Of phones and men.....

I remember well the first time we had a landline phone at home in Quezon City....after waiting for 10 years for our application for a phone line to be approved, we finally got ours in the early 70's. i was at home the day the dial-type phone was installed. right after the pldt lineman left i excitedly tried the phone and was so ecstatic that finally, we are wired!!! it didn't matter that we had an "old witch" for a "party line", the important thing was we had a phone...at last, whenever somobody asks us what our phone number was, we could give an answer.

i was so excited that sometimes, whenever i answer a call from anybody wanting to be my phone pal, i'd say yes and we became pals for a while. that phone line was very well-used. it was during the time when my brothers and i were in our teens and sometimes i'd go to sleep with my elder brother using the phone and i'd wake up in the morning with him still on the phone doing "telebabad"! one very exciting use of the landline phone then was receiving calls from relatives overseas. whenever my eldest brother called from Japan, we'd crowd around the phone and impatiently wait for our turn to talk to him and ask him to buy us "imported" things! hehehehehe.

fast forward to the mid-90's ....other landline phone providers besides pldt entered the scene and i remembered it took only a day for our newly-established laboratory to have 2 phone lines!...a few weeks after that, we also got 2 lines from pldt via their "zero backlog program".

a few years thereafter came the mobile phones. at first, it was only the rich who can afford to have bulky mobile phones complete with monstrous rechargeable batteries ....as the years went by, the mobile phones became smaller and smaller (and more affordable)...until the present...when almost anybody between 10 and 60 years old have their own cell phone!

my very first mobile phone was a company-issued black nokia standard phone. it was about double the size of my present phone and it didn't have texting capabilities. when texting became available, i bought my own Ericsson phone (take note: it wasn't Sony-Ericsson yet.!). as the years went by and technology improved, i changed phones either by buying them myself or as gifts (can you name the different brands & models in the photo? i can't! hehehehehe).

i've changed phones at least a dozen times ....and each time it happens....i still feel as excited as i was when we had our first phone in the 70's.