10 On The 10th Of March: The Telephone

This is my first foray into participating in the 10 On The 10th monthly writing prompt put out by Marsha over at Marsha In The Middle. While she isn’t the originator of this monthly prompt, Marsha’s its current caretaker and she’s doing a great job with it.

It’s a fairly simple ask of the participants. All they need to do is provide their answers to a list of 10 questions on the 10th day of the month on a topic chosen by Marsha (or a designated co-host). The questions are posted a few weeks ahead of time and not a lot of effort needs to go into answering them. Whether to include photos is up to the blogger.

As I said, in the few years that I’ve known about the 10 On The 10th prompt, this is the first time that I’m joining in it. The change in communication via the telephone over the years is an interesting topic. I’ve found myself SMH recently at the proliferation of young TikTokkers posting videos on their new idea that a home could have a phone that everyone would share so to make it easier to get in contact with someone. I don’t if these videos are simply meant to be ironic or if they’re poking fun at Gen Zs and boomers. Now that I really give it some thought, it’s probably the latter.

Anyway, I’m game to give it a go at answering this month’s 10 On The 10th questions. But before I do, indulge me while I share a couple of not-so-common “associations” I have related to telephones from long ago.

In the summer after I graduated from high school, I was hired at the nearby Sears as a switchboard operator. Back in the late 70s, telephone automation was still a pipedream and what I did was much like you’d see in some movies or TV shows set in that time or earlier. The job involved answering incoming calls and connecting the callers to the requested department/person through the use of a manual switchboard of cables and ports. If you saw The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, then you’ll recall the set-up when Midge was banished to work on the switchboard in the basement at the department. However, at the store where I worked, working on the switchboard was no punishment, it was located on the second floor among all the other back-office functions, and it had only three stations. Many times during an evening shift or on the weekends, I worked alone. It was a part-time job and fit well into my school schedule as I completed my freshman year at a nearby university while living at home.

For the rest of my time in college, I attended a university that wasn’t close to home but I return home each summer to save on living expenses and hopefully find a short-term job. One year, I was hired by the phone company as a 411 operator (I may have fibbed a little about planning to not go back to school in the Fall in order to get the job). I was one of the many, many voices you might have heard making the inquiry “what city, please?” when you’d call to have a phone number looked up. There were dozens of us in a very large room each sitting at one of the many stations with a computer monitor to find the requested information. It’s decent-paying jobs like these that no longer exist due to automation that have so many now working in the fast food industry.

Thank you for your indulgence. Now onto the 10 On The 10th.

1 – As a child of the 60s, we obviously had a landline in our home.
2 – Hey, I’m old but not that old. However, I do recall hearing some tales of party lines told by my grandparents when I was young.
3 – I go my first cell phone sometime in the early/mid-90s although I don’t recall the maker of it. Definitely, it wasn’t an iPhone and I’m not even sure if it texting was even available back then. Quick google search – the technology was developed in 1992 but didn’t become available until the late 90s/early aughts.
4 – We gave up having a landline two moves ago in 2014. At first, I was quite hesitant to not have a dedicated single phone for us all to share but The Husband convinced me that all would be ok. For years I missed being able to ask “did anyone call while I was away?” without being looked at like I’d grown a second head. (IYKYK)
5 – I absolutely screen my calls and have done so since the availability of caller ID. Even on my iPhone, I have the “silence unknown callers” feature activated. About 90% of the calls I get nowadays are spam anyways.
6 – While I was still commuting for work, I would often call my daughter or sister to chat while they were also commuting. Those conversations could last 30 to 45 minutes. With my daughter now living in another state, there have been the occasional hour-long conversation every now and then if it’s been a while since we last spoke.
7 – My current phone is an iPhone 13 that I got about 2 years ago.
8 – Gosh, I misread that question at first. My iPhone is used for nearly everything from phone, to accessing the internet, to camera, etc. I considered it my lifeline and I’m usually never more than about 3 feet away from it. The only time I don’t have it on my person or within reach is when I’m at the gym where I leave it in a locker so as to not be distracted. However, I find myself a bit anxious while doing so since I likely wouldn’t be able to retrieve it if there was an emergency situation (e.g. earthquake, fire, shooting).
9 – I recall playing a game called Operator which I think is the same.
10 -Nah, special ringtones for anyone always seemed a little silly and unnecessary to me.

What’s your history with telephones? Got any out-of-the-ordinary tales to share? Who else recalls the joy of finding left behind bits of change in the coin returns of payphones? Even so, I think that smartphones are among the most wonderous of inventions.

Stay well and let’s keep in touch! Subscribe, Tweet, follow, friend, pin … all options are available. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

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Photos: MMPerez