THEM NEW PHONES

THEM NEW PHONES

Elva and I picked up our new IPhone 4s this week and are in the process of weaning ourselves away from the familiar land line we’ve known since we were kids.  Her number before the dial phones were introduced was 132 ring 2, and mine was 8.  Her family, living as they did in the ‘sticks’, was on a party line while ours was on a private line.  Families in the village of Wellington were the first to get phones in the early 1900s, and customers willing to pay a little more got their own private lines.

When the time came for me to register for university classes at UNB in the fall of 1971, the lady behind the counter asked me for my phone number.  I told her: “8".  She looked at me kind of strange and asked: “8 what?”.  “8 Wellington”, I answered, trying to make her feel as stupid as I could.

 

I wondered as I was setting up the mysterious and wonderful IPhone 4 what the older generation I grew up with might have thought of “them new phones”.  I imagined myself at Rufus MacLure’s barber shop on a Saturday morning in 1963.  Rufe is giving Clayton Barlow a trim and Steve ‘Ro’ MacNeill just walked in the door.  Émile Clovis is sitting in his customary corner chewing on a fig of Hickey & Nicholson’s twist and Sylvère Perry is talking politics, as usual.  George Bishop is hitching his horse to the rail beside Arsenault & Gaudet’s store.

 

Astute observer that he is, Rufe decides he’d better get the conversation on a different track before Syl and Steve get into it over who’s more crooked: the Tories or the Grits.  So out of the blue he says.  “Tillie was telling me about them new phones, IPhones, I think she calls them.  They say those things can do just about anything.”

 

“What’s an eye-phone?”, asks Steve.  “Is it some new gadget Dr. Reid uses to examine your eyes?”  “No”, says Rufe, “it’s a telephone, for God’s sake!”  “What’s wrong with the telephones we have now?”, asks Syl.  They’re a hell of a lot better than what we had in the War.  Those damn things never worked right.”

 

“Well”, says Rufe, “Tillie says Edmund Fidèle just bought a new one for the store and was showing it off the other day to some customers.  It’s not connected to anything and you can carry it in your pocket wherever you go.  You can even see the person on the other end of the phone if you set it up right.  They call that ‘Facetime’.  And it has maps on it so you can see where you’re going.”

 

“What in hang would I need a map for?”, says George Bishop.  “I’ve never been past Miscouche with the horse, and when I need to go any farther, I take the train or the bus.  That’d be no good to me!”

 

“Tillie says you can even get mail on your IPhone”, says Rufe.  “What kind of mail?”, asks Clayton.  “They’re called ‘email’.”  “Well”, says Clayton, “I bet Fidèle at the Post Office won’t like that too much.  People gettin’ their mail off their phone.  If that email catches on, pretty soon Harold and Hilda won’t have any mail to deliver out in the country.”

 

“Who makes them there IPhones?”, asks Syl.  “Tillie says it’s a company called ‘Apple’”, Rufe replies.  “The apples are no good this year”, pipes up Émile Clovis.  “My August apples are full of worms”.  “Not that kind of apple, for Christ’s sake Émile”, growls Steve.  “Why don’t you get the batteries changed in that old hearing aid of yours?”

 

“Tillie says the women won’t be buying any of the new phones because they don’t want Delima to lose her job at the telephone office”, Rufe continues.  “Like hell”, roars Steve.  “That’ll be the day the women don’t want the latest thing around here.  Our lane is too long to get the wires up to the house, but if them new phones don’t need to be hooked up to anythin’, I bet Kathleen will be wantin’ one.”

 

“How in hell are you going to charge up the battery, Steve?”, asks Syl, with that snarky look that tells everybody he’s got one up on somebody.  “You ain’t even got the ‘lectricity up there!”  Syl slaps his knee, and even Émile Clovis is in on the joke.  He has a good laugh at Steve Ro’s expense, and sends a well-aimed gob of black tobacco juice toward the spitoon.

 

On and on it goes until the men eventually tired of this subject and turn to the more familiar topic of the summer weather and how it was affecting the crops.  I sit in the corner and wonder how these new phones will change things for my generation.  I can’t wait to get home, and start working on Mom to see if I can get my own IPhone.

 

Elva and I fall somewhere between old-fashioned and new adopters, probably closer to the latter.  We were the first family in Wellington to buy a family minivan in 1987, but we were slow off the mark when it came time to buying a flat-screen TV.  As for cellphones, I’ve only had one for work since 2006, and Elva’s had hers for about five years.

 

I remember reading an article ten years or so ago about the advent of computers – how they’d affect our lives, and the lives of our parents’ and our children’s generations.  The feeling was that, for our parents, computers would be nothing more than a curiosity.  For our generation, they would become a tool, a means to an end.  For our children, they would become a way of life, an essential element of almost everything they’d do.

 

Today, we’re presented with an infinity of choice when it comes to computing and communication devices: desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.  We’re expected by our family, friends and co-workers to be ‘on’ all the time, 24 / 7.  As our dependence on these gadgets increases, we spend more and more time looking at screens, and less and less time talking to one another.

 

But, they’re not all bad.  I wouldn’t trade Skype time with my children and grandchildren for a phone call.  I love my wireless printer.  I like being able to do my banking over the internet, so much so that I haven’t been face-to-face with a teller in God knows how long. 

Soon, we won’t even know what a ‘teller’ was!  It’s another of those old-time occupations destined to disappear.  Just like the telephone operator who answered: “Number please?”, when I turned the crank on the old phone in Wellington. 

 

 

That old phone hangs on my son, Clément’s, wall in Edmonton.  It’s a shame he missed out on the conversation in Rufus MacLure’s barber shop that Saturday morning in 1963.  The old crank phone would mean so much more to him if he had.