Dialed Down

The truth of the matter is, I owe my place in history as an innovative technology because of the ideas and inventions of Alexander Graham Bell. Bell was a Professor of Vocal Physiology at Boston University engaged in training teachers in the art of instructing the deaf how to speak and he experimented with the phonoautograph, which recorded the vibrations of speech. It was a simple device which used a stylus that traced lines on a smoked glass plate, leaving trace lines as a person spoke. This experience gave Bell the idea to work with spoken sound waves and electricity and wollah, the phone was invented around 1874.

So here I sit on a marble top end table in my owner's bedroom the means of her communications in and out of the real world. I am a simple device. I am made of hard black plastic, as is my earphone and vocal phone, which is connected to me by a black coiled wire. On my face, there is a round, rotary dialing device, sitting atop a round white field that has letters and numbers printed on it. When someone calls, the bell inside me rings loudly and keeps ringing until my owner picks me up. If my owner dials a number of a friend, or a relative, or a stranger, or a store, or a taxi, or whomever, my phone sends an electrical signal to the phone plastic rotary phone on the other end of my selected call line and rings and rings until they pick it up.

Of course, I do need to be made of hard black plastic and in fact, my kind, my tribe as it were, comes in many colors from red, to black, to pink, to blue and the color selected has to do with my owner's preference. I only have one ring tone; loud and obnoxious, no doubt to get the attention of the person the call is for. I am proud of the fact that my bell inside of me will ring so loud that my owner can hear me ring upstairs or downstairs and come a running to answer the call.

My phone experiences a lot of emotions. Love. Anger. Flirting. Sighs. Small talk. Smart talk. Dumb talk. But just talk. If my owner gets into a heated conversation with the person who has phoned them and does not want to continue talking with them, well then my owner just slams my receiver onto the phone. Those angry and out of control slams really shake me up, but because I am made of hard black plastic, I usually survive.

Sometimes someone far away is calling my number when my owner is in the shower. She hears the ringing, the constant, never stopping ringing, and then with a towel wrapped around her waist, exposing her breasts, she runs to the side table and picks me up. Her hair is still wet, dripping into my ear phone; her mouth is still wet dripping into my vocal phone, and, worst of all; her hands are covered in soapy hot water dripping all over my clean and dry radial dial. My owner only talks for a few moments, since she is half naked and dripping onto me and the marble table I am sitting on and then runs back to the shower without wiping me off. I sit covered in soapy water for an hour or so and then she finally comes to wipe me off. It probably was a good thing to do, I certainly felt cleaner after her wiping me down, because I probably had fingerprints all over me, dust or dirt in my radial dial and spit on my vocal phone part.

I am by no means a perfect phone or means of communications. If the wind is blowing outside, swaying the telephone poles and the wire strung between them, a lot of static will occur inside my phone. I can't help it. I have no mechanism inside of my inner workings that can deal with the static. Fortunately, the wind and the storms go away and the static stops.

Of course, if the wind is fierce, the phone lines might go down and no signal from me can go out or come in. I feel bad about this situation, on behalf of my owner, because no doubt without any phone service from me, she feels lonely and vulnerable. Just like I can't do anything about the static in my lines, I cannot do anything about her feeling lonely and vulnerable because she cannot call anyone when I am down and out.

I was just sitting on my marble tabletop next to my owner's bed one day when she got a call and, unbelievably, I could hear another set of voices on the line. I think I realized at that moment that my owner did not pay extra money for a private line but shared my line with other phone users. This bothered me a whole lot, but again, I could do nothing about it.

One day, a traumatic day to say the least, my owner called the phone company and inquired about getting another phone for her kitchen downstairs. She told them she wanted a wall phone with a long cord. Looking at myself and how I sat comfortably on the marble table next to her bed, I wondered how she would mount another black plastic phone like me on the wall. I was made to sit quietly on a tabletop, or counter, or on a TV or stereo cabinet and wondered how I could sit on a wall. There was no way.

After getting the information from the phone company my owner went out and purchased a "wall phone." Thankfully, she brought it upstairs when she got home and opened the box while she sat on the bed. I could see it quite clearly. It was red, red as an apple and it had a long phone attached to a hook at its top and a long red cord hanging down from the earphones. Under the phone, it had a radial dial, like mine, with numbers and letters to dial out with. It really was quite sleek but I am not sure it could do the job of communicating as well as I could. Of course, I was in for a rude awakening when my owner had a friend over and they were fixing lunch in the kitchen. My owner was upstairs sitting on the bed and looking into a small mirror to fix her hair. My phone rang and just as she picked up the receiver, she called down to the kitchen and had her friend pick up the red receiver on the red phone hanging on the wall. My owner and her friend, now with two phones operating, talked to their other friend who called and with laughing and talking and having a gay old time.

So now there is another me in the house hanging on the wall in the kitchen. She is just like me, except I am black hard plastic and she is red hard plastic. We do the same thing; provide communication for our owner to the outside world. We don't communicate with each other unless there are two people holding us at the same time and talking. We live a solitary life in this house, never going anywhere. We only learn about the outside world when our owner gets home.

We both wonder what the next invention of our kind will bring, when it will happen and if we will become obsolete.