Eh, he’s not a bad guy, just a total dumbass.
He has a very limited idea of the fact that other people do things differently than he or his family does. We’re still friends but I would never date him again (he asked a few days ago…)/hijack
I have made this obervation before. My step-mother will still do this. I’ll be down in a minute. I am on the phone and it’s LONG DISTANCE. If I pointed it out to her she would realize that it’s ridiculous but old habits die hard.
When I first went away to college in the early 80’s, there was a trick that we would do when I wanted to call home. I would make a collect call and my parents would refuse the charges and then call me back because dialing direct was much less expensive than a collect call. That way I didn’t have to pay for the expensive long distance call.
Yep. Long distance, especially here at the edge of civilisation, was a very big deal last century. A long distance call had priority because of expense and relative rarity. Even now, I tend to snap a bit to attention when a long distance call comes in. Almost as if it’s a VIP thing. And I’m careful, oh so careful, to get all those numbers punched in correctly when I’m making the call.
I remember back in the 1980s, saying to a branch or head office, “This is a long distance call from Auckland” would get you very efficient service at the other end. These days, it’s just too commonplace.
My parents were still on a party line when I was born. My mom went into labor at night and my brother needed someone there, so my dad picked up the phone and called my uncle (who was on the same line) and said nothing but, “Ready to switch beds?”.
Now, being a close-knit farming community, that could have started some scandal…
I’ve noticed a lot of elderly people will shout into the receiver when it’s long distance, when those calls’ clarity is generally little different to local calls these days.
The satellite lag is annoying though.
Depends. Calling India is still exorbitantly expensive, you still have to shout, and the call is not crystal-clear.
In the nineties a lot of my family in India didn’t have phones in their house. So you would do it like this. You’d call the neighbor who had a phone, tell them who you were, then tell them to get your cousin or whomever. You’d say you were calling back in 10 minutes.
Having been on the other end of the call, too (receiving calls from the States), you’d then get something decent on to go outside (10.5 hour difference meant mostly the calls came early in the morning) then rush over to the neighbor’s house and chat with them and have tea while you waited for the call to come.
The phone would ring and the conversation would take place, with plenty of shouting and echo-echo-echo. And they would inevitably ask “So when are you coming?”
Nowadays everyone has cell phones over there too. But I don’t. Last time I called India for only 20 minutes it was ridiculously expensive, so I do it on this special calling card program my mom told me about.
I still remember even in college being told not to call long-distance too much. My parents would call me once a week and that was it.
I think in part at least that most people have phones in their homes today (in the US, anyway), so why the heck are they phoning from your place? A brief urgent call (Hi, Mom, I got here safely. Everything ok with you?) is one thing, but getting on the line and shooting the bull for more than a minute or two? I was brought up to believe that having an exclusive conversation with one person while in the presence of another is rude. And a phone call certainly qualifies unless it’s on speaker phone. So on top of costing you money, your visitor is now ignoring you in order to spend time with someone else. Why the heck are they visiting you in that case? Don’t you actually owe it to your host to, you know, not act as if they’re not in the room?
Just today I listened to this radio show from 1941 that comically gives an idea of how complicated it was to place long distance calls back in the 1940s.
The show is Vic and Sade, a brilliant fifteen-minute comedy that ran daily for about 14 years. It takes most people a few tries to “get” Vic and Sade, but it’s worth the effort. Brilliantly written and acted, even if it doesn’t seem so at first glance. If you want to listen to more, here’s a site with more than 300 episodes, all that remains of the thousands that were produced.
FYI, the actor who played 14-year-old Rush Gook was Bill Idelson, who later played Herman Glimscher, Sally’s boring boyfriend, on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
As Ice Wolf says, Long Distance calls (Toll Calls, as they are still known in NZ) were A Big Thing.
Local calls in NZ were free (at least until I left in 2000), but until the mid-90s, calling anywhere more than 100kms away was expensive, and phone calls to anywhere like the UK, USA, or even Australia were the sort of thing you had to specially set aside money for in the weekly budget.
