Love and the Telephone (nostalgia for some of us)

[Guest]

Just a good read if you're not too young. - Perdita
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The Death Of The Crank Call In which Caller ID means no longer can you just dial and hang up and swoon. An epitaph

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist, May 19, 2004

It was just like cocaine -- but without the rehab and the stroke and the painful deviated septum.

It was that mad tingling heart-stopping hormone-soaked high school rush you enjoyed when you finally worked up sufficient nerve to pick up the phone and call that insanely delicious guy/girl you had that mad inexplicable unrelenting crush on because, well, you just had to. Remember?

And then it happened. You heard the click and her voice uttered this mellifluous "Hello?" and time suddenly stopped and your breath caught in your throat and your stomach leaped into your eternity, and you hung up instantly as your heart just about exploded in excitement and love and the sheer unbridled terror that she might figure out it was you.

Back then, there was no Caller ID. There was no *69. There were barely any answering machines, not just yet. She could not possibly know the person calling was that love-struck kid who sat behind to her in Bio and could barely breathe when she spoke up in class and who was in a constant swoon because she smelled like Obsession and cashmere and divinity.

And it was that very knowledge, that very safety net of understanding that your secret paramour had no way of discovering who it was who kept calling and hanging up and annoying the parents and confounding the dog, that made it all blissful and immediate and loaded with potential.

That, as they say, was then.

Add it to the list of sad perils of the modern age. There are no more secret late-night anonymous love calls. There are no more dirty or hilariously infantile crank calls ("Is your refrigerator running? You'd better go catch it." Dear God.). No more quickie breathless hang-ups after you called her at 10 pm on a school night just for a split second to hear her voice and know she still exists and that all is well with the lurid angst-torn teen universe.

Caller ID was the death of the anonymous call. Ditto *69. And Instant Messaging. And VibraAlert. And Talking Caller ID. And Call Screening. And Call Forwarding. And Anonymous Call Rejection. And customized ring tones you can assign to various numbers so when that person calls, your phone plays a silly snippet from Beyoncé or 50 Cent or The Darkness in a cacophony of cutesy polyphonic bleeps that let you decide whether talking to that person is worth interrupting "Monster Garage."

Check this angle: My older sister is gorgeous and amazing and throughout her high school years was positively drenched in eager suitors, some of whom she swooned after herself. As her younger, preternaturally jaded, heavy-sighing rock-and-roll brother, I was ever asked to call her various boyfriends to see whether they were home, because my sis had called too many times and the guy's mom was getting annoyed and if she called again she might use up her daily allotment of estrogen-fueled giggling.

I was to pretend to be one of the guy's school buds. I deepened my voice. I acted all slackerly and loose. "Yo hey is Nick there?" I'd mutter. And the guy's mom would say no, he's not home right now, can I take a message, and I'd say nope, thanks, I'll call back later and then hang up quick and my sister would look all scared and frustrated and giddy and beg me to call again in five minutes. The things you do for sisters.

This generation of tech-blasted teens will know none of it. Such behavior is now impossible, is dead and gone, to be replaced with a whole new dance, a technologically dizzying and complex array of flashing LED screens and vibrating antenna and high-res 2-inch video screens that will display everything you could possibly want to know about the caller short of the barometric pressure immediately surrounding them. But they're working on that.

It's true. The new phones not only tell you who's calling and how many times they've called and their favorable DNA quotient and how good they look in tight lickable leather pants, they also offer, say, full-motion video cameras. And Internet access. And walkie-talkies. And vibrator attachments. And lubricant dispensers. And nasty electrical pulses that zap your snippy little ego to tell you when you're being an obnoxious intolerable dink by loudly discussing your feelings about "The Bachelorette" while sitting on the toilet in a restaurant bathroom. Or rather, they really, really should.

But wait. This is not a curmudgeon column. This is not a gol-dang-life-was-simpler-then column, because I am far too young for that and I don't actually believe love was any simpler or more pure, and I actually adore much of what modern technology has to offer and I find it all simultaneously fascinating and surreal and utterly magical as well as sad and warped and inhumane. You know, same as it ever was.

Rather, this is a column of simple mourning. A sentimental farewell to a potent but little-celebrated facet of love and lust and youth, one that vanished almost instantly from the culture, as technology races forth and devours everything in its wake at such a rate we can't even log it all, much less understand how to use it or how weirdly it's mutating our interactions.

And, verily, much has not changed. The love impulse and the raw desperate I-am-going-to-die-if-s/he-ever-talks-to-me nervousness are all exactly the same. Hell, if anything, tech has amplified those eternal, time-honored anxieties, made the dance that much more convoluted and impenetrable. Go ahead, just try and hang up in a rush of anonymous love after sending an emoticon-laden Instant Message.

The mating dance merely has a more intricate and elaborate beat now. It's just that much more complicated and silly as nowadays you gotta have a decent spam filter and a bitchin' animated buddy icon and a Motorola m3000 VideoPhone and a color-coordinated 40GB iPod loaded with just the right party mixes downloaded from just the right RIAA-condemned music servers, or you ain't down.

But the good news is, the sheer terror still exists. The raw power and deep unstoppable orgiastic horror that is young love still trumps all gizmos and all filters and all sinister tech methodologies, all attempts to rein it in or forward it to your PalmPilot or capture it on a video card.

This is the astonishing thing about new, raw love. It can withstand any sort of onslaught, any sort of tech revolution, any effort to rewire its agenda. Like a luminous cloud formation, like a tequila-singed dream, like a mutant strain of a deadly virus, it mutates and adapts, never forfeiting its capacity to utterly terrify, confound, annihilate, invigorate and regenerate the human animal, no matter how many wires and earphones and antenna are sticking out of its head.

