By the Dashboard Lights

David Friedli

August 20, 2009

Hold the Line

Technology has taken giant steps forward in my 52 years of life.

Collectively, we have fallen backward in what we will tolerate.

On the writing desk in the corner of the living room of my childhood home in Milford, Nebraska, sat a black telephone.

A black telephone made from something we called plastic, but it wasn’t really plastic.

GAF View Masters were made of shiny black plastic. This was some sort of matte-finished material that was hard as a rock, heavy as iron and seemingly indestructible, so indestructible that it served our family well into my 20^th year of life.

And by picking up the receiver on that phone and dialing—that meant rotating the circular mechanism on the front of the phone displaying numbers and letters by inserting a finger and turning it with a satisfying grrrrrrrrink, clickity, clickity, clickity sound as the aptly named dial did its work and returned to its beginning position—by picking up that receiver, we became connected through a remarkable set of links to someone as close as next door or as far away as another country.

And it worked well.

It worked so well we wanted more phones. Phones in dens. Phones in bedrooms. Phones in kitchens.

Phones even in bathrooms. Incredibly, a friend had a phone in his garage. In his garage!

Of course, we paid for those lines, as the rumor was—true or not—that the phone company could tell how many phones were in use at a house by some line-testing process, and if you had somehow installed an additional line, they would find out and shut off all service.

At least that’s what people said. And in those days, the idea was perpetuated by the fact no one could just go to the local hardware store and buy telephone wires and jacks and phones. Only the phone company had them, and if you had phone supplies in your possession, you got them by some nefarious means.

In the 1970’s everything changed, monopolies were broken up and telephone use exploded. Even something called a cordless phone appeared.

And it worked well.

Then cellular phones arrived in the 1980’s, phones the size of a brick in a case large enough to hold a pair of shoes, and a telephone could go anywhere, if you wanted to carry a brick and a pair of shoes.

We “progressed” from having a way of communicating with other people, near or far, with great clarity and reliability, to a system that we tolerate.

Who doesn’t own a cell phone today?

And what conversation on them doesn’t include, “Are you still there?”, “Hello, hello, hello!”, and “Just a minute, I think I am in a bad ‘cell.’”

I am the first to admit I love technology and I embrace it as much as anybody.

But in taking steps forward in convenience, we sure have learned to compromise quality.

Can you hear me now?