Phone Preview

With Daddio focused on the NCAA basketball tournament during dinner, the girls and I ate dinner together. Okay, they watched me eat my dinner and they talked about their respective days. After I finished my meal, theirs untouched, I took the opportunity to practice using the telephone. Teacup knows the important telephone numbers - the house phone and my cell phone number, including area codes.

To date, she's never let her fingers do the walking.

I gave her the house phone and held onto my cell. To start, she practiced calling my cell. Getting the hang of it, we switched and she called the house phone from my cell.

Making telephone calls is no longer intuitive. When you tell someone to "hang up" the phone, there's nothing to hang up. Telephones rarely hang from the wall anymore. Furthermore, it's rare to see a telephone receiver attached to a long, spiral cord (unless you live in California and deal with earthquakes).

One day, when I'm old, grey and wrinkled (more-so than my current state), the phrase "hang up the telephone" will become obsolete, if it hasn't already. (Teacup blankly stared at me as I instructed her to "hang up the phone" this evening.) At some point, I imagine a youngster asking me the origination of that silly, meaningless phrase. What will people say when they can no longer explain the derivation of the phrase? "Press the button" just doesn't have the same connotation. Given all the various buttons in our lives, which button do you press? Even "end the call", still doesn't seem to cut it. Maybe I'm just old-school.

I regress.

Teacup enjoyed the telephone exercise. Then, Scooter wanted to get involved. I handed over the telephones and walked away (yet still nearby).

I captured this moment:



and fear the teenage years.