Concerned About Growing Old?

[SPedigrees]

the first mobile phone i ever saw was the one Dad had installed in his car, it was not portable but it was mobile and it worked. he paid quite a bit to have it but he was on the road a lot so he really needed it for work.

we didn't get a cellphone until a few years ago. our landline was suffering too frequent issues too and so we finally gave it up. we spend less for the cellphone and Mom hasn't smashed it yet. yes, it is a flip phone. i don't want anything else.

I live in a dead zone with no cell service, so it's landline or nothing here. Many years ago my dad once loaned us one of those old school car phones for a trip to his beach house. It was called a "bag phone" because it was literally in a bag.

In more recent times we got flip phones for our cars in case of emergency on the road. Very recently the technology of this old flip phone finally went extinct and I had to upgrade to a smart phone. It is a stupid, unresponsive, annoying smart phone, in other words a dumb phone, but I keep it in the car in case of emergency.

I have 4 laptop computers and 4 landline phones, but no useful mobile phone to speak of.

 

[Shades-of-Oregon]

My first cell phone was a brick sized heavy block phone. That was early 90’s before there were cell phone towers everywhere like today. Back then you had to have a very big battery in the cell phone to reach limited towers for calls. The searching for connections with phone waving in the air around areas … “Can ya hear me now ?” Was a common phrase then. These huge phones came in real handy when out on horseback expeditions riding with friends , getting lost or too tired to ride back . Called a friend with horse trailor to pick us up because we or the horses were too tired to ride back home up and down the mountains and rivers… no joke. I was always ready for a challenge. Sometimes the hardest trails wore the horses out before the riders. The happy days of horse camping and endurance competitions.

 

[flowerbug]

Seeing a spider on the wall, Mom says, "Hand me the phone book!"

@flowerbug , "Phone book? Use your cell phone."

haha! we get some TP.

the thing about smashing basically continues, like last night Mom is banging the remote control because it isn't working as she expects it to work. i tell her that it doesn't help to smash something and that it won't work any better.

once in a while it is batteries that need replacing but more often than not she is simply just not using it right. pushing buttons harder in some cases just wears them out faster. bashing the remote down dislodges the batteries inside and makes for a worse or no energy flow, etc. i go out and press the buttons and things work. i'm gentler. sometimes it takes a moment for something to happen and Mom doesn't wait that long and hits button again.

and in the case of the tv on/off button right on the tv she was pushing it so hard and so long it was effectively turning the tv and on off again. i just poke it lightly and it works. which i showed her and she swore at me. but at least she can turn the tv on and off now...