Yesterday I had somehow misplaced my mobile somewhere at home again. After 10 minutes of searching, I gave up and reached for the home phone – the landline. I don't even know what the number is – since we moved I had not bothered to remember it.
The receiver (even this feels like a foreign word) was slightly dusty and so were the buttons. It took me 3 tries to dial my own mobile number. Somehow, you have to press the buttons in succession fast enough?
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I remember fondly the times where the home phone was a significant part of my life. After school, friends would call each other on our home phones, punching in numbers from contacts scribbled on our school diaries – or in the case of good friends, we remembered those by heart. I think I still remember G's landline number. I didn't realise I did until I am writing this!
"Hello? May I speak to G please?"
"G ah, hold on ah."
The parent/sibling proceeds to yell for the friend.
After some time, our parents learnt to recognise the voices and announce who was on the other end of the line.
"In my era" home phones were mostly already cordless, or had the cordless receiver on top of the corded ones. I would take the cordless one, hurry off to my room and have extended conversations with a friend until our parents yelled at us for dinner. The receiver would grow hot against our cheeks and we would hear the dreaded low battery tone and that would be the signalled that we've rattled on for too long. Or if we walked too far away the connection would start to break off and we would shout "wait ah!" as we rushed closer to the landline phone while the person on the end constantly goes "har? cannot hear!"
G and I would call each other often, just to talk. I barely remember what we spoke about other than Hong Kong dramas, G's stories about camp and the people we secretly admired. Or at least G did. What did I talk about? I can't seem to remember at all. Perhaps I'd get to reconnecting with G some day and ask if she remembers.
Over the call we would twiddle with random objects, roll around on the bed or couch or floor, walk 30 rounds round the house when talking about something particularly exciting. But we were largely focused on what each other had to say.
I do miss phone calls. It's easy to facetime or skype now if one could spare the time. Yet, perhaps I'm the only one, but I think there is a strange sense of comfort and intimacy about sharing a conversation over the phone. There's something warm and charming about a call just to ask about your day and it's perfectly normal. There was something, in-the-moment about it.
In this age of multiple tabs(guilty as charged) , multitasking and distractions, do we still remember how to listen and hear?
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