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Recently, I saw a post online with this challenge: "Without saying your age, say something a young person today wouldn't understand."
For me, it was The Phone.
It had its own place and aura in the home. If you didn't have internet--and most homes did not during the entire '90s--The Phone was the only non-postage way of reaching people if you couldn't travel to see them or didn't want to.
It may not seem that way in hindsight for some folks, but there wasn't a majority of homes with internet until the early 2000s.
(And when that started happening, The Computer took its own little place and aura in the home.)
The U.S. Census Bureau reported that between 1998 and 2005, the number of households in the United States with cell phone ownership went from 36% to 71%. As late as the very early 2000s (forgive the contrary phrasing there), about half of adults and teens didn't own a cell phone.
So, around the start of the Millennium, most households didn't have a cell phone or a computer with internet access or both. There was a television, maybe two, and there was The Phone and god shined upon the lucky teenager who had their own phone in their bedroom. (I did not.)
If you had to meet someone, you would make plans to meet them at a specific time and all parties would take it on faith that each other would follow through. Because the only way to communicate with them was a landline phone. At your home. Or maybe at the intended destination. Maybe you'd find yourself close enough to a convenient pay phone (that's a whole other story).
If you knew you were going to be way late, say, to a restaurant, you might call ahead and leave a message with the host to give to the folks you were meeting, so they knew you were still coming. If the destination didn't have a phone, you would just hope they waited for you.
So, when The Phone rang, it was an event. As a younger kid, it was very common to race your siblings to the phone to answer it. When you're, like, seven years old, you have a hope that it could be someone interesting or exciting. Maybe it's the President calling. It never was.
Answering The Phone was a crapshoot in many homes without an answering machine or caller ID. Who was it? Who the hell knows? It could have been anyone. Sometimes, it was someone who shouldn't be calling. Still, we rushed to answer it. In hindsight, it was crazy, but we did that.
We'd race to The Phone, sometimes from the exact opposite part of our home or even run from outside when we heard it, sprinting, because we had to be the one to see who was calling on The Phone and report it to the rest of the family. As younger kids, this made us feel important.
You and your siblings would fight over who gets to answer The Phone, sometimes colliding into each other at full speed, having run from different parts of your home, a flurry of arms and elbows and much shouting. There were arguments!
When you were a younger kid, you might test an adult calling by attempting to imitate your parent's voice or a general "adult" voice. It was terrible acting and tremendous fun. The adults were not always amused by this. There were arguments!
As we got older, racing to The Phone was done in the hopes of a classmate calling about homework or maybe a crush from school. Or a friend calling about hanging out. For most of us, there was the one line, meaning only one person could use it at a time. There were arguments!
When internet access began reaching homes, going online meant The Phone couldn't be used while someone was online because the modem used the phone line. There were arguments! Whole fights over who got to control the doorway to the rest of the world. This was all very exciting.
Many of us grew up with corded phones. When we were younger, we'd sit or stand near The Phone, talking to a relative on a holiday or a friend from school, idly wrapping the cord around our fingers or absentmindedly getting it tangled up around ourselves and others walking by.
The cord would sometimes stretch across the room and annoyed family members would have to step over it or dip under it and might flash you a look of annoyance for your lack of spatial awareness. There were arguments!
The cordless phone was a game changer. Suddenly, there was freedom with where you could use The Phone. Snatch that damn thing and talk in your bedroom for hours. You and your siblings and your parents would be annoyed with each other when it was missing. There were arguments!
Sometimes, one of you would take the cordless phone into your bedroom and talk for hours and hours until it died, and then, everyone else who needed to use it had to wait until it charged on its little dock. There were arguments!
Cordless phones felt a bit less like The Phone. Less formal. When it was corded to the phone base, which was plugged into the wall, it felt more permanent and older. Cordless phones felt new, an aura less congruous with "The Phone". Hard to explain. It just felt that way.
Cell phones, of course, slowly eroded this aura of The Phone over time before suddenly obliterating it -- slow at first and then, suddenly, very quickly, seemingly overnight. It felt like it was overnight. It wasn't. But it felt that way.
The aura of The Phone is no longer a substantial part of American life and hasn't been for some time. Less than a third of homes have a landline now; the vast majority use only cell phones. Just about everyone in the family over a certain age has a phone in their pocket. Wild.
Anyway, younger folks don't need to understand any of this, of course, but to those of us who grew up at the tail end of The Phone, it was just a completely different vibe stuck in a specific time that's now long gone.
And sometimes, weirdly, irrationally, I kinda miss it.
Hi, I’m Charlotte Clymer, and this is Charlotte’s Web Thoughts, my Substack. It’s completely free to access and read, but it’s also how my bills! So, please do kindly consider upgrading to a paid subscription: just $7/month or save money with the $70/annual sub. You can also go way above and beyond by becoming a Lifetime Member at $210.
The Phone