I was trolling
the internet. An anonymous wag wrote: “My daughter just asked why we say ‘hang
up’ the phone and now I feel like I’m 90 years old.”
And what I feel is: how young do you have to be so that
“hang up the phone” merely sounds weird?
This isn’t a rant on “young people these days….”
For me, it’s a reminder that we all live in the same, modern
world, but we all live in our own heads, too, and an 10-year-old actually has no
idea what I’m feeling when I say “I was pumping 19-cent gas 40 years before you
were born.” Of course she has no sense of what it was like, way back when, thinking about the "new option" of getting air conditioning in the new car, but deciding against it because
“we’ll just roll the windows down if it gets hot.” And, excuse me: “roll the
windows down”?!?
A friend who is a gentleman of a certain age, like me, is an
adjunct instructor at the local community college. A coupla years ago he
mentioned to me that, in the course of casual conversation in class one
evening, he mentioned to his students “when I was in college, we didn’t have
the internet.” A sweet ingénue in the front row asked: “Well, Mr. Adams, how did you do email?”
The strangest thing is:
old-timers are inclined to feel “out of it” rather often….young folks,
not so much.
Of course, the wide-eyed younger generation has a lot that “we”
never had.
Well, “we” had some stuff that they’re never gonna have….
I’m gonna remember to explain to my grandchildren what “hang
up the phone” means, and we can crank up the iPad to find a picture of one of
those old hand-crank phones with the black ear thingy on the cord that was hanging on the side of it....
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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