9 Steps From Birth To Maniacal Cell Phone Use

This thing is smarter than me and everyone that looks like me, I think.

When I was growing up back before cellular technology, when we were a few hairs away from the orangutans, communication was a blissfully clumsy business.

Dealing with companies like Compuserve and Prodigy while watching successive rounds of personal computer advances was thrilling, but the lack of cell phones was equally thrilling in hindsight.

Here's a brief time line of what happened.

#1 Yes, Rotary Phones

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We couldn't just jam our thumb down on the picture of the person we want to call's face on our contacts by type of friend list. We had to remember and dial the number of whoever we happened to be calling.

I use the word "dial" loosely, the rotary phone experience was something like playing a game of Plink-o that ends with your finger getting stuck between a plastic sheet and a knife at the end of each round.

Guess what happened if you screwed up the number? Game over start again. Imagine if you needed to dial for police or some emergency.

If this was a Bond movie you'd be shot within three numbers, and you'd probably get two of them wrong.

#2 - Our Lives Became Touched

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Eventually we hated sticking our hands into a mincing machine enough to develop the first keypads. No dialing pencils, thimbles or any otherwise protection needed.

I still don't know how to explain to my son, while he's thinking directly into his computer, that we used to have wires into these things and otherwise all over the place, but these things make great antiques now.

#3 - Call Me Maybe

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If someone called and you weren't home guess what happened? You had to wait until they got home.

Somehow we all lived! No emergency was ever so great that it couldn't wait til everyone got home.

Didn't feel like talking to someone? Just don't be home, or spend to much time in the tub, or turn the TV up too loud and otherwise don't answer!

Now if someone you need to talk to is out of your sight you can call their Blue-Tooth enabled earing. But just twenty years ago there simply was no other way. You waited, the pace of life was slower, and that actually wasn't so bad.

#4 - But Leave A Message

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If I wasn't home back then you had to leave a message. With an actual person.

That's right, if someone called and you weren't home you had to tell whatever carbon unit answered that you needed a callback. And if the message didn't make it to your target? Oh well, call back.

When people called for my parents I usually forgot. Depending on who called my parents sometimes just said that I forgot.

Eventually my parents bought a "telephone chair" and put it next to the phone with a piece of paper and pencil for taking down messages. These were the archaic ways of a bygone age, telephone chairs being extinct now, but the system was not without it's charm.

#5 Actually, Leave My Robot A Message

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The technology has been around since 1898, we might as well start using it now. That's right, the technology behind answering machines was really invented in 1898 by Valdemar Poulsen, less than twenty years after the first telephone patent.

Answering machines first hit the market in 1949, selling for $200 (about $1,900 in today's dollars) and were on the fast track to failure. Yet by the time I was ten everyone had one.

It took several hours to get the greeting and the programming right and could record something like three minutes at a time.

Now you could call and talk to someone's machine, which was bordering on artificial intelligence on the awesome scale back then.

#6 Everyone Appeared To Be A Drug Dealer

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If you were too cool for school you had one of these, a fine looking object called a beeper that had somewhere between two and four buttons on it.

If someone called this thing it would emit a high frequency beeping that showed how important you were, and additionally scared off any bears in the area.

There was no other choice but to run to a pay phone somewhere and call the number that beeped you back. In other words the first toe in the water to our interconnected world involved mass annoyance and a lot of leg work.

#7 A Really Fancy Drug Dealer

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"I'm getting a page," was a common thing to hear from maybe a doctor or super professional businessman. Great way to get out of bad situation.

Did I say doctors? Yes, the primative beepers had advanced and became popular in all walks of life. I think I was still stuck in the telephone chair but at least the gadgets were looking cooler.

#8 Rise Of The Machines

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They might have started out the size of a VCR but these bricks started popping into everyone's hands as I was going through high school.

They did "everything," as in make call and send the most primitive of gutteral text messages to each other. I think the first plans let you send 60 texts for $1 or so. You still needed people AT&T to handle your long distance though, oh and you had to make sure you weren't roaming.

#9 - I Feel Constantly Stupid

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Do I know where I'm going? Sometimes. Do I know how to get there? Almost never. That's okay, with a few click and voice sync through the car I can pull up a map.

Or for that matter take a picture and check my email and text and search for the nearest pizza joint. It's super productive, except I often realize that I'm not producing anything per se.

I'm Off The Market!

I love where technology is going but I also love where it's been.

After realizing that I really only talk to two or three people on a regular basis, and I'm often the one calling them, I'm taking the radical step of shutting off my cell phone for a month.

That's right, this borg has left the collective, at least for now.

I may have spent years breaking out in hives whenever I've lost my internet connection but I'm going to try this phoneless thing out for a while.

At least I still have my computer and TV with entertainment console equiped with dozens of movie video and gaming apps. If anyone needs me I'd be happy to take a message.