From fi rst phones to cell phones to phonies
OTIS KIDWELL BURGER
In the late 1920s, there was a wall telephone
downstairs in my grandmother’s hallway next
to the kitchen. You spun a dial and a voice
said: “Number, please,” and you got a whole lot
of other voices on a party line.
A couple of years later, my parents built a house on
the Staten Island heights. It had a whole new kind of telephone
shaped rather like a plant with a strong stem and
a sort of blossom on the top to speak into and a little appendage
like a wilted leaf hanging on one side to listen to.
I was terrifi ed by the disembodied voice.
By the ’40s, we were living in another house with a more
modern telephone and we teenagers often spent time listening
to each other. Back then in the ’40s and ’50s, there
were lots of public telephones. You could lock yourself in
a booth and chat away as long as your change held out.
But technology has long swept all of these away.
Then, fast-forward, and we had people walking on the
street talking apparently to themselves. They did not have
Tourette’s. They had cell phones. Now, even toddlers
seem to have cell phones. However, some of us still have
landline phones with a long cord and receiver that you can
hold to your ear.
I have become more or less used to the telephone —
though not to smart phones or computers — as a means
of electronic communication, but not to how, nowadays,
all phones can be used as a sort of pry bar to separate
telephone holders from their bank accounts.
First there were Nigerians. They had gold and diamonds.
If you just paid the taxes, they would get it into
this country and share it with you.
Next came the announcement that I won $2 million
from playing the lottery, and if I’d just send $800 to pay
The writer, who
is now 95, as a young artist.
taxes, I would receive a cashier’s check. I have never
played the lottery. Eventually, it was dropped to $1 million,
then $500, and then vanished. Then they resurfaced
with a $400 check. If I cashed it and sent them $200 of
those dollars, I would receive several hundred thousand.
So I fi gured if I cashed this, it would somehow give them
access to my bank account, so I asked my bank and they
wouldn’t tell me that but if I tried to cash that check, they
said they would close my bank account, so I tore up the
check.
Then there were the ones who said I’d done something
terrible and the cops were on the way. I never did fi nd
out what I had to do to get rid of them. Then there were
some fairly plausible ones who said they had shipments of
fi ne wine and if I paid them money, they would keep the
wine in a cellar and sell it when the market went up and
send me the money. They even sent me pretty believable
brochures describing this process.
Throughout all this there have been people calling me
at all hours to ask me if I have pain in my back, arms,
legs. I say, No. I did get into conversation with one who
called four times one day and they said they were from
MediCare and wanted my MediCare card. So I said I was
legally blind, which I am, and so they said they wanted
the last four numbers of my Social Security and I said I
couldn’t remember. That did not discourage them completely,
as I had several calls after that. But one day my
fi nger slipped and I cut off the phone call. I have not heard
from them since. I am waiting breathlessly for the next
round of entertainment.
I have since heard about other lonely widows who have
been entertained by charming men who, after several intimate
phone calls, have said that, if the charming widow
sent them money for their carfare or plane fare, they could
meet.
And now I have also heard that the lonely elderly can
have robots, including robot puppies, come and entertain
them. This is just humanitarian aid, not a fi nancial swindle,
but I do wonder, at 95, what lonely old age in this
world is coming to.
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