
Rolly
/ Moderator

Nov 20, 2004, 5:45 PM
Post #10 of 11
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It’s Saturday night I’ve been sitting here watching mindless TV while ironing my Sunday shirt. The iron’s cord kept getting in the way, and I began to wonder why we don’t have cordless irons. When I was a boy I used to visit my cousins who lived on a farm. My aunt had a couple of cordless irons that seemed to work just fine. She heated them on the stove and used one until it started too cool off, then she swapped it with the one on the stove, etc. Then along came “progress” and gave us an iron with a cord to get tangled in my shirts. That was called a better way. Just like what they did to the telephone. When I was a boy we had a voice-actuated phone with call forwarding that didn’t cost extra. All I needed to do was pick up the receiver, turn a little crank on the side, and the phone would speak to me “Operator,” and I would speak the name of the person I wanted, and it would happen. Sometimes I might say “Ida Mae Jones, please,” and the phone would tell me “Ida Mae is over at Mary Beth Johnson’s playing bridge. Do you want me to ring over there?” Then I could decide if I wished to use the free call forwarding service. The phone could even be used to find some one and deliver a message. Ida Mae told the phone “Find my good-for-nothing trifling husband and tell him to get his sorry ass home before I come after him with a shotgun!” That way Ida Mae could shoot his sorry ass in the privacy of their home without making a public spectacle. (And everybody in town knew he needed killing -- that's just the way it was in Texas in those days.) But we don’t have a user-friendly phone system like that any more. “Progress” has messed it up. Ain’t that right, Bubba? Rolly
(This post was edited by Rolly on Nov 20, 2004, 9:17 PM)
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