Here Are Things, Once Commonplace, That We Don’t Do Anymore

I bet this particular sentence has come up a million times in conversations I've had over the last 15 years or so: "Remember when if you weren't home, you weren't home and they'd have to wait til you GOT home to talk to you?"

Do you remember it?

Do you remember going on vacation--sometimes for weeks at a time--and being practically unreachable?

We'd always call my grandfather and grandmother when I was young and we were traveling, but not until we got to the motel that night.

Or, very simply, if you were just out to dinner?

(That reminds me of something I saw recently at a restaurant. Three people were sitting around a table and all of them were checking their phones. Remember when folks actually TALKED to the people with whom they were dining?)

What about dropping in on someone?

Back in the day, it was common for friends to just DROP IN on other friends. It was perfectly alright.

Now, it's perfectly NOT alright. And, actually, that's fine with me. Despite the angle of this blog, I do think that arriving unannounced at someone's home is a little too weird.

Speaking of phones, very--and I mean VERY--few people need to use a public telephone anymore. It's probably why you can't find them anywhere.

(My favorite public phone--yes, I had one--was the old wooden phone booth in the lounge at Anderson's Department Store downtown. Remember it? It was halfway up between the first and second floors and you could look down ONTO the first floor.)

ALSO speaking of phones, remember *69? Hilarious.

Of course, not everything we no longer do involves phones--like who needs a phone book?

What about pictures?

Much as I always mean to, I never print my pictures. And that's cost me a couple of times recently when my phones have crashed. Fortunately, I had saved the important ones on the cloud.

Oh, there's a good one. Remember when a cloud was just that white fluffy thing in the sky made of steam?

I could really go on. Like I could ask how many of you still use a Rand-McNally atlas (I do) or watch a show when it actually comes on (I rarely do) or look up words in a dictionary--you know, the kind with a front and back cover and a spine and page numbers?

Yeah, me neither. Good ol' dictionary app.

So many common activities have subtly been replaced and I'm not sure we even noticed.

(Oh, I almost forgot about big boomboxes. Ugh. There's a good reason for that.)