Telephone Tag

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Location: Osborne Village – Winnipeg, Manitoba

Do you remember how much time we used to spend on the telephone? Not that anyone called it a telephone – it was just the phone. When I was teenager, it was my lifeline. I wasted hours (and hours and hours) on it, talking to my friends and boys I liked (or boys who liked me, who I didn’t like much, but who I was stuck with everyday at school, so I felt obligated to tolerate to some degree.) Even Topher, who hates phone calls now, put up with long phone conversations back then. (Dare I say, he might have occasionally enjoyed them?)

Either way, there weren’t any other options.

I remember my first cell phone, a plastic brick that required me to press each number up to three times to generate one letter. The fact that we ever sent text messages in those days seems almost unbelievable, but life did more more slowly then, so maybe we had the time. Texting is so quick and easy now, most people prefer it. Phone calls are still a huge part of my work, and the work that my team does, but pinning people down for phone calls is an increasingly impossible task. Why talk to each other, after all, when we can send quick but incomplete messages that lead to misunderstanding and frustration? Sometimes, I feel like my work life is an endless game of telephone tag.

That’s the thing about the phone. It’s still better, even if most people don’t like it anymore. When we talk to people and have to respond to them in real time, when we hear their voices, we get so much more information. We respond differently as a result – to their tone, to their inflection and really, just to their humanity. There is almost nothing that can’t be resolved over the phone in five minutes. And sometimes, the same exercise requires twenty emails as the alternative.

The truth is, while I can wax nostalgic about the telephone and expound on its virtues, it was becoming outmoded even in my childhood. I’d never seen a rotary phone until I was five – I was forced to learn to dial one at a friend’s house, my chubby fingers repeatedly slipping, to call my parents and let them know I’d arrived. I remember it being an exercise in frustration to start, but I got the hang of it quickly enough. At home, we almost always had cordless phones with plastic buttons for dialling. I didn’t have an extension in my room until my very late teens, which meant my dream of my own phone went unfulfilled. But being able to carry the phone away and hold it hostage in my room for hours was still satisfiying.

My parents still have one of those sets of cordless phones. I gave up my personal landline years ago, although I kept one for work until late last year. My work calls are all done digitally now, through Microsoft TEAMS. Removing my big old plastic Avaya phone made space on my desk, but I confess: digital calling is just not the same.

These days, I make most of my personal calls on FaceTime. It works. And I will still happilyy chat for hours. But it would never be my first choice. Which is why I was so over-the-top excited to find an old rotary telephone at a local thrift store. My iPhone is an incredible tool, but is completely lack in charm and character. A peach rotary phone, on the other hand, still looks beautiful and sophisticated, even if it’s not functional. If I’m honest, I think I miss that as much as I miss the phone itself – the idea that even everyday objects should be beautiful, as well as functional.

…maybe there’s someone I could talk to about that?

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