It was Wednesday morning (when I started this but it is now Thursday evening), the morning chores are done and I have just been phoning to try to figure out what happened to my credit card. Amazing to me, I was not put on hold. Two rings and straight through to a real person – well, two rings and typing in my credit card number twice. I have an older landline phone with no speaker facility. It has a club speaker/receiver that I tuck close to one ear and hold with my chin; I started doing this in the 1980’s while working at a job that required lots of telephone calls and the habit has stuck in spite of my stiff neck and a perfectly working iPhone with a speaker. “Turn on the speaker,” says my YD, more or less patiently, when she calls me on this marvellous device.
What is the most marvellous, really, is that I am
chatting with her as she drives home from work or back from an assignment. In
Brussels, or on the Autobahn in Germany, or ... wherever. We can also chat with
her via video from her home, also in Brussels. The phone calls are crystal
clear. The video is excellent. It is not the same as having her here and
getting hugs and finding strange wrapped bags of things in the refrigerator.
But it is a miracle of modern technology. Mind you, I thought that email was a marvel
when I first acquired it. The ED was living in Scotland, and to be able to
reach her on a daily basis and to know that she had managed that day -in a
difficult period in her life – was priceless.
Earlier communication methods were not priceless –
sending bulky letters across the Atlantic, trying (and failing) to keep phone
calls from Africa economically short, paying for international cell
phone coverage in an emergency – all came at a price and a high one by times.
Worth it, though. It is an interesting, for me, comment on how life is that
something you want starts out looking expensive but becomes routine. The switch
from black and white film to colour film is a case in point. We had a good
camera that took a roll of twenty-four shots but that made a film expensive to
have printed. (I had a developer of my own for black and white for a while,
also expensive to do but very interesting.) I started by being very careful
when I had colour film, but ended up doing candid shots and paying for the
rather mixed results. Lines of relatives, posed and resentful, are not good
photography. I went looking for such a photo and found this. Terrible photograph, but it is funny, especially when you know the kidlets.
My Facebook friend, AC, just did a retrospective of his year in photographs, and it is worth a look. His comments are gold mines of teaching about good photography. He has a post here. It made me think about photos I have taken that I liked well enough that I remember something about them. I may just go and look for a few, although remembering about them and remembering where I put them are two very different things.
Report on the report: I had to trek into our medical
facility and ask for a copy of the report to be found and printed from my master
file. It was frustrating, but at least I now have that information. It has
generated more tests, so I will probably be muttering about more reports here
before too long. Both JG and I have reached the plateau of old/old and that
seems to cause our doctors to want to know all about our insides. Me, I read
the report, do a LOT of looking up of very big words and sort of shrug. Yeah,
this, that and the other thing are Not Quite Right. Or, even, labelled with Latinate
tags. I expect I shall be like the ‘wonderful one-hoss-shay.
I remember when we moved from Montreal to Toronto in '62. I was homesick for the old place. I could sometimes call on Saturday night and keep my eye on the clock to keep the time to 10 minutes.
ReplyDeleteNot so long ago, email was The App, but I almost forget to check it now.
Good health to you.
thank you. I have directed people to,your blog without checking with you first, discourteous, Apologies.
DeleteCommunication sure has changed. We enjoyed Facetime with infant grandkids, now in their teens!
ReplyDeleteYes, we have friends whose grandkids are all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and they read them bedtime stories on Facetime. Luckily, mine are within reach.
DeleteWe lived in central Newfoundland and called our parents on the east and west coast of Newfoundland just once a week. Long distance was expensive! Communication has come a long way!
ReplyDeleteYes, indeed. The Sunday phone call from the parents was a staple in our household too. It surely was expensive. They called us.
DeleteI remember being in college in the early 80s and calling my then-fiance long-distance on Wednesday nights after 9PM when it was cheaper. We kept it to 15 minutes only, to save money. Of course that was back in the days when I typed papers on a real typewriter and had to do research in real books and magazines, too. LOL
ReplyDeleteI wrote rather a long response to this comment and Blogger ate it. No more antacids for Blogger.
DeleteAnyway, yes, I used a manual typewriter in College, a portable that had been a highschool grad gift. Unlike most of my fellows, I was a ten finger typist and so I got a lot of wistful faces poked through my door, followed by a fist full of abominable writing. And I loved, loved the 'stacks' in our library. Rooms all divided by floor to ceiling book cases with study carrels stashed away here and there. You could be all alone, lost, and able to hide the books you were using in another case to keep the insufficientcy of copies another person's problem. Um , I think I was a brat. Thank goodness the bf was not long distance. I did have to stand by a pay phone on the wall to commune with him though.
My grandmother was fascinated by things like stretchy snap front baby garments. Me, it is iThings. Yeah.
The prices for sending international mail/packages has really risen lately and made it almost not worth the cost. I am grateful for technology allowing me to be in constant touch with the kids.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about AC's photographs. He takes such interesting photos that really give you a perspective of where he and Sue live.