Phones I have used

Over the years phones have been a big part of my life. I worked for AT&T for 30 years, and another Phone Company for an additional 8 years. During those 38 years I was on the phone averaging about 6 hours a day. I think that may be why I don't like talking on the phone for very long at a stretch today. Texting, I can handle, but talking, not so much. The first phone I can remember was in Norman OK. We lived in town and the phone weighed about 9 pounds.

Later on, when we lived in the company house, we had a desk phone that had a rotary dial. It still weighed a lot, but it was beige, I think. We may have gotten a wall mounted phone with a curly cord before we moved to Victoria.

When we were in Victoria, I remember both a wall phone and a desk phone with rotary dials. Before I went into the Navy, I may have had a phone of my own in my bedroom.

While I was in the Navy, I didn't have much need of a phone. There were pay phones on the pier where we were tied up and we used them to call home.

Once I got discharged, I really started to know more about how the phones actually worked. I started working with NY Tel in Queens. This is when I developed my dislike of talking on the phone. That's all I did for 8 hours each day. It's also where I actively started loosing my ability to hear.

Joyce and I had a princess phone with the rotary dial in the handset. This was in our first apartment in Levittown. We ended up moving from there to Queens. I really don't remember our phone situation in that apartment. We eventually moved out to Hicksville to our own home and we had at least 2 or 3 phones in that house. One in the kitchen, and one in the living room area, and one upstairs in our bedroom. When we moved to Texas, that's when the phones became MOBILE. When Joyce started working at Jupiter Lanes, I started to go to the Goodyear store across the street. The owner of the store John was a horse player. He had an account with an off track betting site and he would have me print out the racing forms for each track that he wanted to place bets at. John had more money than God, and paid me to do this each Saturday. I got experience on his computer, and that helped me get Joyce set up on her first computer at Jupiter. At some point in the mid to late eighties, John bought a “mobile” phone for his car.

It was one of those cluncky bag phones that mounted on the center hump in his car. That was before front wheel drive became the norm. He didn't have the time or inclination to read the instructions, so he paid me to do it. I learned how it worked, got it setup in his car and I had gotten the bug. I eventually Got my own cell phone when they became more reasonable. John probably paid several hundred dollars for his bag phone, and a hundred or so per month in access and usage fees. My first cell phone was a Motorola Razor Flip phone.

You could text on it, but each key had 3 or 4 letters assigned to that key. You also had to exit the calling mode and enter texting mode. Example. The number 2 button had A-B-C assigned to it. To send text letter C, you had to hit the 2 button 3 times. You can see this made texting rather difficult. The next Phone I had was a Blackberry.

It was much easier texting as it had a physical keyboard on the bottom half Of the screen. You could also access the internet if you had a data plan. The next one I remember was a Nokia,

and it had a physical keyboard, with half of the keyboard on the left, and half on the right with the screen in between. I got my first Android phone shortly after Apple introduced the iPhone. I never liked iPhone because you had to pay for each app you wanted to use. Android apps were free. I liked that a lot. (I'm a cheap bastard). I'm not sure what model it was, but I'm pretty sure it was a Samsung. I have stayed with Samsung except one phone that was offered as part of the renewal of our data plan. I don't even remember the make of the phone, because I didn't keep it long. Right now I'm writing this post on my latest Samsung s22+. It belonged to Kelly, she needed to get a different phone that would take 2 sim cards. When she is overseas, she usually gets a sim card from the local cellular company and she has her US sim card from GoogleFI, I think.