Terry Jones

A weird thing happened to me this morning.

I needed to call someone in Portugal. I reached for the trusty land line, checked for a dial tone (so old fashioned), grabbed the number, and went to dial. Then I realized I didn’t remember the prefix to dial to get out of the country!

That’s pretty amazing. I’ve been living “overseas” (whatever that means) for over 20 years, and I’ve made plenty of international calls in that time.

I’ve been using Skype for international calls almost exclusively for at least 2 years.

Concepts like “dial tone” and “international dialing prefix” are soon going to appear extremely quaint.

I took my kids to a flea market a couple of months ago. We ran across a rotary phone. Although they knew it was a phone, they couldn’t figure out how you were supposed to dial. Why not just push a button? Dial tone? Access code? Why not just push a (mouse) button?

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.