In the mid-90s, Telecom introduced $5 and $10 weekends, where you could call anywhere in NZ ($5) and The Civilised World ($10) and talk for as long as you wanted. Suddenly, talking to the relatives in Kaitaia or Invercargill wasn’t an expensive treat, it was a realistic proposition, and ringing your cousin in Sydney or your Aunt in London wasn’t going to cost
Even as late as 1999, I recall being able to get faster service at the other end by telling them I was on a Toll Call from Christchurch.
Also, when I was in the UK in 1998 with my Dad, my Mum and Brother would call us every third day or so, because for some odd reason it was 1 pound a minute to ring NZ from the UK, but $10 for as long as you wanted for NZ to call the UK.
I can still remember the people who answered the phone calling out “Mr. Enfield, a telephone call for you from New Zealand!” with the same tone they’d use for announcing that Her Majesty The Queen was on the phone and required my presence at Buckingham Palace forthwith for Knighthood and bestowage of a Hereditary Peerage.
Sorry, I seem to have got a little distracted there with my dreams of glory, power, wealth, and influence… 
Anyway, the point was that a phone call from New Zealand may as well have been made from the dark side of the Moon, with all the attendant images of Vast Expense, Technical Difficulties, and Marvels Of Modern Technology such a feat would conjure up.
Of course, now I can pick up my cellphone and call people in Dar-Es-Salaam, Ishapore, Belize, Ulan Bator, or Vladivostok, and it will not only cost me practically nothing, they’ll sound as if they’re sitting in the next room- as opposed to sounding like they’re standing in their pyjamas wondering who the fuck is calling them at 3:20am in the morning, waking up the entire household in the process.
In Australia, it’s generally cheap to make Long Distance Calls, especially to other parts of Australia. For some reason it’s cheaper to make a call to Perth- 6,000kms away- than it is to call NZ, which is only 2,000kms away, but that’s a different thread entirely…
Are there still analogue phones in NZ? Even when I left, it wasn’t unheard of for people to still have the old rotary-style phones (which are very cool), and there were still people using those really old “Portable Phones” that you had to carry over your shoulder (like the one in The Big Lebowski).
And no, we didn’t tie onions to our belt (as was the fashion at the time). Why do you ask?
Definitely different. My nan always rushes me off the phone when I call saying “it’s your money, I don’t want to keep you on too long”. Yeah, nana, better hang up now before the next minute kicks in and I get charged an additional seven cents.
It’s very hard to shake off both the financial fears and therefore economic restraint AND the recollection that, for the majority of one’s life, long distance calls *were * very expensive. For that matter, my parents both lived through times where even seven cents *was * something you’d be careful about. I think your sarcasm is unwarranted.
Children of the Great Depression (i.e. my Dad) have a completely different way of looking at waste and extravagance. Heaven help ya if you leave food on your plate or buy a third pair of shoes because you felt like it. Dress shoes and play shoes. What more does a person really need?
I get that on the few times I call one of my grandmothers. (There are several reasons I rarely call her, none of which I want to go into here.) I think the last time I called was on Mother’s Day last year, using my cell phone which, of course, has unlimited minutes on the weekend including high-traffic and usage days like Mother’s Day. I still couldn’t get her to talk for more than a couple minutes. And she was using the money thing as a reason, though I’m not sure if that was just an excuse or she really was thinking about potential cost. I’ve pretty much given up trying to get across the idea of “Grandma, it’s a cell phone. I pay $40 bucks a month for it for several hours of available time during the week and unlimited time during the weekends and it all goes to waste (not as true these days as I’ve switched to a rollover plan, but she doesn’t have to know that) if I don’t use them. You’re not costing me a thing.”
In The Caine Mutiny (the novel not the movie), set during WWII, at one point Willie makes a long distance call from Pearl Harbor to the East Coast and the charge is eleven dollars and change–indeed a fortune considering what a dollar was worth in those days.
After my uncle and his wife visited her about two years ago, my grandmother received a higher-than-usual phone bill. (It was only up by about $10, but she’s on a fixed income and counts every penny.). She later found out that my aunt, despite having a working cell phone, had used her phone to make long distance calls.
