Good morning. ☕☕☕
30 May 2026
I remember when telephones with push‑buttons started showing up. They looked so modern, so futuristic, like something out of a science‑fiction movie. If you had one sitting on your desk, you must have been somebody — even though, at first, they didn’t really do anything the old rotary phones couldn’t do. I still wonder why we started with a dial instead of buttons in the first place. I don’t wonder long, though. It had to be whatever the technology of the time could manage.
When I was a small child living with my grandparents — my parents were off at the Great Lakes while my dad went through Navy training — I had to memorize their phone number. To this day, it still doesn’t make sense to me. It was “Sycamore 5‑2453.” Try dialing that into a phone today. There have been a few changes since then.
And isn’t it funny that after all these years, after all the technical leaps that led to the cell phones we carry in our back pockets, we still say we’re “dialing” a number? I’m sure plenty of young people don’t even know what that means. I’ve seen clips online where teenagers are handed an old rotary phone and look as confused as I’d be if someone handed me a crank‑and‑jar churn. I wouldn’t know its purpose, let alone how to use it.
Makes you wonder what the next fifty years will bring. I’m certain of one thing: nobody will be running down to the telegraph office. And someday, even cell phones will go the way of buggy whips.
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan
“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.” — Doug Larson
“If you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance even less.” — General Eric Shinseki
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