LET'S TALK

The art of conversation has become a technological hodgepodge of texting, twittering and tweets that can all be organized with a hash tag. No eye contact is required. It’s communicating with your mouth shut starting with e-mails. Looking at the bright side, this is technologies revenge on those who never wrote a letter home. For people who are really into developing their thumbs, there is even a U.S. National Texting Competition.

For those of us who enjoy talking, there are still telephones that, for the time being, still include this capability. However, I recently found out that a person has to be very careful when actually speaking aloud.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting on my (land line GASP!) telephone with a friend.
Suddenly, her voice sounded as if she had her head in a bucket. I probably should have asked her if she was washing her floor, but instead, I said, “I can’t believe your brother-in-law has stayed with you for a month. Why don’t you tell him to go home?” After a moment of silence, my friend said, “Because you just did.” Unbeknownst to me, she had switched to speakerphone to clean up his spilled Cheerios. Speakerphone. Whoever came up with that miserable invention? It is just a distant relative to the old fashioned party line which was much more fun anyway.

When I was a kid, we shared a phone line with a bunch of other people, and I could listen in on all of their conversations. When mother said, “Get off the phone,” it didn’t necessarily mean I was talking to anyone, but it honed my listening skills.

Call waiting is another annoying invention. The same person, who complains about being put on hold while waiting for a computer geek to answer, doesn’t hesitate to put me on hold when receiving another call. Admittedly, the new caller might be more interesting than I am, but when put on “Hold” I hang up.

And, what’s up with the friend who calls me on her cell phone to tell me that she can’t talk because she’s out of range and then everything goes silent. Why did she call me?

Smart computer innovators have now made it possible to see the person you are talking to on your computer screen. That is a nice feature, if you haven’t just stepped out of the shower.  One day, my son called and said, “Hey, Mom, what are you doing?” I held up the toilet brush and replied, “Guess!”

Esther Blumenfeld (call me sometime)