I have joined an exclusive club just by virtue of having lived long enough. No, Petunia, it's not the Colonoscopy Club. Okay, it is, but that's not what I was talking about. No, it's not the Better Check Your Drawers After You Sneeze Club. All right, I'm in that one too, but I meant something else. No no no, not the I have No Idea Where I Was Headed At The Beginning Of This Sentence Club, although, yes, I am a member. Where was I? Who are you? Shut up.
Phone book. I am in the I Am In The Phone Book Club. Someone just asked me the other day what my address was, and I dashed off that breezy response from yesteryear--"I'm in the book." The person querying had no idea what book I meant. And these days, that doesn't make her the stupid one. It no longer occurs to anyone to look up an address in the phone book. A long time ago, we had a fat phone book containing the white and yellow pages. Your mommy would put it on your chair so you could reach your strained peas. Then we got a fat white pages, and the yellow pages, which were even fatter, got their own book. Then the yellow pages whelped and three tubby tomes thunked onto the front porch every fall. It was getting unruly. But just when it seemed we'd have to reinforce the floor under the phone table, the books started to shrivel up. Our most recent white pages is so thin we use it to shim up the table leg. A guy in his deathbed could karate-chop it in two. Next year, we'll be skipping it across the pond. It's a tiny slice of America, it is, and I'm in it.
This makes the phone book not only a relic, but a reliable snapshot of a certain demographic. It's a demographic I'm proud to belong to, if only because shame is so pointless.
Another thing that's changed is that people call each other up now just to find out where they are. We used to know exactly where someone was when we dialed her number.
[Dialed? Look it up, Petunia, I don't have all day.] When I called my friend, I knew she was lying on her bed, admiring her toenail polish and languidly twirling the cord on her Princess Phone. My parents were not so indulgent as to provide me with a bedroom phone, so I was in the kitchen with the phone cord bent around the corner, leaning up against the boomerang-spangled Formica countertop as far away from my parents' ears in the living room as I could stretch the cord. GPS, hell. We could pinpoint each other's locations within microns.
So this is The Book, this thing I'm dangling here between my thumb and forefinger, and I'm in it. If you want to know where I live and what my phone number is, this is where you might look. It's also a good place to locate your market, if you happen to have a lot of carbon paper or Jumbo Diapers to unload.
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"Where was I? Who are you? Shut up."
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful line! Thank you for once again providing me with my morning laugh.
I absolutely LONG for boomerang-covered Formica. And do you recall that it used to be a feat of tremendous strength to tear a phone book in half? Hell, now I could do it.
ReplyDeleteThe other day a friend with an iPhone showed me an app he has that allows him to see right where my cell phone is. It spooked me, so I turned it off, and it still showed my location!!! Yes, I am also a member of that generation, although we still keep phone books in the house, we don't use them any more. It would just look weird if they were gone.
ReplyDeleteI gave up looking in the phone book when the print got so small I needed a magnifying glass to read it.
ReplyDeleteI had to explain to my teen, techno-wizard son what I meant by "dial." It was a disheartening moment.
ReplyDeleteI love being in the phone book. It's like being famous but without the paparazzi.
ReplyDeleteI love my phone book. I hate getting new ones that aren't worked in yet and don't have the necessary doodles and important messages and numbers you wrote in the margins. Can you do that on an iphone? Probably. But you can't kill a wasp with it (you shouldn't). And I don't usually misplace my phonebook - big and yellow? However, if I DO misplace it, I can't call it to see where it is....
ReplyDeleteAnd you can't press flowers in it, and you can't reach your strained peas with it. Or maybe you can, how would I know?
ReplyDeleteI'm not in the book, but my computer is, and it uses my name. So I demand entry into the club!
ReplyDeleteOur phone book is still a 6x9 inch jobbie, less than an inch thick. It's a lot bigger than it used to be. Our town has grown so much...
ReplyDeleteEvery summer we used to get a new phone book from Ma Bell. Now they have been privatised or something because we get they with Pizza tabs sticking out of them and they just don't seem quite as good. One year they issued one with print you needed the Hubble telescope to read. There must have been some grousing because the next year it came out reading like the first line of an eye exam. Pah!
ReplyDeleteSo we still use the old Bell one from 2006 and hope no one moves.
edit: we get them, not "they"
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize until recently that having a landline made me a bit of an oddity. And that they call them "land lines'. We used to just call them Phone Numbers!
ReplyDeleteRemember how excited Steve Martin was to be in the phone book? I haven't had a land line in years so I am not phone book famous.
ReplyDeleteThe new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!!
ReplyDeleteThis trend must be spreading west to east, because ours are still fat enough to tear their covers off when we jam them in the junk drawer, and everybody I know is in it.
Yesterday, I did note a sign of the times, when someone left a message for me on my answering machine without leaving a number. I could only guess she assumed she was calling a cell phone that would automatically display her number. Or that I had caller ID. Wrong on both counts.
