As I get closer to my birthday I get a little looser than normal with customers. If you’ve been a customer of mine then you know I’m pretty loose to begin with so it’s hard to imagine me even looser. The past couple days I’ve been the don’t want to get older me that inevitably happens at the end of August each year.
The right person came through my door at around half past ten this morning. My third customer of the day was dropping off a laptop and right in the middle of signing her in she asked me if I remember when… “Remember when we didn’t have cell phones?” And that little funny phrase got this soon-to-be-older guy thinking. For the rest of the day I asked every customer if they remember when.
I remember a day when we had to call someone at their house – from our house. We either had to know when the person would be home or we’d be forced to leave a message with someone on the other end. If we were lucky they’d jot our name and number on a slip that would be tacked above the phone or stuck to the fridge. If the person we were calling was important enough they had an answering machine.
Later on caller ID reared it’s ugly head. For such a cool technology it was sooo evil. See, caller ID came right around the time I started dating so for me it was evil and terrifying. After getting the nerve to call it was a guessing game when she wouldn’t pick up. I would always ask myself if she wasn’t home or was simply screening her calls and didn’t want to talk to me. If she called me back, seeing her number on my caller ID screen would twist my gut a little.
Another customer brought up always having to adjust rabbit ears and antennas. Where I grew up we were lucky to receive two very fuzzy TV channels – and that was on a good day. Most days we picked up a Boston channel from the second floor TV by wadding tin foil on one ear of the antenna and putting a clothespin on the second. For those of you old enough to remember, that’s not an exaggeration. A friend of mine was lucky enough to have somewhere around 14 channels of premium cable television. Those were the days.
For college my parents bought me a huge beige Smith-Corona word processing typewriter. For it’s day it was fancy; allowing me to edit a single line of text then send it to the daisy wheel printer. I would have to retype the whole page if there was a typo mid way through. So much for the word processing function because it only retained the last line of text. I guess editing line-by-line beat the alternative of White Out and backspacing.
I never really use the pockets behind the passenger seats in my car anymore. But in the day I used to keep a stack of road atlases in that pocket. Getting lost meant finding the closest cross streets and indexing them in the atlas. If there was a passenger, their task would be to find block A-5 on the map and give directions to get us back on track. No passenger meant lots of stopping and starting while navigating the oversized atlas.
Out of college I was lucky to get a job selling industrial automation equipment. I was responsible for selling into Fortune 500 companies like Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, Kodak and General Motors. Even though the equipment I was selling was state of the art for its time, the sales management system was paper and pen. Each week I was required to fax a carbon copy of my handwritten summary to the boss. One drunken night many years later, my ex boss confessed he couldn’t read anyone’s notes.
On the eve of my fifty third birthday I think back to when times were simpler but not really easier or better. It’s funny though, I still get lost when traveling. Editing somehow became a much more arduous process. There seems to be less on television. And, calling a woman never got easier.
Jeromy is the 53 year old President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located in Greenfield and Gardner MA who sometimes wishes for things to return to the way they were. You can read more at https://www.localcomputerwiz.com.