Phoning it In

No Kids - It Wasn't This Bad!

People of my generation can really look back and marvel at the progress of technology over the course of our lives.  Nowhere is that more evident than with the telephone.  When I was young our family had what was called a “party line” which involved actually sharing a phone line with someone else – can you imagine that nowadays?  Phone numbers back then actually started with letters, EL2-0299 was ours.  Of course all numbers had to be dialed in and during my teenage years we thought a push button phone was about as cool as you could get.  All phone communications went through AT&T which enjoyed a government approved monopoly to provide phone service to all Americans.  Long distance calls were expensive and rationed appropriately in a family watching costs.  International calling was something truly exotic.  I can remember while stationed in Panama having to go to the local post office to call back to the US and my mother to inform her I was getting married.  In 1984 AT&T was broken up and that, more than anything else seems to have fueled the breathtaking leap forward in technology as competition fueled better and better service.  My mother bemoaned the fact that AT&T was being broken up but I think history will show it was a catalyst of spectacular change for the better.  My wife can now sit down and video chat with her family in Panama for free, no post office required.  Dial phones are museum pieces and even push button phone are archaic.  Most young people do not even have a telephone wired into the house and long distance charges are a thing of the past for the most part.  I cannot remember the last time I actually dialed the number for a friend since most of these are stored in the phone.  My grandparents were around for the invention of the telephone, I can only imagine their wonder at the globe spanning telephone technology available to us.  It’s fun to imagine what it will be like in just a few decades further into the future. 

The Phone I Grew Up With

My wife was not going to take the Bulova watch problem lying down.  She took all the paperwork back to Macy’s where she bought the watch and confronted them with the evidence.  One of the sales clerks there was the person who told her that we had to send it back to Bulova and that proved useless (see earlier blog entry).  When she saw the same clerk yesterday she refused to talk with him and waited for a supervisor who admitted the other clerk had serious customer service issues (which begs the question why he continues in the position but that’s Macy’s problem to solve).  The supervisor immediately admitted they owed us a refund for the watch and took care of it with profuse apologies.  My wife is going back today with the refund and a 25% discount card Macy’s sent her to get me a new watch – I don’t think it will be a Bulova.  I am so very proud of her for not just sitting back and accepting that we had done everything that could be done.  It’s also testimony to her increasing self-confidence because she’s always been a little reticent to push issues (except with me, of course) in English which is not her native language.  Kudos to Macy’s for their responsible reaction but you really do need to move that one guy back to the loading dock.  Construction on the road out front continued.  They paved around the storm drain (see picture).  I’m no engineer but it seems they should have paved the gully all the way up the hill because the first heavy rain will undercut everything they’ve done.   Hopefully that’s part of the finishing off phase.  If not they’ll have to come back and fix it again.  The best news is that today I get to drive through Connecticut again during rush hour.  Those of you who read this blog regularly know there is only one thing that can make me do that happily – I’m going to be picking up my daughter and son in law for a weekend visit home – color me extremely psyched.

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