". Yet another confirmation of my passage into geriatric-hood. What was I thinking? A Gen-Z'er, born with a cell phone in the cradle, how would she possibly understand collect calls?
I went on to explain it used to be that that every 'long distance' call was individually charged to your phone bill, priced by the minute - long distance meaning any call that crossed out of the local telephone company's territory. A caller had the option to ask the operator to "reverse the charges" so the cost would show up on the callee's bill rather than your own. This feature was often used by children calling home. You just told the operator you wanted the call to be collect and she - always she - would connect the call and ask "Will you accept the charges?". Another puzzled look .. "What's an operator?". Deeper and deeper into the twilight zone.
So I had to explain 1950's phone technology. I could as well been speaking Urdu. Before age of the dial phone, an operator fielded every request and connected you to someone via a telephone switchboard. You picked up the phone and heard "Number please?" and waited for the call to be put through. Our home phone number was 74. The hardware's was 2. Grandma was 35. Lowry telephone operators were also the watchdogs of Main Street. I could pick up the phone and ask Inez or Leona if they knew where my dad might be. "Oh, I just saw him go into the cafe".
Not knowing when to cut my losses, I then told her the story of coming down with the mumps during my senior year in high school and being forced into quarantine for 3 weeks or so. One boring Sunday afternoon, when my folks were out visiting - people actually did that back then, just drop in on someone for a visit - I decided to give Carol a call. She lived on a farm about 5 miles away, but in another phone company's territory, so the call was "long distance". (I didn't ask to reverse the charges!). We talked for 45 minutes. When the phone bill arrived and my mother saw the mammoth $4.50 charge sticking out like a neon sign amongst the mostly 50¢ calls, she let me have it. "What could you possibly have to talk about on the phone for 45 minutes?" Hmm, note to self: next time remember to reverse the charges.
Finally coming to my senses and rejecting boldly going on to person-to-person calls & party lines, I decided to cease and desist.
So .. I've come to the realization that most of my great treasure of knowledge and a substantial block of my skillset is obsolete and of little interest to anyone - with a possible rare exception of another old geezer.
Some of my now less than useful capabilities are things like ..
- Deftly digging out information from American Peoples Encyclopedia
- Coupling cast iron soil pipe joints with oakum and hot lead
- BASIC Programming on a Commodore 64
- Operating a key punch machine
- Clipping baseball cards to my bicycle spokes to turn it into a motorcycle
- Circling good stuff in the Sears Catalog
- Drag bunting
- Diagramming sentences
- Operating a ditch-witch
- Bowling scorekeeping
- Operating the Burroughs posting machine
- PowerPoint
- Listing World Series winners from 1903 to present from memory - fyi, no series winner in 1904 or 1994
- Constructing a haystack - actually an embarrassing fiasco
- Assembling a hog feeder
- Using a slide rule
- Navigating with paper maps
- Spelling
- Weighing out 25¢ worth of 8p nails
- Conjugating Latin verbs
- Driving a stick shift pickup truck
- Speaking broken German
- FORTRAN IV
- Twinkie baking
- Writing cursive
- Integrating to find the area under a curve
- Changing a fuse
- Blogging
- Proving a doughnut and a coffee cup are topologically equivalent - but not digestively
- Knowing the way to San Jose
- ...
Copyright © 2024 Dave Hoplin
