A mark in history: Mobile phones have replaced my “land line” of 20 years!
Seems a bit surreal but this weekend I disconnected our home telephone handsets. Recently we canceled service or disconnected our home phone number….. who would have predicted that? We’ve had this phone number for over 20 years.
I remember not long ago the long distance telephone price wars. Our monthly phone bills would range from $50-100 and the “Friends and Family” rate per minute was lower than other options.
Then we started getting free nationwide long distance with our mobile phones and now everyone in our family has a mobile phone! Now we pay 2-3 times what we used to pay but the phones are now personal to the individual.
Remember the days of calling a house to ask if someone was there. Or leaving a message hoping they’d get it and call back. Remember talking or hanging on the phone with a friend in school and really saying nothing but to hear your parents or siblings tell you to get off the phone! It was so cool when my parents got call waiting so you could talk on the phone and answer if someone else called!
Oh and remember the answering machine so people could leave a message when you were gone! Remember a family member erasing your message and not writing it down
It was frustrating at the time but another memory of the past as we all have our own personal answering machine today and if you delete your own message it’s no one’s fault but your own!
In the past phones were for the family and connected to the household, today they are connected to the person and I’ll tell my grand kids about this someday. Heck I’m going to box up home phones and bring them out in another 10-20 years and share this story.

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