Busy Signal.

The other day Cassidy was calling a business where she has a job interview. She held the phone away from her face, looked at it puzzled, then listened again, then hung up and redialed. Then she repeated the entire process again.

Cassidy: Are you sure this is the right number?
Me: Yep, I read it back to her. Why?
Cassidy: It’s not ringing and the phone is making a weird noise.
Me: Like what?
Cassidy: *puts phone on speaker*
Me: That’s a busy signal.
Cassidy: *looks puzzled*
Me: She’s on the phone with somebody else. Hang up and keep trying till you get through.
Cassidy: Can’t she tell that I’ve been calling her over and over?!
Me: It’s a land line!
Cassidy: Who even does that anymore?

I had to think back to the last time that we had an actual land line. We got rid of it when we moved out of the first apartment we shared together and into our rental house in September 2005. So that was almost 9 years ago and Cassidy was just 6 at the time! SIX! So she has NEVER heard a busy signal! In her life! Before last Thursday!

Other things she finds odd but has never really experienced:

1) Pagers
2) TVs without remotes
3) Dialing a rotary phone
4) Mix tapes
5) Answering machines
6) Cameras that spit the photo out at you that you have to then shake to see
7) Machines that only exist to rewind your VHS tape
8) Drive in movie theaters
9) The scratch of a record player
10) Having to roll down the window in the car

And also, I am really old.

Time to cool off via chocolate overload! ;)

6 thoughts on “Busy Signal.

  1. Manual door locks should probably be added to the list. I have to admit, I’ve been spoiled by them since, oh, 1996 or so. So when my mom had a cheap little rental vehicle (a Saturn, I think) in 2003, that had power NOTHING (I’m surprised we didn’t have to hitch it to horses), and she asked me to “lock the door” as I exited the vehicle, I seriously turned to her and said, “What?”

  2. Next time you guys come down to see your dad, you all should go to the Santee drive in, since Oceansides is just a swap meet now.

  3. heh my kid still gets to live with a landline.. our home is so far out in the middle of nowhere that if we didn’t have a landline we’d have no phone at all. we also have an answering machine :p

  4. This makes me think of all the things my great-grandmother (who died in 2011 at the age of 100) saw in her lifetime. She started life without any of the mod-cons, and lived to see things like television, computers & internet, mobile phones, etc. all come into reality, not to mention a lot of other things we take for granted like the rise of motor vehicles and such. It’s crazy!

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