galoshes blog

Communication Breakdown

By Gavin Murphy

Me talking to my grandchildren.

“Well, that was before we had cellphones…”

Blank stares. 

“But, how did you talk to your friends? How did you know where they were? What they were doing? 

“Well, we had a telephone at home…”

“One phone for everybody in the house?”

“Some rich kids maybe had their own phone in their bedroom. And there were pay phones around.”

“Pay phones?”

“A phone that was outside on a street corner or in a bar or restaurant…”

“But how did they work?”

“You put coins in…”

“Coins?”

“Yes – coins… Money”

“Not a credit card?”

“No credit card.”

“Oh, debit card! They’re more like money.”

“No! Coins! You had to carry coins with you and after a few minutes the operator would come on and tell you to put in more coins.”

“Operator?”

“Yes, usually a female, would come on the line.”

“The line? Wait, you mean a real person?”

“Yes! A real person!”

Confused expressions. “Could you text?” 

“No! No texting! We didn’t have I-pads either.”

Brows knitting.

“In fact, when I was in college, we didn’t have laptops even. We wrote papers on typewriters.”

“I think I saw one of those at the junk store grandma always wants to go to…”

“After college, when I got a job, they were replacing the manual machines with electric typewriters.”

“Oh, I saw one of those in a movie. It had a metal ball with letters on it that spun around real fast. It typed right on a piece of paper. Was that like a PDF?”

“Well, no, if you wanted a copy you used carbon paper…

“Carbon paper?”

“Or the copy machine…”

“Copy machine?”

“You went to the machine and you lifted up the flap and you put the page face down on the glass top and there was a kind of camera inside. You closed the flap and pressed a button and the copy would pop out, but if you were making a bunch of copies the machine would usually get jammed or it would run out of paper and…”

Eyes glazing over as skeptical expressions deepen.

“So that’s how you got a PDF?”

“There were no PDFs.”

Looks of incredulity.

“There were no PDFs, no Adobe even. No Apple! No Microsoft even! No ChatGPT. No apps!”

“But how…”

“It was like the Middle Ages, before Gutenberg!”

“What?”

“It was before the Internet! There was no Wi-Fi! There was no – never mind!”

Expressions of pity for the raving old man.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

-The prison captain in “Cool Hand Luke”

Posted February 2025