Dean Poling
The Valdosta Daily Times
VALDOSTA —
Having left my cell phone at home one day, I reached for the office phone to call my wife ... only to realize I didn’t know her number.
I have called her number probably something akin to a million times, but ask me right now what her number is, I could probably get it within a digit or two but still get a wrong number.
You may find yourself in similar straits with your cell phone. You don’t have to know the number because you can push one button to automatically call someone or you punch up a contact list then select a name. Hit the name and your phone makes your call.
This is all very 21st century and downright wonderful if you have your cell phone. Remember back when people had to carry around all of those phone numbers in their heads?
Remember when some numbers were so ingrained, you could dial them out of muscle memory. Phone numbers you knew so well, from calling them so much, that you sometimes actually had to dial the number if someone asked you for the number. You may not have been able to say it, but your fingers could do the walking and dial it.
Isn’t it funny how I still say “dial” in a touch-tone world that hasn’t known dial-rotary phones in decades? Yet, most folks know exactly what “dial” means. Isn’t it even funnier that some kids refer to dialing a phone without ever having dialed a phone? Of course, most folks just say some tense of “call.”
Still, without my cell phone that one day, I couldn’t dial or call anybody. I was about as clueless as a 2-year-old regarding what should be a well-known phone number.
I could imagine the voice of an old elementary-school teacher asking, Do you know how to call home? If my wife’s phone is home then my reply would have had to have been, No. Just like a 2-year-old.
Technology makes our lives easier, but maybe we have let it make our lives too easy. Studies abound that e-mails and scanning the Internet have shortened our attention spans for reading longer magazine articles and books. Once voracious readers admit having difficulty getting through a book since the advent of the Internet.
Now, we no longer have to remember phone numbers. Current generations have no reason to remember phone numbers ever, at all.
Having phones that remember phone numbers may be a convenience, but they also ensure that we must always have them. Or else we are lost even to those whom we hold most dear.
Dean Poling is The Valdosta Daily Times assistant managing editor.
