KT Phone Home

I just missed the telephone being invented, or I feel like it sometimes. Still, I remember the rotary phone and party lines. Do you?

Remember picking one up and finding Mrs. Brown down the street talking to Mrs. Avery up the street. You might walk away and find any number of things to do, but your next 20 attempts would find them exactly where you had left them. They were still complaining about every old woman in the neighborhood, and every member of their families.

Many times, while on the phone, you knew someone was listening in. Probably the same old women. I never listened to others, afraid I would actually hear someone die of old age while talking about Mrs. Border’s bloomers showing while she was working in the garden. It was during the party line days, I first suspected the phone to be a plot our government created to destroy the Russians. A plot which backfired and went terribly wrong.

Remember when we had phone booths? Inside, you would find walls covered with numbers and the mindless doodling of those who had come before you. Chewing gum dating back to the invention of the phone would be plastered throughout. These booths contained the same smells found in the back seats of Taxi Cabs and Greyhound buses. One was never sure what the smells were, but spent much of the time, on the phone, trying to hold their breath. I’m pretty sure some horrible disease can be traced back to pay phones.

When I became old enough to own my first phone they were touch tone, but were still tied to the earth by a cord. I made sure the cord was long enough to reach into the closet. If I needed it, I got it out, otherwise it was in the closet where it belonged. Then they became cordless, it was at that time I understood where the phone was headed, it came to me in a nightmare. That nightmare has come to pass. Then came the car phone, remember those? When you got a call the horn blew, as phones evolved they became more aggravating. Remember the first semblance of a cell phone; it was akin to walking around with a shoe box on the side of your head.  Those who could afford them were talking about stupid stuff you didn’t want to know about. I guess some things never change, because now everyone is talking about that same stuff.

There is an old saying; the emptiest jar makes the most noise. It is so true, the stupidest people talk on the phone everywhere they go. I don’t want to talk on the phone, but must be subjected to conversations that are either a string of curse words threaded together with total idiocy or a string of like this and like that’s strung together with curse words. Funerals, wedding, church services, business meeting and movies are interrupted be ever increasing numbers of annoying ring tones. To include passing gas, things said by Captain Kirk or Mister Spock, country songs I’d rather not hear and rap music complete with offensive words.           

We’re still on the party line now, except the government can hear what we’re saying while we still can’t understand half of what they are saying. Everywhere we turn, we are subjected to mindless conversations about idiotic subjects. DWT, driving while texting, has become the new DUI, driving under ignorance. I remember when there were multiple forms of idiocy, which might afflict those drivers among us who could not drive. Now if erratic behavior is spotted on the highway, you will pull alongside the vehicle and find its driver texting. I recently played touch and go with a woman, all the way to Atlanta, some fifty miles. I was on cruise control and I would pass her, in the right lane and then she would re pass me. She was texting the entire time as she endangered everyone around her. All the while cruising in the fast lane. She was also endangering her three innocent children as she hurled through space and time in a 5,000-pound tank of an SUV.

I will admit it, I hate phones. Remember when the thing to do, was to hit signs with Coke bottles? The year following my divorce, I hit two different signs with two different phones. I heard the blam, wonder what they heard on the other end. I’ve said it before, stupid people should not drive. Stupid people should not drink either and doing both at the same time is stupidity squared. Now I believe that stupid people should not be allowed to own phones. Wait why not invent mute buttons for stupid people. Okay that might utterly put an end to presidential elections, sorry. Remember when they said, don’t call us, we’ll call you? Yeah, what they said.