That Antique Moment

This action is known as "dialing."

At a dinner party over the weekend, one guy started complaining that his nephews had no idea how to use a dial phone. His dad still had an old rotary in the kitchen, and the boys couldn't figure out how to use it.

"It's a PHONE?" was their shocked reaction. "But how do you dial?"

In fact, I'm surprised they know the concept of dialing. Soon we'll just speak to Siri, and she'll dial for us. 

My own antique moment came when my husband and I were first married. We moved to Evanston so he could go to Kellogg business school; part of the MBA experience was going to Friday night mixers to chat with other students.

At one mixer, I started talking to a very young, very attractive girl. She was wearing a pendant on a long chain that looked exactly like this:

image courtesy of yesteryearremembered.com

"Oh, that's so cool!" I gushed. "It looks just like those things we used to pop into the center of 45's!"

She frowned. "What are you talking about?" she asked.

And that's when it hit me: I'm old. It was that awkward, antique moment.

That moment is arriving faster as the speed of technology picks up. After all, those old rotaries had a good run - they were around for fifty-odd years, I'd guess. (Before that, people picked up a sort of speaking tube and demanded numbers like Pennsylvania 65000.)

Now tech gets replaced every year, at least. Remember burning CD's? That wasn't all that long ago. Soon, though, that action will seem as quaint as floppy disks or my little 45 rpm doodad, as we place huge mp3 lists on external memory sticks and trade those.

I sort of miss those rotary phones. It was fun to dial them with a pencil, and I liked that clicky noise the dial made. Ditto real records - when you played a great album on a sweet stereo after midnight, in your sister's room, listening on headphones. That ROCKED.

It's cool that my kid doesn't need a ride to the mall every single time she wants to buy a One Direction song*; plus, she and her friends are doing stuff on their iPods that I would have considered witchcraft when I was her age. Still, I really want a phone number that has a word in it. Make mine Antique 1960.



*I know. She's 8 - what can you do?