Thursday, October 11, 2012

I'm at a payphone...

A colleague was having a conversation with her 7th graders about the song "Payphone" by Maroon 5.  (My first question is why the hell does Adam Levine need to use a payphone in the first place?  He has tons of money and surely has a cell phone. Does not compute).  Anyway, being that today's 7th graders were born in the year 2000 and beyond (chew on that for a minute, will you? Yeah, they have no claim to the 90's.  They were born after the new millennium.  Crazy), they did not live in a world where cell phones were not ubiquitous.  
So, my colleague asks her students, "Do you guys even know what a payphone is?" And one answers, "Yeah, those are those phones that you put minutes on ahead of time."  My colleague was first like: /headdesk.  And then answered, "No.  That is a pre-paid cell phone.  A payphone is a phone that you have to put change in before you can make a phone call."  Another student speaks up, "Oh! The phone in a box!?"  Yes.  The phone in the box.
So then I started thinking about pay phones.  I remembered how much of a pain in the ass they were to use...especially if you didn't have change.  But there's something nostalgic about them.  They played a big part of my pre-teen and early teen years.  It kind of makes me sad that my students will never know what its like to have to fish change out of the fountain at the mall just to call for a ride home.  Or, when you were really desperate because you'd spent your last penny on something stupid you really didn't need from Spencers or Hot Topic, calling home collect and when asked to state your name, you quickly rambled, "I'matthemallcomepickmeup" so that your parents/older sibling could deny the charges.  Did anyone else do this?