We have to climb to the top of the birding tower to get reception on our cell phones out here, a la Green Acres. It's a drag in winter. So we keep the land line, antiquated as it is.
We had the boomerang Formica in the back bathroom. I loved it. It was so Coyote and Roadrunner.
These must be much easier to rip in half.
ReplyDeleteRemember our parents yelling "HANG UP THE PHONE!" ? Now, it's no longer necessary, since the kids have their own phones and numbers, and "hanging up" is as antiquated and incomprehensible to this generation as "dialing". I find myself yelling "GET OFF THE PHONE and DRIVE!!", fairly often, though.
ReplyDeleteTo me, the greatest thing about the Internet is that it made phonebooks obsolete. I always hated phonebooks, just as I hate libraries and find myself hoping against hope that some free, publicly available version of the Kindle and the iPad will soon render them obsolete.
ReplyDeleteTrue story: Our son was middle school age when we were visiting his grandfather. Son wanted to phone up his cousin and asked if he could use grandpa's phone. He walked in the kitchen and picked up the handset of the old, black, "bakelite" phone on the wall. A few minutes later he came out into the living room and asked us how to "work" the phone! He had been sticking his fingers in the "holes" but didn't have a clue that you had to rotate the "dial" with your finger. Of course, we all laughed and humiliated him. Now he is a computer programmer.
ReplyDeleteWe get the phone book left on our porch by some unknown delivery. It goes directly into the recycling bin, never making it inside the house.
I had a pink princess phone just like that, but I've never been "in the book." I figure those who I want to know where I live already do.
ReplyDeleteI love liberries, but I like them better when you got shushed in them. They're just like anyplace else, now. And jayne: how do you expect us to stalk you?
ReplyDeleteMurr,
ReplyDeletePhones now have no character! When I was a kid, my Mom would yell, "Get that, it might be important!" We were on a "party line" (you know this and you're too old to drive) and all news was spread on the party line. "The Miller's Barn is on fire! Tell your Dad!" Then all dads, and the rest of us would race to the barn to try to rescue some animal or other, or hold the stricken farm family kid's hands and comfort the parents.
Or, if someone passed away, we all knew within minutes, and moms started baking casseroles.
When I had a boyfriend, you never said more than "Saturday night? Sure what time's the movie? OK, I'll be ready." and you didn't say it in a sexy voice either. It was a business transaction. Even so, the neighborhood would ask you on Monday how your date went.
Well, the 'village' is now on Facebook and Myspace, and your neighbors may never meet you in person, and forget someone holding your hand when you need a real person.
Who would have thought the loss of a party line would have been another human connection lost, when it was mostly an annoyance when it existed?
We had a party line, but there was only one other party. At Grandma's house in North Dakota, the whole town could listen in and everyone had their own ring. Hers was "five shorts." I remember when they invented direct long-distance dialing and Mom called her brother and they spent five minutes saying some version of "you sound like you're in the next room!" Then she hung up.
ReplyDeleteI'd forgotten all the different rings for different neighbors. Hey, they did sound like they were in the next room. But now, with hearing aids (so misnamed) I sound like they are in India (and most of them are).
ReplyDeleteOh gosh, I had a princess phone (with a gen-U-ine dial powder blue, sigh). Am I dating myself? Of course not, how in the world could I date myself, there'd be no way to open my car door for me,,,, where was I?
ReplyDelete:}
The biggest change I see in the wonderful world of telephones is this.
ReplyDeleteWhen my parents went back to Africa in 1960, and I stayed in the U.S., and I didn't see them for 5 years, I talked to them ONCE on the phone. We had to reserve the time (to use the transatlantic phone line) and the cost for 3 minutes was $25.
Now, with my daughter living in London (UK), she calls us every Sunday, using Skype--basically free and we get to see her!
My, how 50 years can change things.
GULP--did I just say 50 years?
I am crying I'm laughing so hard...I can barely see to type this..."The person querying had no idea what book I meant. And these days, that doesn't make her the stupid one" is *classic*! http://bit.ly/9pDL4m - `nuff said. :)
ReplyDeleteWelcome aboard Amy! I love to make people cry.
ReplyDeleteThe other day a friend with an iPhone showed me an app he has that allows him to see right where my cell phone is. It spooked me, so I turned it off, and it still showed my location!!! Yes, I am also a member of that generation, although we still keep phone books in the house, we don't use them any more. It would just look weird if they were gone.
ReplyDeleteI'd forgotten all the different rings for different neighbors. Hey, they did sound like they were in the next room. But now, with hearing aids (so misnamed) I sound like they are in India (and most of them are).
ReplyDeleteLove it. It's not often I have a good reason to burst into laughter first thing in the morning. And I am proud to say that I was often the one on the other end of the line when you were stretching that phone cord out to its limits.
ReplyDeleteActually, you were ALWAYS the one on the other end of the line.
ReplyDelete