In the 1950’s and 60’s, the rotary telephone was communications central for homes across America.  Ours was black and weighed a whopping four pounds.  It had a six feet long cord anchored to a junction box.  A coiled wire connected the headset to the base providing the caller 3 extra feet of movement.  When I was four, I submerged that phone into a bucket of water my mother was using to clean the dining room chandelier.  I just wanted to help.  Turned out it wasn’t waterproof.  Oh, boy, was I in big trouble.  

Our telephone sat on the dining room table.  Phone books were on a chair nearby.  Bell Telephone delivered two copies every year.  The 3”-thick White Page edition contained residential addresses and phone numbers, and the 2-inch Yellow Pages provided local business contact information.  By year’s end, each of them was dog-eared and filled with notations and doodles.  Yet, once replacements arrived, they would sit around for an extra two months as back-up against an important number being lost.  But one thing was sure, if you wanted to find someone or some business quickly, you almost always could.  Friendly operators even helped you locate numbers for people who didn’t appear in the phone book or who had changed their number. Try that today using the internet.

The next three decades saw much change, including the mandatory use of area codes extending phone numbers from 7 digits to 10.  Phones themselves became lighter, colorful, sleeker and with buttons replacing a rotary dial. Instead of writing telephone numbers down on notepads, a contraption called the flip-up telephone index appeared in households to catalog and alphabetize the most important numbers.   By the mid-1980s, phone cords were replaced by charging stations and handsets with antennas.  I bought my first home in 1985, and installed two of them.  They were really slick.  

Business phone numbers were commonly kept on a simple rolodex device or inside a business card notebook. You could still refer to phone books, but they were slowly phasing out.  I had a business phone on my desk with a ton of buttons.  The most frequently used button connected me to a new technology called voicemail.  Little did I know that it would come to be an unbelievable pain in my ass with co-workers leaving messages day and night. 

What about car phones you ask?  I had seen them, but they were reserved for the really wealthy among us. That abruptly changed in the early 1990s, when my company gave me a Motorola bag phone with a large handset.  Even though it was clumsy, I loved that phone.  I could go most places and communicate with my customers and family.  When I didn’t have it with me on road trips, I’d stand in line at airports waiting my turn for a pay phone.  Salespeople had AT&T 800 pay codes back then that allowed us to make long distance calls without fishing around for change. By the way, have you seen a pay phone anywhere lately?

Handheld cell phones began rolling out by the middle of the 90s, and before long, I got my first handheld Nokia phone.  Aside from making calls, it had games on it like Snake and brickbreaker.  My kids loved that game.  

Things stayed pretty status quo for me until my boss was able to snag Blackberry phones for the two of us around 2009.  Wow, what a game changer.  The buttons were raised and the screen on the phone was much better than anything I had used before.  Whenever I pulled it out, people would stare and tell me how lucky I was to have one.

Today, cell phones are literally out of this world; especially when you consider a basic cell phone has more computing power than the computers used to send men to the moon and back.  We rely on them beyond our own conscious thinking.  They keep us in touch with one another, but that seems to be secondary to all of the other services they provide like entertainment, navigation, email, voicemail, internet, texts, and apps for just about anything you can think of.  My colleague and good friend Gary recently had his phone fail, and when he finally got a replacement, he said he had no idea how much he depended on it until it went down.  As we talked, he had me freaked out at the thought of losing mine.

In life, we use the phrase “Cut the Cord” to refer to getting away from dependency.  Yet, from the moment we cut the cord to our conventional phones, it appears that we have become more dependent than ever on their off-spring.