The Silken Tent
      My Letter to the World
      December 2000
      December 30, 2000
      Saturday

       When Lynn and I left Delia's yesterday we had a piece of business to transact. Early in the Christmas shopping season I'd bought a cell phone with pre-paid service as a big surprise for Lynn. It rested in its box under my bed for two months before the big presentation Christmas Eve.

      Lynn is in ninth grade. She does not actually need a cell phone. It could be argued that there are few people, adults or otherwise, who have one who actually need one. She can't carry it to school, and I wouldn't let her even if it were not against school policy because she absolutely doesn't need one there, at least during the regular school day. (After-school activities are something else.) She doesn't drive, so she doesn't need one for road emergencies, and she doesn't yet go out alone with boys we don't know to events we're not confident about, so she's unlikely to need to be rescued from a problematic social situation.

      But she wanted one, because it's cool to have one, so I made a decision to use my affluence to indulge this desire of hers, and in a way, to indulge the 15-year-old that I was.

      When I was your age. . . -- Of course, no enterprise of this sort can be conducted without a speech that begins that way, especially when we're dealing with communications technology.

      I was Lynn's age in 1962. We lived in a two-story house with one phone, a black rotary dial model hard wired into a spot in the dining room. (This was a "shot-gun" house, half of a double, where the front door opened directly into the living room, and the dining room and kitchen were in a row behind it.) Every call had to be made or received from that spot -- the cord stretched only to the landing of the staircase to the second floor, about four steps up. You could sit there to conduct your call. Some of my friends had persuaded their parents to acquire an extra long cord, maybe twenty-five feet (which had to be installed by a telephone company worker), so you could, if you had to, pull the phone into the coat closet on the other side of the room.

      We moved the next year to a new house in the suburbs which had a finished basement. It was already wired for an extension on each floor, so we moved into the next level of cool in telephone technology. There was a phone on each floor, still rotary dial-- touch tone was just being developed -- but now in pleasing colors to match the room decor. But they were still hard wired into the wall -- cordless was yet to be born. You could make or take your call from the family kitchen, the "family room" in the basement where the television was, or your parents' bedroom.

      Some of my friends were lucky enough to actually have an extension in their bedrooms. The ultimate in cool, of course, was to have a separate phone line, noted in the directory as "children's telephone" or, for the really really cool, under your own name. This was beyond what my sister and I could ever have hoped for. We were happy with the regular length cord and the possibility of having the bedroom or the kitchen or the family room free of other people while conducting a call.

      Part Two of this lecture also includes reminding Lynn that I got through my entire dating life without answering machines, pagers, voice mail, etc. etc. etc. In a college dorm where you shared a hall phone with fifty other girls you might find a note pasted to your door; "Some guy called. He wants you to call him back. I forget the number. I think it had a 2 in it." (Okay, this happened once -- most girls were really good about messages, because you get back what you give.)

      Lynn regards our telecommunications set-up as fairly primitive. We have two phone lines (one for the family, one in my study) which must handle both voice and internet traffic. (That is, the family phone handles calls and Ron's computer, my phone handles my personal calls and my computer). Lynn has a cordless phone in her room which is an extension off the family number. She uses my phone for surfing or chatting only by permission, which is denied only if I really need to be on the 'net. We don't have call waiting or Caller ID or call forwarding or any of the other bells and whistles because we simply don't need them and I think they're a waste of money, at least for us.

      It turned out that the pre-paid phone service I bought for Lynn was a huge disappointment. "Trac-Fone" calls itself America's most popular pre-paid wireless. Lynn's first attempt to activate her service resulted in an announcement that they were experiencing a high volume of calls and she should call back. She was unable to reach their customer service at any hour of the day or night (Lynn did get into the service queue for about an hour about three in the morning on Wednesday, but was cut off before she talked to anyone) -- if you were an existing customer who needed more minutes, you were out of luck.

      That was unacceptable to me, so yesterday we returned the Trac-Fone (which uses a Nokia model but not the coolest one) to Wal-Mart for a cheerful refund and proceeded to Circuit City for the Nokia model she really wanted (she used some gift money to buy a silver face plate) and the cheapest, most basic plan added on to our other AT&T service. We set up parameters for her use of it and for her monetary monthly contribution.

      In all, it was a good experience. It's one more piece of independence for Lynn, one more way to learn about managing time and money, and to learn to appreciate and use wisely our great abundance. A least I hope so.

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