One subject that gets my dander up so badly I need a bottle of Head and Shoulders is the subject of modern so-called telephones. Including cell phones which, we all know, don't deserve the "tele" part.

Recently I talked to - or tried to - a couple of my grandkids on the so-called telephone. It wasn't much of a conversation, even as conversations with adolescents go. Between my mid-size cordless (as far down as I can go and see the numbers) and their little bitty cordless, it was mostly all of us (well, mostly me) saying "What?" I'm not hard of hearing and they're not hard of speaking (okay, one is 13 so he mumbles, but when told to speak up so Grandma can hear him, he does) but it seems the lines between these inconveniently sized phones can't handle their original, primary purpose in life anymore; that of transmitting sound. Clearly.

When I call one son, he has to go stand out on the porch or, occasionally, in the road, to conduct a conversation. Of course you know that means he has a cell phone the size of a matchbook and the litany of service problems that comes with them. When my daughter calls her husband from my house on hers, she goes to stand in the driveway. When I call her on hers, she has to leave the building she's in or hang her head out the truck window. Now I ask you, this is convenience? And the conversations they permit are sure not worth the obscene cost of one of their "plans".

"Can you hear me now?"
"Uh..let me get across the road."
"What did you say?"
"Uh..let me try standing on the car."
"Are you there?"
"I think I have 10 more minutes allowed on my...." buzzzzzzzzzzzz.
"Nice talking with you. Hello? (sigh)."

The only indoors places the things seem to work are in the aisles of any store or, I'm told, the seat in the movie theater .... excuse me, cinema plex .... directly behind you. Cell phones are suspected of causing many bad things, traffic accidents, sidewalk rage, and bringing home the wrong brand of string beans. So how did they get so popular? Who knows? They're handy for seniors living alone? Seniors can't see the buttons with 9, 1 and 1 on them. They're handy for kids to call home? Since when does a kid call home voluntarily? They're the right size for the cat to use when she learns to talk? Well..........

Fifty years ago (here comes the old geezer stuff) telephones were all the same size, nearly all black, and sat politely on a desk or counter or hung on a wall in a well-behaved manner exactly where you could always find them. There they were connected to lines that transmit sound by the most useful things ever devised for that purpose, plain old telephone cords. You didn't have to plug them into a socket or buy batteries for them; they were ready to use. Most wondrous of all, you could hear what someone was saying to you on them. Later, the telephones came in colors and the Princess phone was introduced for teenage girls, who comprised about 95% of all telephone users at any given time by then. Even the cords were colored and curled into spirals. They worked just as well.

If the new phones are progress, progress has gone on entirely too long. Even more than fifty years ago, you could get pretty much the same results with two orange juice cans and a long string. Let me tell you how.

Keep in mind that orange juice cans were not cardboard with zip-off tops and a plastic zipper-offer you need a pliers to budge in those days, they were made of real tin like other tin cans. For those of you who left school some time after I did, tin is a metal. And every kid in the world who had access to orange juice cans knew how wonderfully useful they were long before they grew up and used them for hair rollers in the 60's.

These useful little items were not without risks. But parents in those days just taught their kids to "Be careful or else!" instead of filing lawsuits against the makers of orange juice cans. Those cans weren't opened by unzipping, pulling ring tabs, or inserting into an electric gadget. They weren't even opened with can openers featuring little cutting wheels that you turned with a handy handle - the kind known as a little cutting wheel turner. A can opener was a metal thing four inches long or so, featuring a wicked pointed cutter at the end. These days they would be confiscated at airports. You stuck that cutter into the can top as close to the edge as you could and used your wrist muscles - you know, the ones made for keyboarding - to cut around the can top to almost your starting point. Then you laid it down and grasped the wickedly jagged edge of the can top to pull it up and off, hopefully without much loss of blood. In the case of orange juice cans, you were lucky to have a mother who actually cut off the whole top and removed it. If the edges left on the can weren't too dangerous, you could have it after she reconstituted the orange juice concentrate. (This was only done at home by mothers in those days.)

Then the fun part. You poked a hole in the bottom of your orange juice can with a ice pick (this is why ice picks existed) to thread the longest string you owned through, knotted it inside the can, and ran back outside to connect your can to a friend's can with the string. You and the friend backed away from each other with your cans, around corners, up trees, behind fences, as far as you could until the string was tight. Then you held the can to your mouth to talk into it or to your ear to hear. Could you hear your friend? Yes! As long as you were both outside.

Does that sound suspiciously like the requirement for cell phone conversations? Well, no. It's missing something. Nobody paid hundreds of dollars a month. And frozen orange juice concentrate was 10 cents a can. Granted, the population has increased a bit since then; kids don't play outside and adults tolerate levels of noise they never used to. I suppose there would be the problem of everybody getting tangled up in all those strings, causing sidewalk rage, traffic accidents and bringing home the wrong brand of string beans. Oh well, nothing's perfect.

Thanks for reading.

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