Holiday Booksignings
Friday, Dec. 5,
Lambs’ Bookstore, Greenfield, Indiana, 7-8 p.m.
Saturday, Dec. 6,
Books ‘n Blessings, Zionsville, Ind., 1-3 p.m.
Monday, Dec. 8th, Columbus Library, Columbus, Indiana, 7 p.m.
Saturday, Dec. 13, Carmel Library, Carmel, Indiana, 10 a.m. –
noon
Landline phones: Endangered Species
Lori Borgman | Monday, November 17, 2008
Our
three children are grown and not a single one of them has a landline phone. They
consider “home phones” pieces of antiquity – like disco and eight-track tapes.
Which
probably explains why the first question so many parents ask when calling one of
their children, is: “Where are you?”
It
used to be when you called someone you knew where they were -- at home. That’s
why they answered their phone, because they were home. If they weren’t home,
they didn’t answer. It was a good system. You knew who was home and who wasn’t.
Now
when you call someone, chances are the person will not be home, but
will answer the phone. Since I like a mental picture of where the kid I am
talking to is located, I’ve fallen into a standard greeting of, “Hello, where
are you?”
“At
the grocery store. (Beep, beep goes the scanner.) Can I call you back?”
“I’m
at Home Depot loading lumber. (2x4s clunk in the background.) Can I call you
back?”
“We’re
hiking a trail and just about to the summit. (A bull moose bellows.) Can I call
you back?”
“I’m
in a restaurant. (Loud music, chattering voices.) Can I call you back?”
I have
never understood why people answer a phone just to say hello and ask if they can
call you back.
Of
course, they can call me back. But they better not count on me being home.
Wireless phones cut the leash that once tethered us to home. The evolution of
the phone has given us great freedom, but it has also disrupted a valuable
pipeline of parental information.
When the family phone was a
big black box anchored to the kitchen wall, a parent could answer the phone and
discover who was calling, what they wanted, who they wanted to talk to, whether
the caller was a male or female, their approximate age and whether they sounded
friendly, curt, hostile or polite.
That 10 seconds of voice
contact provided fodder for the Twenty Questions game that often followed the
phone call. For parents, it was the Golden Age of Surveillance.
With the arrival of
multiple extension phones scattered throughout a house, it was now possible for
youth to “beat” mom and dad to the phone, thereby shielding callers from probing
questions. Pity the parent with slow reflexes.
When phones
went cordless, parents lost even more means of intelligence gathering. A parent
could no longer “do dishes” in the kitchen and get the lowdown. The portable
phone could move to a bedroom, a closet, the basement, the roof or the crawl
space. A determined parent could get some information, but it was
awkward.
“Mom! Get out of the
closet. There’s not room for both of us!”
And then came
the cell phone. Children armed with their own phones are younger and younger and
a lot of parents have no idea who is calling, how often they call, what they
sound like, what they want, the nature of the message in the text or the picture
in the e-mail.
Parents setting young
children up with cell phones lose a lot of information in exchange for being
able to call and say, “Hello, where are you?”
You can ask that when
they’re in their 20s. When they are adolescents and teens, you need to know a
whole lot more.
