What Did We Do Before Cell Phones?

If I recall correctly I got my first cell phone around 1996.  It was kind of a boxy looking Nokia.  It wasn't as boxy as my brother's phone, which actually was in a box, or more accurately a bag.  He kept it in his truck.  My brother having beat me to ownership of a mobile phone is a shocking revelation.  

Our first cell phone didn't do much by today's standards and neither did the next one that followed in its footsteps.  It was probably several phones later before we owned a cell phone that could even be considered a very expensive deck of cards used to play solitaire.

Those phones didn't let me send and receive texts.  They didn't take pictures.  There was no access to the world wide web.  In the phone's defense I'm not sure we even had internet in our home at that time.  We might have still been running off a bulletin board service, waiting our turn to access what little bit of internet there was available.  That's another story for another time.  Back to the phone.  

It made calls, but the plan had very limited minutes, so it was basically used for non-emergency emergencies.  The most useful thing about it was sending it with our then high school aged son when he had away games and he could call us when the bus was almost back to the school, so we could be there to pick him up.

The three of us shared that one phone with limited minutes and limited access.  By limited access I mean there weren't a lot of towers around Fort Dodge, IA at that time.  In fact, several years later when we moved to Arizona and made trips back to Iowa, whatever carrier we were with didn't have a tower within 15 miles and we didn't have any service while we were there without purchasing a Trac Phone and adding minutes just for the trip.  

The nice thing about the phone's lack of usefulness was that I didn't freak out if I left the house without it like I do now.  We probably didn't even know where the phone was, which one of us was in possession of it half the time.  

Looking back on life there were times even that primitive cell phone would have come in handy.  It would have probably been a nice thing to have with me for safety's sake when walking home from high school through an industrial area along railroad tracks.  

A phone might have been useful the night my seventeen-year-old self and some of my friends decided to go to the carnival at the mall when there were obviously tornado watches and warnings being forecast all over the place or at least there would have been if Super Doppler had been available.  Instead, the weather prediction was coming from my mom, no doubt having something to do with the arthritis in her hands.  I have come to appreciate her super power to predict the weather that way.  My weather predictor is my spine and right shoulder.  In my teenage mind she was just being mean and didn't want me to hang with friends.  Being the responsible, parochial school girls that we were, we turned around as soon as we heard the tornado sirens and headed right back to my house since it was the closest.  We rode the storm out safely in mom and dad's basement.  Dad, of course, was stationed on the back steps watching the sky and ordering us back to the basement whenever we tried to creep up the steps to see what was happening.  Personally, I think he felt safer out on the step than in the basement with my mom and four giggling, screaming teenage girls.  We were luckier than many who lost their homes.  Ours and none of our house guest's homes had any major damage and my friend's red Starsky and Hutch car sans the white stripe, was safe at our house instead of at her house where it would have gotten pelted by hail.  I loved her car, but it bugged the hell out of me that it didn't have the stripe.  Now that I think about it, I'm still not over it.  My point of all this is a cell phone would have certainly eased all our parent's minds when they didn't know exactly where we were and the tornado sirens were blaring. 

There were so many times after high school a cell phone would have come in handy, too.  I worked at a bank processing center at night.  Some nights we worked until the wee hours of the morning.  Some nights we were done by 9 PM.  Those nights we went out partying.  Mostly we played foosball for drinks.  The drinking age in Iowa was 18 in the 70's.  It was about to be raised to 19, so I felt obligated to take advantage of my good fortune.  

Oh the stories.  Someday, much to the horror of certain friends, there will be a book about those years.  "One Night We Were Drinking".  Just assume every story in that future book will start with those five words.  

The processing center where I worked was located at what was referred to as the top of Central Avenue.  It was next door to the local XXX bookstore.  If that place could talk. 

Anything going on in Fort Dodge for people our age was probably happening in a bar or someplace on a gravel road.

