Posted on 04/14/2010 11:49:46 AM PDT by fishtank
I guess there's LOTS of people now who never had to learn to dial a telephone!!!
My grandma used to have a phone just like that. We thought it was so cool. It was the 70’s and she still had that phone! She was really “modern”, too which always seemed contradictory. My old fashioned and older grandma had a modern phone.
LOL! I remember when we got our first touchtone phone. GAWD I’m getting old! :(
We have an old wooden one (as a decoration) on the wall ... great conversation piece ... it doesn’t have a dial though. Which also begs the question - why do people still say to dial a number when there are just buttons ....???
Did they run this on TV?
I remember when they put in telephone service in my area.
Nah. People pulled it up on the internet, just like now.
My cousin tell a story about his father, a bar tender. Regular comes in and complains about how his car is riding. Uncle Paul innocently asks him if he changed the air in his tires since last winter. Well, no the guy says. Paul tell him the thing he’s got to do is let the old winter air out of the tires and replace it with new spring air. Everyone know that.
Huh, the guy says. About an hour after the guy leaves another regular, who owns a gas station comes in and tells Paul, you’ll NEVER guess what I just saw a guy do. Paul casually says - Did he let all the air out of his tires and pump them back up? The guy’s jaw dropped.
I guess it was to test whether your phone was in working order, but it was a great way to, say, tease a sister waiting for a phone call from a certain boy.
Just sayin'.
My mom was a switchboard operator, too.
Everyone I knew, including my family, had rotary phones in the ‘70’s. I believe my parents kept ours in use into the ‘80’s. And I remember the pay phones having them.
Not long ago, one of my children saw one somewhere - I forget where - it might’ve been at a museum - and he asked me how you’d use it. Wow, did I feel old...
Q: Do you use your dictaphone?
A: No, I use my finger.
I instructed him on how to use it -- "See the little shiny metal curlie-cue up by the backside of the '0' where it reads 'operator'? You put your finger in the hole of the number you want to dial and wheel it all the way around (no, no... Clockwise!) to that little metal doo-dad until your finger stops, then you pull your finger out and do the next number" -- but try as he might, he couldn't get it right.
I warned him: "Now be careful with your fingertip and pull it out quick, or you could get a really bad pinch and a blood blister!". He'd wheel the number around and pull his finger out really fast like a cobra was about to bite him. He wasn't sure if the wheel was hydraulically-assisted or not and he was afraid he might lose a fingertip. Then I had to tell him to wait until the dial reset before he could go on to the next number. He looked up at me like I couldn't be right. It takes this long to dial a number with one of these ancient phones?!
He finally got his number dialed, but I almost gave up on him after he asked "Why does 'zero' have 'OPERATOR' printed next to it anyway?" I said, if you dial that number alone, you get to the telephone operator lady. "There's a woman who sits around waiting for you to use that number?" Yes, but I haven't dialed the operator in years, so maybe it's computerized voice menus or something. You used to call her to place a collect call or dial overseas. "Collect call, what's that?"... Oy, you'd think I was helping him make a 1920s-era international trunk call from Chicago to Paris having to get seven different switchboard operators involved using numbers like 'Klondike Seven-Two-One' through the Central station in New York City.
At last he said "Well, now I know what they mean when they say "dial" a number... They actually had DIALS on phones at one time."
The whole episode made me feel old and I was only in my mid-thirties.
You just brought back a memory for me. When I was about 5, I decided that I would push a chair over to our wall phone, so I could reach, and call a number.
I can’t remember whose number it was, but I remember I was unsuccessful because I could not find the hyphen symbol on the rotary dial, and phone numbers then, of course, were always printed with a hyphen.
I remember that our phone number was MU7-6770
Send this one in to 0bama - he’s an expert on tires and tire inflation.
That’s not all. How to read? How to count? There is a reason that “cash registers” as fast food joints have pictures of the burgers on the keyboards.
Directory delivery guy wears a suitcoat and tie!
I think they use street bums now. LOL
Well, he learned the hard way that land-lines phones don't typically have SEND buttons. They don't own a land line phone, and it was news to him.
Fortunately, the officer that came to the house was an old friend of mine, and just give him, and mom, a lecture on proper use of 911. As I always say a party is not a party until the police show up.
After I got out of the Marine Corps in 1968, I got a job in the office at a very old cold storage warehouse in the ancient produce district of Los Angeles.....the switchboard looked exactly like Canedawg’s pic — I actually answered and forwarded a few calls when the operator had stepped away..............scary
Huxley, CS Lewis and Pres. John F. Kennedy all died the same day. There's a book about it by Peter Kreeft, imagining their conversation together after death.
My husband picked up an old dial tone phone at a yard sale several months ago. Our 2 granddaughters came to visit, the oldest being 10, and we were curious to see how they would work the old phone. We asked them to try and call one of their friends, and they looked at the dial for a minute, and then they stuck their fingers in the dial holes, and pressed down on the painted numbers. They were using it as a push button! They were flummoxed.
On another note, I was watching an old Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, I can’t remember which. But it was supposed to be way off in the future. The man on TV picked up what was supposed to be a futuristic phone, and it was shaped in a real futuristic shape, but it had a dial on it. Not to mention that nowadays, you can stick a phone in your ear.
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