Terry Jones

My 7-year-old daughter was here the other day and needed to make a call. She decided to use my landline, but found the old-fashioned phone (the one Telefonica installed, new, about 18 months ago) very confusing.

The handset had no numeric keypad on it. Plus, very weird, it had a cable. Then, when you picked up the phone unit, it had a cable on it too. So she couldn’t bring it to me to explain her difficulty. So I gave her instructions. Put the handpiece to your ear. Do you hear a high-pitched noise? (No, a woman’s voice. OK, hang up, now pick it up again.) Now push the buttons on the main unit.

All so old fashioned, though at least there were buttons involved, unlike when she ran into an old rotary phone.

There’s also a nice symmetry. When I first got a mobile phone, in 1999, Ana noticed that I always stopped when I was making a call. She had to point out to me that you can just keep walking, no need to stop. Now I have my daughter here trying to make a call and getting into trouble when she tries to walk across the room holding the fixed phone – to her great surprise she found that you can’t just walk around.

Which reminds me of the time she pointed to a bulky (switched off) monitor on my desk and asked what it was. I was surprised – she’d seen me using a computer thousands of times, but only ever a laptop. Now that flat screens are everywhere, she may never really run into an old computer with a CRT monitor. But she will probably remember having seen one, just like I remember having to use punch cards for one programming task (which they made us do at Sydney University, just so we’d know what it was like)

OK, nothing deep today. But I must feed the blog.

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