Caller I.D.
One of my favorite developments of this new tech era is Caller Identification on the telephone.
When I was a kid, we didn’t Caller ID. No Call Waiting, not even answering machines. If the phone rang, you answered it. It was a pure crap shoot whether you got a friend, foe, bill collector or beau.
We had rotary phones in those ancient times. They only had one ring sound, a bell - because there was a real bell inside the phone - and one volume - piercing. You could hear the phone ring from anywhere in the house. That bell could go through any wall. If you wanted to put your phone on “silent” you put it in a desk drawer or under a pillow. I had an uncle who worked nights and put his phone in the refrigerator during the day. If you were handy, you could unscrew the plate underneath the phone and wrap a piece of tape around the little clacker between the bells, and that was your “soft” setting.
It was just awful on days when you were eagerly waiting for a calll from a boyfriend, hoping for a call from a good friend, dreading a call from your boss, and fearing a calll from Sears because your payment was late, all at the same time.
You’d wait and wait for the phone to ring and hours would go by. I learned that the only sure way to get the phone to ring was to move out of answering range. There were no cordless or portable phones then. The phone was either the desk model on a ten foot cord, or a wall model which was bolted to the wall in the kitchen with a 25 foot curly cord from the phone to the receiver. A watched pot never boils and an attended phone never rings. You’d have to be clever to get the phone to ring. You had to walk just far enough away that the phone would think you couldn’t get back to it in time to get the call, or use the bathroom. As soon as the phone was certain that you were out of range, it rang.
There are stories people of my generation can tell you about taking a flight of stairs in three leaps, high jumping over furniture, tripping over cats and dogs, stepping on Barbie shoes or Army men in our bare feet, hurtling our bodies through space by any means possible to reach the receiver before the ringing stopped. There was no “Star 69” either because these were not the days of touch tone. You either got that ringing phone and took a chance on talking with whomever was calling, or you had to wait for their next try - if there was one.
That’s why I love Caller ID so much. If I can’t get the phone in time, I can see who tried to call me and call them or ignore them. And I can even hold the ringing phone in my hand as they call and look at their name for a moment or two and decide if I feel like talking to them today or not.... oh the power! Plus, I can give my own names to any callers. I have “Too Talky” as a name for a very chatty neighbor of mine, I have “Elvis” for my friend who is an Elvis impersonator, and lot of special names that only I know.
I was visiting a friend of mine once and my mother called there from my home phone to talk to me. It never occurred to me that it occurred to other people to have code names for their regular callers too. I picked up the phone and saw my number with the ID “NY Mouth”. Ooooooohhh!
“Kathy, how come my number says NY Mouth on your phone?”
“Because you talk forever.”
“Oh yeah? Well next time I call, I’m just going to use three sentences. I have self control you know. And how come it says NY? You live here too.”
“It says NY Mouth to distinguish you from my sister-in-law, NJ Mouth.”
Now I was intrigued. I scrolled through her saved IDs to see what nicknames she had.
“Kathy, who’s “Deadbeat”?”
“My daughter’s ex.”
“Who’s “Schizo?”
“My Aunt Jerri. You can tell right away what she wants when you say hello. If she’s nice, she needs money, if she’s screaming she’s drunk, she’s got, like, 30 personalities. I named her Schizo because if I let the Caller ID try to figure out who she is on its own, the phone would explode every time she calls.”
I just love Caller ID.
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