Alexander Graham Bell, You’re a Genius!

Last Updated on: 19th September 2013, 03:25 pm

That looks like a strange thing to say, now that phones are everywhere and they’re so ordinary. But that must have been what they thought when he first invented the thing. And why would such weirdness be swirling through my head? Because I got a taste of what it must have been like before phones yesterday.

Like I said, we’re almost ready to get over to the new place. Well, my stuff is over there, and Steve’s moving on Saturday. Since we’re using Steve’s phone account and had to move it yesterday or be screwed until Monday or Tuesday, poor Steve was without a phone. I don’t know if he’d call himself poor Steve, but damn it he’s poor Steve for the purposes of this story. So I go down to the lobby to speak to our poor stressed out building manager to get my buzzer tied in with my phone and book the elevator for Steve’s folks/moving crew who are heaving things like couches into the new home, and I find out that the elevator’s not going to be available at the time we would have hoped. Now, what would one normally do? Call Steve and say hey, what should we do now? But he’s got no phone! Add to that that my internet’s not in at the new place because I need his big length of cable that, um, he’s using. So he may have the internet, but I have no way of reaching him. So all that’s left to do is take the bus across the city and talk to him face to face.

So off I go, thinking about how it must have sucked to not even have the bus back then, and only having horses and such. Then I get off the bus, and I really think I’ve been placed in one of those old movies. I’m running down the street, and I hear a slow spit…spit…spit. Within a minute, it becomes pit pat pit pat pit pat…and as I get close to Steve’s house, it’s more like pitter patter pitter patter pitter patter! Can’t you just hear the dramatic old movie music?

I have to admit that once I got the message to Steve, the old time feel died suddenly when we…sent an email to his mom and asked what time would work for her. But it really made me think about how much we depend on the phone, and how I never want to go VOIP! And it made me realize how important the words “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you!” really were.

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