Calling all Gen Xers!

During a recent lunch date, a friend of mine told me she hates it when people call her without texting her first. My first thought was, Ack! I just called you to invite you to this lunch! My second thought was, What is the point of having a phone if you don’t actually talk on it?

I had heard this complaint before, but usually it came from my Gen Z stepson, who is now 20. He hated making actual phone calls to actual people using actual words. Once, when he was 16, I overheard him calling a potential first boss. RING, RING. Hello? said the voice on the other end. “Hey dude,” said my stepson. A few minutes later, he ended the call with, “Later.” Gah! A lifetime of texting had exposed a huge void in telephone etiquette, and suddenly I was living under the same roof as Matthew McConaughey. Would you like the job? Alright, alright, alright! I blamed myself for not teaching him how to say “hello” and for not playing enough Lionel Richie songs while he was growing up.

But I didn’t expect an aversion to phone calls from my friend, who is in her 40s and a mom to three kids and who certainly must have received plenty of actual phone calls in her lifetime from actual people like teachers or grandparents or United Way fundraisers. My friend is a Gen Xer like me, but I’m a handful of years older, so it doesn’t always feel like we’re from the same generation. As a teen, she wore flannel and idolized Kurt Cobain; I wore neon and worshipped Madonna. "Pop" was something she drank, and "grunge" was something I cleaned off the bathtub to earn my allowance.

In 1985, I was torn between Madonna and "Xanadu."

As a teen in the ‘80s, the phone was easily the most important thing in my life, and I could not live one day without it. This was back in the day, of course, when phones were wired to the walls of your house, and they did nothing else except (gasp!) make calls to actual people.

The only kids who had their own phones in their room were either rich or had sneakily ordered an expensive Sports Illustrated subscription behind their parents’ backs to get the free NFL Football Phone. And having your own phone line? Well, that was something straight out of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But if you were at least lucky like me, your parents got a wall phone with a really long spiral cord that stretched all the way from the kitchen to your bedroom.

Juuuuust the right length.

Still, there were hurdles. I was the youngest in the house, so I’d have to wait until everyone else was done with the phone before I could use it. And there was no way to tell if someone was on the phone except by picking it up and listening for a few moments. God forbid they would overhear all the incredibly secret things I was telling my middle school friends! Critical things like: What are you wearing to school tomorrow? Or, did you see how cute (insert boy’s name here) looked today?

Then one day around 1983, my world changed forever: There was this new thing called Call Waiting. And just around the corner, in 1987, it changed again with Caller ID. For a 13-year-old girl, things couldn't get any better.

I spent huge chunks of the day talking to my best friend, Becky. In eighth grade, we called each other before school, after school and before going to sleep. Sometimes on the weekends, we'd sneak onto the phone at midnight. Pouring our souls into those phone receivers solidified our friendship in a way that can't be done through a text message. We're still best friends to this day.

1987: For all the yammering we did, I wish Becky (right) had talked me out of that outfit.

Becky, ironically, is the person who introduced me to text messaging. I was behind the wheel of my car as she and her husband were in the back seat, giggling for no reason. When I learned they were texting each other, my first thought was, Why are you typing a message to a person sitting 6 inches away? My second thought was, Ack! They're complaining about my driving!

Becky swore that wasn’t the case. Texting was fun!, she said. She prodded me to upgrade my phone so she could text me silly things, too. But I dragged my feet for years.

In 2011, I finally bought a Nokia 3310 phone that could send texts. By then, other people were flaunting their fancy iPhones. I was getting divorced, though, and couldn’t afford one. Plus, the Nokia worked just fine for texting, even though it went super slow. You had to use the number menu: Press “2” for the letters A, B, C. Press “3” for the letters D, E, F, and so on. It took a while to send a text message. So long, in fact, that it was just easier to call someone.

Terrible for texting, but fun to spin like a top.

I had outsmarted the smartphone! Or so I thought, until Aug. 23, 2011.

My young daughter and I were sitting in my parked car outside an office building near our house in Richmond, Virginia. It was a sunny, calm afternoon when I felt a WHOOSH of wind push the car. Just as soon as the breeze stopped, it happened again … and again … and again. The car was now rocking back and forth like a dinghy in an ocean squall. The cars next to me were bobbing like a seesaw — 5 feet up, then 5 feet down. Everywhere I looked, everything was moving up, down or sideways. None of it made sense. Like Obi-Wan Kenobi, I finally realized: That’s no breeze. It’s an EARTHQUAKE!

Later, I would learn it was a magnitude-5.8 quake, and its epicenter was just 50 miles from my parking lot. The quake shook stones off the Washington Monument and was felt by more people than any other earthquake in U.S. history. And I was in the thick of it.

I grabbed my Nokia phone and began texting my long-distance boyfriend, Adrian:

3-3 ………

2 ………

7-7-7 ………

8 ……….

4-4 ………

7-7 ………

Or, in other words,

E………

A………

R………

T………

H………

Q………

Argh! I gave up and called him in Texas. “Can you look at the TV and tell me if something major is happening?” I asked. He nonchalantly answered, “Oh, I think there’s an earthquake somewhere on the East Coast…” The importance of it suddenly dawned on him, and he continued, “Oh my goodness! Are you in that earthquake right now? Are you OK?” And then: “Why didn’t you text me?”

Sigh.

I bought an iPhone the very next day. Becky was half right: Texting — when not attempted during an earthquake — can be fun. But I will always prefer talking on the phone. On the phone, you don’t need emojis or “LOLs” to explain how you’re feeling; you can hear and respond to laughter, crying, anger or confusion. On the phone, there’s no autocorrect or misspellings, and you can curse all you want without it being changed to something "ducking" ridiculous. On the phone, you can’t ghost someone — eventually you’ll have to answer the tough questions or hang up. And oh, yes — hanging up — the best feature of the phone. In the old days, nothing packed more of an emotional punch than slamming down the receiver as hard as you could.

The telephone will always hold a special place in my heart. And speaking of hearts, this story wouldn’t be complete without mentioning another person from the 1980s who couldn’t live without the telephone: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Oh, the irony.

What would E.T. have done if his friends on the spaceship hadn’t answered his call from his makeshift forest telephone because it was “possible spam”? What if he had texted them to “Please rescue me,” but autocorrect changed it to “Please reschedule meetings,” as my iPhone just tried to do?

E.T. would have been stuck on Earth, the scary government agents would have nabbed him, and Elliott would have croaked! Poor E.T. would have fallen to (Reese’s) pieces.

Groan.

Somebody call the joke police! Just make sure you text them first.