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A Boomer’s Journal

By Tom Anselm

I am sitting here today thinking about how my life span has touched eight decades. Eight! Count ’em! The Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties, the Aughts (?), and now the Teens. (Had a little trouble with that second-to-last one… any suggestions out there?) And how in that time, the way humans communicate has changed considerably.

I guess I am musing about this now because, as of last week, I officially joined the 21st Century. I did the early-upgrade thing and got me a smartphone. Now that name is perfect, since one really has to be smart to figure out all the doodads and woozles available. So, being a smart guy, I turned to my 11-year-old granddaughter, Emma, for assistance.

She is an old hand at these devices. And after her brief tutorial, I am off and flying into the ethersphere. Or whatever you call it where the signals from my touch-pad, hand-held mini-computer shoot off to on my very command. Heck, I even can just talk to this thing, saying ‘OK, GoogleNow” and it answers me with a written “Hello, Tommy”, or a “Good Afternoon, Tommy”. So polite. And more than a bit weird.

But it will find places for me, call people, and probably perform a half-dozen other tricks I don’t even know about yet. Guess I’ll have to check with good old Em again.

“OK, GoogleNow… call Emma,” I will say, with full confidence in that electronic entity to complete the connection.

My earliest encounter with voice technology was when I tripped over the phone cord in our three-room apartment on Minnesota Avenue and did a swan dive into the side of the bathtub. Nice shiner resulted from that one. I guess I was about 6 or so.

Phone cord. Funny how that’s evolved. It looked like an long black noodle, stuck permanently into the hallway wall. Over time, phones became more stylish, But black… always black. Then the kitchen models came out with bright colors. Ours was school-bus yellow for years, and mom was able to stretch the coiled cord over to the sink and around the corner to the front door. And you could always find it, being on the wall like it was.

Do you remember the phone number you had as a kid? UN 8-3227. Jill’s was UN 7-0011. Never forget those. I actually just called them. “Number not in service.” Hmmm.

Since my dad was a phone company guy, he would come home with ‘extra’ phones. The coolest one was The Princess, with the pushbutton dial system. It was in my parent’s room, dad having installed a bootleg phone jack. It was, of course, pink.

For a short time, we had a ‘party line’. You’d pick up the phone, and there would be someone else talking. Someone you never met… or wanted to. So you just waited until they were done to dial your call. (Dial. Funny, we still call it that… even though all we do now is touch the pad. Or say ‘OK, Google Now.’) Eventually, we got a private line. Phone company man, right? And that company was singular. There was only one ‘phone company’, Southwestern Bell. Now… well, lots of options.

Mobile technology was probably first used during WW II, with the walkie-talkies. The first car phone I ever saw was on a college friends Chevy Malibu console. It was the size of a shoebox, size 11 DD. Today’s phone is all about moveable connectedness. Cordless phones rose in popularity starting in the late ‘70s. Then ‘mobile’ came to mean ‘cellular’, and the phenomenon took wing. Lots of new generations, or “G’s”, ensued, all the way up to, what, 5G now? And so it will go.

To make this all work, we see cell towers disguised as flagpoles cropping up like Walgreens. Drive by a Verizon or Sprint or any other network provider store and it looks like they are just handing them out free. Which of course they most definitely are not. This connectedness is not cheap. Many people are ending their land line service to cut down on expenses. And, gone are phone booths, which is really bad news for Superman, who now has to sneak into the QuickTrip restroom for his wardrobe changes.

And don’t you sometimes wonder about all them radio frequency waves shooting around us? Imagine if we could see all the electronic connections, from our home phones, cells, sattelite/cable TV, desktop/laptop computers, all crisscrossing hither and yon, upwards and outwards, different colors pinging off towers and space transmitters, across the nations and seas. I can see me entrapped in a tangled cocoon of wires, all emitting death rays, eating at my chromosomes.

But enough of the lighter side of technology. I am in the game now, for better or worse.

Feelin’ hip to the times, even.

Except when another grandie, Abby, picked up my Sony ICF-S10MK2 transistor radio.

A Sears 2003 model. Twelve bucks. “Hey, Greepa… what’s this thing?

Okay, maybe not so hip… yet.

But just wait ’til I load down them apps thingies on my hot new smarty-pants phone.

“OK, GoogleNow… play me some Beatles.”

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