In 1973 when my Dad died, technology had not exploded into what it is today. But if it had been around then, my Dad would have had it all; if he could have afforded it. They did have a color TV but it did not have a remote, but he controlled it by telling one of us 4 kids which channel he wanted it on.
We would try to change the channel if he fell asleep during a boxing match but we would always get caught. He’d wake up and yell, “I was watching that, put it back where it was.” We’d tell him he was asleep but he swore he was not and that he knew everything that had been going on.
With a remote control he’d really have had control over what we watched. No…. he had 4 remote controls and kept all of us busy changing the channels, so I guess nothing would have changed after all with the TV.
There was still only one phone in the house, one that hung on the wall in the kitchen, and that was strictly for him in the evenings and weekends so he could get calls from the filling station he owned.
If a friend had the audacity to call me during the times he was home we were allowed 5 minutes and then I had to hang up and they were not to call back or they would have been talking to him and he would not have been nice.
The day I got my first cell phone, I thought about my Dad and what he would have thought about it. If they had been around when I was in high school I shudder to think how much control he would have had over my life.
I know a man, who has a Granddaughter in college, and he has one of the new phones and she does too. He showed me that he could check on her at all times and know just where she was. He knew if she was in class like she was supposed to be or if not just where she was.
My dad thought he had to know where I was going and when I would be home. When I was dating and I was late I was in big trouble and would be grounded for at least 6 weeks and not be able to do anything but school activities. I am sure that Dad would have insisted on the phones that have the GPS so they can be tracked by another phone and he would have had one and I would have had to carry one when I went out.
Sometimes we would change our minds and not do what we had planned to do on a date and he was none the wiser for it. Well, maybe…….information traveled fast in the small town I grew up in and he usually knew what I had been up to before I got home.
If we had owned the phones with GPS on them he would not have been waiting in the living room the night I was late getting in, he would have been in his car tracking me down and dragging me home with him when he found us.
You didn’t need GPS in our small town because each couple had their own place where they liked to park and he could have asked any of the kids on the street where I was and they could have told him. Not that we had much time between the end of the movie and my curfew, but if we had a few minutes that we could have alone they could have sent him straight to us.
Turning off the phone would not have been an option, because if he had checked to see where I was with his phone; my phone would have had to be on or else. If I had turned it off so he couldn’t track me I would have been in big trouble and grounded again. And if it had rung I would have had to answer it or he would have been in the car tracking me down.
I know that he just wanted to protect his first born daughter but sometimes I felt he went overboard, even back then. I shudder to think what my life as a teenager would have been like with the cell phones of today in my Dad’s hands. I know my Dad would have loved the technology of today and would have used it all to keep track of me and to keep me safe. To contact Sandy; [email protected]