One night two co-workers and I did something that was so dumb and dangerous.  Ok, there was more than one night, but this night topped them all.  I swear to you, the three of us are very intelligent people.  We just had occasional lapses.  Thank God for watching over us during those lapses.  We were wandering around the downtown area and checking out the bars, when a truck with three guys in it came past and they yelled, "Do you want a ride?"  Of course we did.  It was winter.  It was always winter in Iowa, except for a couple of months we called summer when there was 90% humidity and mosquitoes.  It was darn cold in the back of that pickup truck.  We decided to jump out when we got to a stop sign near a bar on the edge of town.  There were too many long legs going over the box of the truck and I didn't make it out before the truck took off from the stop sign.  Oh yeah, that cell phone would have been great right then.  We ended up back in the downtown area and I jumped out, walked to work and got my car.  I didn't know where my two pals were, so I drove out to the bar where they jumped out and I didn't find them, but rumor had it they'd been there and one of them had called a sibling who wouldn't rat her out to come get them.  My friends also didn't know where I was.  Let's just say it was a long night, but we all survived.  

The cell phone would have also come in handy on our wedding night when my husband's car was stuffed full of key punch dots...look it up, they're a thing...and printer paper edging and was sitting on the landing of the steps leading up to the police station.  At the time the Fort Dodge police station was conveniently located across the street from our wedding reception venue.  The police told me they'd prefer the car not be there and they'd like it moved.  My brand spanking new groom and his best man were at our apartment where they had taken a load of wedding presents in the best man's car.  I didn't have keys to that darn mutant Dodge Dart that had somehow found its way up those police station steps.  Warning!  This is what happens when most of the males in your wedding party and many of the guests are softball players who can lift and carry heavy objects.  I'm guessing this is what happened since forty plus years later there have been no admissions and just some random finger pointing.  One of the groomsmen was a well-know and allegedly well-respected Fort Dodge business owner, who cajoled the officers into being momentarily understanding.  The hubs returned with the keys and drove the car down the steps.  Needless to say our wedding, or at least the reception, is kind of a Fort Dodge legend. 

The day my beloved Camaro and myself were stuck on an icy hill because other people don't know how to drive, a cell phone would have made life less traumatic.  I was driving up the hill with no problem.  People panicked, slowed down, slid sideways.  Any traction I had was lost by the time I got around the offending vehicle and it's driver.  I had to walk down that slick hill and then down another one to get to the babysitter's house and call home.  At least I had already dropped off our son.  Can you imagine navigating an icy street, dodging sliding vehicles and carrying a two-month-old baby?  Thankfully it was my husband's day off.  He showed up with sand and we got my Camaro up the hill.  That was the day I became a responsible adult and went from "Oh look how pretty winter is." to "I have a baby.  How dare there be ice under my tires putting his life in danger."  Driving in winter weather became the enemy, even with studded snow tires and sandbags placed in the trunk.  I live in Arizona now.  Winter snow is pretty again, way over there, on a mountain I can see from my house, but not effecting my life.

Aw, yes, cell phones.  How they've evolved and changed our lives over the years.  I remember watching in awe as the young sales people whipped open new screens with the slide of a couple fingers and texted effortlessly.  I thought, "Oh, I'll never be able to do that." but here I am.  I can navigate that phone with the best of them.  The only thing I cannot do is text with my thumbs.  I could do it when I had my Blackberry.  I was really good at it.  Why I lost that ability when the actual keys went away, I have no explanation.

Now I carry the world with me in my phone.  I've got my calendar, access to pretty much everything I could possibly need.  What to cook for supper?  What sounds good?  Google it and get a recipe and tell Alexa what to add to the shopping list.  I've got Wordle and Spelling Bee so my brain doesn't turn to mush.  I've got access to any workout I might be in the mood for and music if I just want to take a walk.  I've always got a camera with me if the grandson or the dogs do something cute or if the desert has a particularly beautiful sunset that night.  Priceless memories.  

I'm not going to lie, I would miss my phone terribly.  I would fight you for it.  Yes, sometimes I get annoyed by notifications, but I can always turn down the volume so it will leave me alone.  At least it's there, you know, in case I ever decide to go for a ride in the back of a pickup truck in Iowa during the winter again.