Diaries, Journals, and Newsletters

 It’s been quite a year, and I wish you all a Happy and Wonderful New Year! I’m sure that the past year has been similar for most of us… some ‘hav- to’ jobs, some happy moments, and lots of spare hours. As I wrote in our year-end newsletter, I did a bit of cooking, a bit of cleaning, a bit of napping, and spent many hours refreshing memories through boxes and albums of photos, writing letters, sending emails and text messages, and talking on the phone. I use my computer every day, but I’ve been reminded about the progress of the telephone in my lifetime.

The first eight years of my life were on a farm, and there was no phone to be had. There was no power and no running water, and the evening light in the room was an oil-burning lamp. When we moved to the city, our first telephone was attached to the wall in the hallway, and when we finally had a ‘curly’ cord, I could sit on the floor when talking on the phone. There was no area code, just a number like 75945, and we dialed ‘0’ to talk to the operator.

During my three years in Nursing School, each of us had a buzzer in our room to notify us if we had a phone call or a visitor. If it was a phone call, we had to run down the hall to pick up the call that was transferred by our ‘house mother’ who operated the switchboard. After training, my first ‘real’ job was in a 19-bed hospital in a prairie town that was still using the ‘central operator’ telephone system. Most of my work was on my preferred night shift, but there were times when I needed to contact the doctor, and the night telephone operator, who had the reputation of enjoying too many martinis in the evening, and sleeping too soundly in the night when she should have been listening for any emergency calls. It was exciting news when we heard that a telephone crew was coming to town to convert the central operator system to those fancy dial phones. It wasn’t many months after they arrived in town, that I married the ‘crew boss’.

We’ve been married 58 years, and telephone technology has gone through many changes. We were introduced to the ‘touch-tone’ telephone, the desk phone, and the battery-powered field phone. Then came the Motorola DynaTAC, the flip phone, the smart phone, and the iPhone. I’m on a new learning curve, discovering all the add-ons available that are intended to provide convenience to our lives. My newest phone takes pictures, connects my hearing aids to my TV and phone, and it fits in my pocket. I learned how to chat face to face with dear friends on several different continents, and that is a real treat now that we aren’t able to travel for a visit.

All I need to do now is remember which button to push when I want to answer a call.