Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for July 11, 2016

Marigold claims to be pretty darn old. Unicorns must have had dial up since, sometime before humans did I guess.

I remember the glory days of dial-up.

Yikes! Dial-up! I was so little when those were around, but I still remember. And that strange sound the Internet made when it was being connected.

Now I really want to see Little Filly Marigold.

I’ve still got my dial up modem somewhere. I think that’s where I’ll probably leave it.

Filly, a word that is associated with horses.

Poo! I can remember when dial-up referred to using one of these things.

Mom was super excited when she got a slimline.

Goddess, I remember Dialup and how it would take up the phone lines and getting 56k was an massive achievement. and there were no search engines, you could buy an book that was the internet phonebook..

I see.

And baseball teams located in Pennsylvania.

Heh. I remember when dial-up was THE thing to have, and the idea of something better was still virtually unheard of on the market.

We were DSL early adopters, but since we had a home business, we also had a bizarre phone system – three phone lines (copper in the ground!) with multiple extensions.Some extensions were rotary and some were touch tone.It was a great way to flummox the phone company techs.Most had never seen a rotary phone.

My mother-in-law kept her rotary phone until the phone company told her they were going to start charging her extra if she didn’t go digital. This was somewhere around 2000. When they first came out with touch-tone phones, there was a $1/month charge to be able to use one. Her tight little German soul wasn’t going to pay it.

When my husband decided to ditch his phone company hard wired landline , the phone company rep said, “But think of the advantages of leasing.”

I remember back when I had dial-up. One time my phone got wires crossed with another phone customer and they were blaming me. They started blaming me because they weren’t getting their calls (they had some kind of home business and the calls were going to my answering machine instead of their fax machine). They accused me of having an illegal phone line and yelling about calling the police and the phone company to file charges against me. One night I wanted to get on line to check my e-mail so I checkd the line to make sure it was clear but the wife was on the line talking to someone (it sounded like gossip, not business). I hung up and waited a half-hour before trying again and she was still on the line. another half-hour and she was still talking and I was starting to worry because I really wanted to check my e-mail, but I only had an hour or so before I needed to get to bed so I interupted the conversation to ask how much longer they were going to be talking. The wife was very upset with me, but she agreed to finish her call in another half-hour. I waited 45 minutes before checking the line again and guess what, after she finished her call she just left the phone off the hook so I couldn’t use it at all. The next morning the phone was still off the hook, so when I got to work I called the phone company because I was tired of waiting for them to call the phone company. AT&T came out that day to check my line and low and behold, the fault was in their phone line, not mine. I never heard anything from them after that, but I wonder if they blame me for the bill from the phone company for fixing their line.

But those old and painful wounds are healing…slowly…oh, so slowly!

It makes me a bit sad that young people today will never know what it was like to not always be online and having to let this weird box dial a phone number to connect to the internet, along with those glorious beeps and buzzes, or to have to go offline every time someone needs to use the phone.