Normally, I don’t need visuals to go along with my column, but today I do.
See that photo that shows what happens when you’re on a cell phone call and another call is coming in through Call Waiting?
Yeah, well when that happens, for some reason, my brain shuts down.
That might be an exaggeration. Only part of my brain shuts down—and it’s certainly not the part that contributes to my panicking. Because that’s exactly what I do.
You would think that this couldn’t bother me. After all, I’ve been using the phone longer than most people my age.
I began using the phone when I was around four years old. I remember talking with my grandmother and thinking it was the coolest thing in the world. We still had a rotary phone then that hung on the wall. (And if you don’t know what that is, go Google it you young whippersnapper! Oh, and I walked to school back and forth fifty miles a day even in the snow with no boots. Now get off my lawn, and let me sit in my rocking chair.)
Then, in kindergarten, I began calling certain friends. Seriously. To say that I was a bit precocious was an understatement. (And if you didn’t know what a rotary phone is, you probably don’t know what precocious means either, so go look that up now too.)
I even spent time talking a lot to my kindergarten boyfriend’s grandmother. She thought it was great that I used the phone and loved talking with me.
When my Mom wore out the ball-bearings in our rotary phone (This really did happen!), the telephone repairman replaced it with a push-button phone. We were the only ones with this then-state-of-the-art communications technology!
In addition, my Mom was offered brand new options: Call Waiting, Conference Call (You could call one person, ask them to hold on, quickly and lightly push the disconnect button, and then call someone else. When you clicked down again, all three of you could talk. My friends were amazed.), and Transfer Call (This was back in the Stone Age before everyone had answering machines or voicemail. When we went to my grandmother’s house, if my Mom was expecting a call, she just dialed a couple of numbers and all our calls rang where we were. There were a few times when she forgot to transfer them back when we got home, so my grandmother ended up fielded calls from all our friends for a few hours. And the kicker is that she couldn’t call us to tell us to transfer them back because her call would, well, go back to her.).
I was a master of Call Waiting on our landlines. Got a beep? Hang on—I’ll be right back. Go over, talk with that person, and then return. Easy peasy, right?
So why do I completely implode when this same thing happens on my cell phone? Countless times, I’ve disconnected one or both people while trying to hold one call and answer the other or decline or end call and take the incoming one.
ACK!!!
I’m not a complete luddite when it comes to technology. Perhaps I freak out with this action because I have to read really fast and then make a quick choice—and unlike in olden times Call Waiting, I see who is calling me and need to choose. Or I think that I’m going to hit Accept and then instead hit Decline. Or perhaps I just miss the days when everyone had a landline.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to look for some cereal with a toy in the box, put foil on my antenna to pick up that TV station three miles away, and then program my Betamax VCR so that it stops blinking 12:00.
Michele “Wojo” Wojciechowski, when she’s not hanging up on her friends by accident, writes Wojo’s World®” from Baltimore. She’s also the author of the award-winning book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box. You can connect with Wojo on Facebook or on Twitter.
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