MY CELL PHONE MY NEMESIS

MY CELL PHONE MY NEMESIS
Wednesday, April 16, 2025 by LINDA WOOD RONDEAU

By the author of

I PRAYED FOR PATIENCE

GOD GAVE ME CHILDREN

I kept punching my cell phone, and my grandchildren laughed hysterically as I held it up in the air and screamed at it, “Oh, you stupid thing!”

“Grandma, did they have phones back then?”

Now, I want to be the cool Grandma, the Grandma with all the whistles and bells and new technology, not Whistler’s Mother.

Maybe my grandchildren thought I was born in the 1800s, before cars, television, and phones.

“Yes, children, they had phones way back then.”

Sometimes, I wish I had been born in horse and buggy days. Life was so much simpler then…no technology to wrap a blonde head around.

Woe is me; I was not. Oh, the sorrows of being non-techno in a digital world. As for phones, my earliest recollection was the rotary phone.

Note its curly short cord. Always black. Simple. You didn’t go to a phone store to buy one. The phone company provided them. Everyone’s was the same.

Not cool.

Most homes had a telephone chair where you could sit to talk. Can you imagine a world where no one sends texts? We put our messages on paper and mailed them. They were called letters.

I suppose that to my parents, the rotary phone was a great invention. Before then, they had to go through an operator.

You pick up the phone. A nice, sweet voice says, “Operator, how may I direct your call?”

You say, “Butterfield 92-4321. Thank you, operator.”

Then you waited….

One ringy, dingy, two ringy dingy…three ringy, dingy…

Another voice answers, “Hello?”

The operator says, “I have your party, ma’am. Have a nice day.”

And of course, the operator knew everyone’s business, including Miss Eileen’s affair with Doctor Baxter.

Now, with the advanced rotary phone…my parents could dial their party directly. The origin of the self-service philosophy.

However, I never felt very cool.

Because only rich people had private lines. Common folk suffered with party lines, allowing your neighbors to listen in on your conversations. I was brought up to keep conversations short and to the point.

Confession. I still do.

I never call just to chat. Old habits are hard to break.

Then came the wireless receiver.

Way cool.

You could pick that baby up and go anywhere in the house with it, even the backyard.

Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!

Only, I never achieved cool.

I’d always forget to put the receiver back in the cradle when I was done talking. The phone would go dead unless it rang again, and I went looking for it. Once I found it in the refrigerator.

No, not cool.

When my daughter went into premature labor and I had to make an emergency trip to Washington, D.C., my husband bought me our first cell phone. It looked like a plump piece of wood with a keypad on it. It was big and ugly.

How could I look cool with that thing hanging on my belt?

So, to be cool, I kept it in my purse.

That meant I had to remember to bring my purse with me everywhere. And of course, if the thing was going to be useful, I had to charge it every night, which, of course, was one too many things to remember.

It wasn’t too hard to manage, but I still couldn’t be cool. My friends could all send texts to their families faster than a speeding bullet.

Me? I never got the hang of it. See, it still had the alpha symbols like the old-style wireless and rotary phones. To text a letter, you had to go to a number that had up to four different alpha symbols. You might only click once for the A, but then you had to click three times for the C. And if you wanted to go from upper case to lower case or back to numeric, there was another button to push. Forget that the images and icons were far too small to read. Goodness gracious.

It took me half an hour to text my husband to tell him I’d be there in ten minutes to pick him up!

I was jealous of all my cool friends with smartphones who took snapshots, attached them to emails, and Instagrammed or posted their lives on Facebook and Pinterest!

“Oh, I have to have a smartphone,” I told my husband. The first one we bought was a hybrid. “It’s sort of smart,” my husband said.

Well, that sounded good to me, since I’m sort of dumb.

And it could take pictures! Forget the fact that I still hadn’t learned how to use my digital camera.

Forget the fact that I still couldn’t figure out how to use my digital camera.

This one had separate alpha keys. But they were so small, I needed a magnifying glass to text. Nor could I ever remember how to use the camera feature.

I still carry the darn thing in my purse when I leave the house, and I never remember where I put my phone and have to frequently ask Google Assistant to “find my phone.”

I don’t think I’ll ever feel cool.

Funny thing is that a smartphone is only as smart as the person using it.