Which is not to say, of course, that I don't desperately miss hearing that delicious, mellifluous, breathtaking "Hello?"

 

[Guest]

Nah.

The story I wrote about modern dating was much more insightfull than this.

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

Ms Perdita,

The column didn’t mention calling up a neighbourhood drug store to ask, “Have you got Prince Albert in a can? Yes? Well, let him out before he suffocates. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

Of course nowadays, if you know a friend’s cell phone number you can call up while they are out driving and ask, “Did you know that your front wheels are going backwards? (Pause) Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

Looking on the bright side, no one will go through what happened to my best friend’s teenage step-brother. He flew halfway across the country to spend the summer with his divorced father. Got his first HUGE dose of puppy love, and came back with a desperate need to call her every day.

By the end of the first month, the family telephone bill was $300+ higher with long distance charges. Young Romeo was busted, and was two months late (2 months and 5 days after his 16th birthday) purchasing his first .. er ..vehicle.

 

[cloudy]

I remember that.

Thanks, Perdita. Cool article, as usual!

 

[Guest]

Dear VB (is it Ms., Mrs. or Mr.?):

I remember having to ask who/what Prince Albert was. Then in college I learned about Victoria! Oh la la.

You also called to mind for me the time I received an extraordinarily high phone bill listing several calls to a city in Africa. Of course I complained and said I never called Africa, but PacBell insisted the calls had been made. A workmate suggested I ask my teen son about it. ?!? They said it in a way I did not query fruther. Yep, phone sex advertised in the SF Guardian (the lefty-cultural rag here). The only fuss I made was about the dollars he needed to pay back. "Love" costs, a first lesson.

best, Perdita

 

[Guest]

i will miss those days as well.. met my first "boyfriend" by pretending i had an english accent. (way "in" thing with me and gal pals back then... cuz you english.. you're way hot!)
cant do those things now a days.. but i have fond memories of them.
do you remember way back when everyone had aol and were charged by the min.? yeah.. me too... when the chat room addiction hit me for over $500 one month, that was the end of that business. so, i suppose now that nearly everyone is online and it doesnt cost for how long you stay online, i am greatful for techno growth.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Although I am of an age to remember such things, I do not. When I was a teenager, the small town where I lived had a local phone company so when I picked up the phone, I heard a pleasant, usually female voice say "Number please?" and I responded with the phone number of the person I was trying to call. Anonymous or crank phone calls weren't really possible because they would have gone through a person, and that person, if asked soon enough, would have been able to identify the source. Hours later she would not have been able to remember because it would have been one call out of hundreds but seconds later, she would have.

Eventually, the local phone company became part of the Bell system but that was after I no longer lived in that town.

This is not nostalgia because I prefer the current system and would have preferred it back then.

 

[Guest]

Although I am of an age to remember such things, I do not. When I was a teenager, the small town where I lived had a local phone company so when I picked up the phone, I heard a pleasant, usually female voice say "Number please?" .

any one else thinking of lilly tomlin as the phone operator? "One ringie dingie."
ok.. that deffinitely showed my age.. *gasp*

 

[Boxlicker101]

any one else thinking of lilly tomlin as the phone operator? "One ringie dingie."
ok.. that deffinitely showed my age.. *gasp*

That was Ernestine but she was a phone company employee who called customers for various reasons, not a telephone operator like I referred to.

 

[Guest]

That was Ernestine but she was a phone company employee who called customers for various reasons, not a telephone operator like I referred to.

Box, I well remember Ernestine at the switchboard with the headset on her forties hairdo. P.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Box, I well remember Ernestine at the switchboard with the headset on her forties hairdo. P.

I remember Ernestine quite well also although I would not be able to date her hairdo. I do know that during the sixties or seventies, people could wear hairdos from the forties if they wanted to. Ernestine was NOT an anonymous person connecting caller and callee. She dialed a number, sat there while the person's phone rang, saying "One ringie-dingie. Two ringie-dingies..." and then said something dumb like "Hello. Is this the person to whom I am talking?" After that, she would say whatever inane thing the script called for.

The telephone system in my home town was more like a large PBX system. A person would pick up his or her phone and a light would go on at Central. An operator would plug into the socket connected to the light and say "Number please?" Upon getting the number, she would say "Thank you," and connect the caller to the appropriate socket and press a button to ring the recipient's phone. If the recipient phone was in use, the operator would so inform the caller, who would usually say something like "Thank you. I'll try again later." If the recipient phone was not answered, the operator would so inform the caller who would respond by saying either something like "Can you keep trying, please?" or by thanking her and hanging up. "Please" and "Thank you" were normal at that time and that place and to omit them showed oneself to be an oaf and a boor. That was usually the only interaction between the caller and the operator and, on a routine call, there was never any between the recipient and the operator.

The operators performed other services too, such as what would now be 911 calls. If a person needed to report a fire or a medical emergency, the telephone operator was the one to call. They could also be counted on to be a source of information on local social events. They didn't usually gossip but the sponsors of the social events would usually give the information to the operators so they could pass it along to those who asked.

Now I am getting a little nostalgic, although I was just a kid at the time I am describing.

 

[cantdog]

infidelities

It's a lot harder to have an affair with all this caller ID jazz, too.

I wonder if it breaks marriages up? That is, I wonder if the divorce rate took an upswing when all those phones with a readout came into use?

A classmate of my wife's in nursing school divorced the guy when he charged the hotel to the credit card...


cantdog