So my niece came down from college this weekend to visit her family and since its been awhile since we all had been together we decided to do a mass outing for dinner.
Plans were made, times were set, restaurant was picked and all that jazz.
As we were all standing around the living room getting ready to leave my niece suddenly exclaims :"Oh crap I forgot I promised my boyfriend I would call him before we left, do we have time"? So we assured her she had time and she pulls out her cellphone only to exclaim "Oh NOOOOOOOO!!!! My battery is DEEEEAAAAADDDDD!!!!!!" which as I'm sure most of you with teenagers or being a teenager yourself can attest is as close to a near death experience as you can get to these days.
No problem I assured her, you can simply use our phone and I point to the landline (yes I still have one) handset on the table next to her.
She picks up the handset and suddenly gets a puzzled look on her face. What's the matter we enquire as she stands there staring at the handset as if it's from outer space.
I don't know his phone number, she replied.
Now a little backstory here. She's been going out with this guy for a little over 10 months at this time. She talks to him daily, multiple times a day actually. And yet she has NO clue what his phone number is, not even the area code (there are multiple ones in my area).
Am I that old or is she that young?
It took a few minutes for me to be able speak again after finally catching my breath after laughing over what I consider the absurdity of the situation. After all in my generation, we had to actually memorize and know the phone number of the person you wanted to call. If you didn't have a good memory you used to have this thing called an address book. It was similar to a phone book but was smaller, portable and instead of having everyone's phone number in it, you only wrote the people whose number you wanted to call. Pretty nifty huh?
Well my niece didn't seem to find this funny at all and its not like any of use could simply offer her our cell phones since we didn't have her boyfriend on speed dial.
So her mother suggested she simply leave her phone plugged in and let it charge while we were out to dinner and when we got home she would be able to call him then.
This idea didn't sit too well with her since she had PROMISED (maybe pinkie promised I didn't push to find out) that she would call her boyfriend BEFORE we went to dinner.
Non-plussed she suddenly looked up and asked if she could use my laptop for a few minutes. I carefully said yes and asked her why.
Simple, she replied, I'll just Facebook message him and have him send me his number that way she said with a smile. Problem solved.
Sure enough within 2 minutes he replied back, she had his number, and was happily talking away
Crisis averted.
Am I that old or is she that young?
It's not like I don't understand what happened, the technology involved or anything like that.
It's that I simply don't think that way. Back in my day, you knew people's phone numbers. You actually had to call them and find out if they were home or not. You couldn't simply log into a page and find out where they were, what location they were checked into, what they had for dinner, breakfast or when their last bowel movement was. If they didn't answer the phone or weren't home you were simply out of luck. No 2 minute replies on how to get ahold of them.
We had a good laugh about all of this over dinner and about how much technology has changed the lives of the current generation in ways they don't even understand. It's been that way for their entire lives, and they take it for granted. I might as well be telling stories from 200 years ago not 20 or 30 years ago about how things were before we had instant access to knowledge via the internet, instant access to friends no matter where they were and the such.
So I ask one final time:
Am I that old or is she that young?
One thing I know for certain, this Christmas she's getting both a VCR and a Walkman. Let's she how smart she is then LOL