Gratitude Tuesday: Telephony

[bodlon]

So here's how my afternoon went down yesterday.

I left work a little early -- 2:30 -- because I wasn't feeling well. I've been fighting some awful sinus thing for ages, I'm (still!) getting over a nasty cold, and what started out as tired in the morning turned into seriously fatigued and in pain and running a low-grade fever by the afternoon.

When I pulled into the driveway, I discovered that the gate was open. Gwen, my younger dog, was loose, but fortunately delighted to see me and I easily led her into the gate and closed the fence behind us. I went upstairs, and on my way pulled my phone out of my pocket to call her and let her know I'd caught the dog.

She didn't pick up.

Concerned, I went downstairs and checked all the rooms, looking for her. My mother is deaf, you see, and starting to develop a lot of traits one associates with being elderly. She doesn't move around well. She's getting cataracts. She forgets things. Every so often, she tries to do something she shouldn't.

And she was missing.

I checked her appointment calendar. Nothing. I went outside and checked the yard. Not there either. I went outside, checked up the street to see if she might be out there, shuffling along with her cane, looking for Gwen. When I didn't spot her on foot I got in the car and drove as complete a circuit around the neighborhood as I could to see if maybe she'd gone too far and gotten tired.

Or worse. I tried not to think about the long list of worse things, but that got harder to do the longer I went without spotting her.

Convinced I'd exceeded her possible radius, I returned home, sat down on the sofa, and called the hospital. All of her doctors work within the same local health care system, and she always goes to the same hospital for emergencies. I think I said something to the effect of, "Sorry if this is a bit weird, but my mom is kind of elderly and I can't find her. She visits your clinics for regular appointments and I'm worried something has happened. Can you tell me if she's there?"

They connected me to the ER, who did indeed tell me she was there. And nothing else. By the time I got there, someone had processed her paperwork enough that my phone rang in my pocket, with a nurse telling me my mother had called an ambulance and was safely at the ER.

To which I replied, "I know. I'm standing right next to her. Could you tell me what's going on?"

Kind of hilarious, but not the best Monday afternoon ever.

The thing about telephony is that it's nearly unrecognizable today compared to what I remember from my early childhood. Growing up in the 1980s, I remember that we only had to dial the last four or five digits for numbers within our prefix. That changed a few years later, either just prior to or maybe during a change in area code that gave 314 to the St. Louis area and introduced 573 to much of the rest of Missouri.

Mass popularity of mobile phones didn't really take off until after I moved away, but I remember someone in my extended family having one of those bulky car phones that came in a nylon tote. The most exciting thing prior to that in my life had been the cordless phone, which allowed me to get up to shenanigans more effectively while coordinating various teenage social plans.

Watching a few episodes of The Kids in the Hall a couple of months ago, I was struck by how many of the scenarios revolved around scenarios that involved land-line phones. A quick listen to various radio hits from the pre-2000s has the same effect. I twenty years ago we waited (or deliberately did not wait) by the telephone. Now I'm in the one where Lady Gaga would prefer you did not try and reach her while she's in a noisy dance club.

Oh, and my phone is also a camera, it has a wee keyboard, and I can check my e-mail with it. All of which, incidentally, is the reason I'll actually carry a telephone and have given up the land line entirely. New technologies allow me to communicate with people using my preferred distance medium: text.

(That's text as in writing, not text as in text messaging. Though given that I have a wee keyboard, texting is handy, especially in situations where speaking aloud either isn't an option or isn't necessary.)

So yeah. A handy technology that lets me get in touch with people at great distance whenever I need to, is small enough to fit in my pocket, helps me find my mom when she disappears, and comes bundled with other things that make me willing to actually engage it. Oh, and is a gateway drug to telling people younger than me about how things happened back in my day, when we used to ride dinosaurs to school. Or something.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com

Comments

[contrarywise]

Yay for living in the future, and for your mum not taking chances with her health! Still, I'm sure you could've done without the worry. I hope you're both feeling better soon.

[bodlon]

Thanks. But yeah, I'm definitely glad I had a way of finding her. Having done without a phone at various times in my life, I can imagine all too easily what it could have been like without.

[stasia]

I'm glad you found your mom and glad someone else remembers riding dinosaurs to school.

Man, I miss my Tric. *grin*

Stasia

[bodlon]

I had one of the little raptors. We bought it off a family friend with the insurance settlement from a bad crash I was in (an unlit bronto hit my friend's steg, there were lacerations, blah, blah, blah).

Bumpy ride, little bit tricky, but good overall.

And yeah. It's good to know where mom is!