Phones. Future.

It's so funny to think that there used to be a time, not all that long ago, when having a mobile phone was not common. In 1997 when pagers were huge, only one person i knew had a celly. It was big and bulky, barely fit in his pocket, but boy, he was so cool for having it. It was an overpriced "chick-magnet".

I am not a jealous but a practical person, so I always thought it was cool to have a phone but in reality using the pay phone was not all that bad. They were everywhere and unlike today they were a "convenience". I think now using a pay phone would be just the opposite, incredibly inconvenient. Pay phones were gross, dirty, and smelled bad but if you had a quarter you could easily call anyone locally, long distance was another story.

When you picked up the receiver, you pushed out the thought of who else has done god-knows-what to the same device as far out of your mind as possible. One time I saw a condom pulled over the thing. I remember someone telling me that when all pay phones had the ability to be called back, they were also personal offices for prostitutes.

The phone booths were also famous for graffiti. Almost every one had phone numbers, naughty drawings, and gang signs all over. I wonder how many people actually called one of those numbers and made a decent connection, not many I presume.

I got my first cell phone in 1999, it came with a free gift of Round Table Pizza coupons and Titanic VHS. Yes those were the days. VHS! Can you believe it?

I think I had 4 phones since then and I don't have an iPhone yet but it is on my list of things to buy in 2008. It's so amazing how a big, bulky, overpriced mobile phone was "so cool" in 1997 and now the iPhone is something out of the future...

...wait a minute, this is the future and as I heard in a Spongebob episode, "Everything is chrome in the future!"