My aunt’s a real bitch. :mad:
In my father’s case (who would be 80 this year were he still living), once long distance rates started coming down in the 1980s, he and his siblings (scattered over several states) called each other about once a month routinely. As others have previously noted, though, before that, making a long distance phone call was A Big Deal.
Here’s an example from a TV show: In the “Mayberry RFD” series, Emmett (the fix-it guy) made a comment on having to repair a *fan. He says, “I’m gonna have to write to the manufacturer to find what kind of fuse it uses.” Not call them directly, send them a letter. That’s just a TV show, but I think the same trepidation would have existed IRL.
*Something else that seems kinda strange, the “fix-it” shop. Nowadays if your toaster or radio breaks, you just trash it and buy another one.
A couple more examples of the differences between children of the Great Depression, their descendants (the boomers), and their descendants (today’s kids). Each generation is shocked (shocked, I tell you!) at the wastefulness and extravagance of the subsequent one, not realizing that their own efforts to spare their children their own childhood hardships have in part created that very wastefulness and extravagance.
Then there’s the fact that prices and manufacturing standards and techniques have changed significantly. Good heavens, it’s changed in the past 15 years, for that matter! In 1990, when I bought small electronics, I was looking for a quality product that would last a long time and could be repaired if necessary, and I expected to pay $250-500 or more for it. Now I can buy a $35 VCR at K-mart, and if it breaks, I chuck it. It’s a whole different way of looking at such purchases, and that’s within the lifetime of pretty much everyone on this board. Now try to imagine that you had grown up with YOUR parents worrying how they were going to put food on the table every night, saving the cotton from prescription bottles and rubber bands and tinfoil for re-use. It was a terrifying time; those who had jobs didn’t know if they could keep them, and those who didn’t… They would have been astounded at what people today consider even a minimalist lifestyle (in the US, of course). It was simply not a disposable society at the time. You mended and fixed and re-used, because you didn’t have any other option.
So have a little tolerance about stuff like this. They faced hardships that (please IPU!) you and I will never know, and at a time in their lives when their attitudes toward many things were being formed and fixed. And there is absolutely no guarantee that it couldn’t happen again. Those who could adapt to the lifestyles of the children of the Great Depression would survive a lot better than those who couldn’t!
My granddad lived in the same house for 64 years. His phone number began as “Villagename 123”. As in “hello operator, can you put me through to Villagename 123,” and wait while the plugs were shifted manually from exchange to exchange. Then it became “Exchange name 456 123”, which you still had to ask for, but it was done by relay. Then came STD (Standardised Trunk Dialing), which was automated relay, and made the number 023 456 123. Then a couple of STD rationalisations and digitisation and now the number, which my mother inherited when he died, is 01234 456 123. From three digits to 11.
Bless you, Oy! you nailed it. All of us who struggled through the very scary Depression were marked and never really got over it. As some comedian remarked, “If you’ve been poor, no matter how rich you get, you still go through the house turning off the lights.”
Some of those marks are, oddly, not bad, though. My mom, who at 86 lives on a pretty darned narrow income - something well under $20K/year, once mentioned that that she rather enjoyed coming up with clever contrivances to fulfil the function of something considerably more expensive. And my father (82), who is FAR more comfortably situated (not rich, but not hurting, and his wife has a good income too), gets enormous pleasure from finding and buying super bargains at various grocery stores (he does all the cooking and shopping). I, at 50, probably dribble through more money in a month or two than either of them does in a year. And yet I am horrified at what the girls old enough to be my daughters (if I had any kids) find perfectly reasonable to spend on clothing and shoes! My parents are far better equipped to deal with hard times than I am, and as for the generation after me? They’re apparently having quarter-life crises over bumping up against reality these days.
Of course, there are enormous differences between individuals within any given generation - for example, my older brother (54) has living on a shoestring down to a science, while our oldest brother (62) spends far more than I. But I agree with you, Klondike, I think living through the Depression at an age old enough to notice probably left its mark on almost everyone who wasn’t securely wealthy at the time. There are things you just don’t get over.
Which include very expensive long distance phone calls, to bring this back to the OP!