Nostalgia #1: iPhone, Your Phone, My Phone

I’ve been spending a lot of time with my folks these few days and nostalgia brewed over conversations I had with them. Before I knew it, I was rummaging through old photos, laughing over the silly antics that we used to pull off and found this picture of me!

I dug a little more into the albums and realised that my siblings had a thing with phones too! Perhaps it’s the buttons that oh-so-satisfy us when we hammer them incessantly [It's the same with lift buttons and anything that we can press.]. Perhaps it’s the idea of talking to someone on the other end of the line, who somehow hears us and responds to what we say, even though we can’t see them [Does this guy live in the phone?! But how?!]. Perhaps we feel like an adult just because we can use the phone [Monkeys see parents do it, hence monkeys do.]. Whatever it is, the phone provided us with endless entertainment. I remember asking my classmate, Aishah, for her phone number so we could call each other when I was in lower primary. The act of exchanging numbers alone made me feel so grown-up. Then when the teachers at school handed out an address book that listed emergency numbers and other helplines – I took matters into my own hand and called someone up on Tinkle Friend (no I wasn’t a distressed and neglected kid, I was just a chatterbox who really liked to press buttons on the phone) and chatted with the volunteers more frequently than I’d like to admit. I think I used to talk about what I did at school –  poor volunteers – they probably didn’t have the heart to tell me to bugger off…

These days, kids are equally, if not more, preoccupied with phones, but for other reasons. The iPhone is often glued to children’s hands, and they swipe with such flair that I wonder if they’ve had it since the day they were born. Photo-taking, photo-editing, playing games and videos, activities that would seem alien to even our parents are not the least bit foreign to the the modern-day child. Heck, there’s even video calling now, and no, children these days don’t wonder if person X is living in the phone, because they know that they don’t.

Whether it’s the iPhone, your phone or my phone, we all had a thing with phones. Don’t believe it? Go through your old photos and see if you can find one of you in dangerously close proximity to a phone. Post it up on your blog, tell your story and comment on this post with the link to your blog entry. Remember to link back to this post Nostalgia #1: iPhone, Your Phone, My Phone so your readers can take us on their trips down the memory lane too!

 

 

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