I got a new postpaid phone last April courtesy of my employer. This is not a reward or anything but it’s simply work-related. Like, if my boss needs me, I’m accessible. If the boss of another department needs me, I have no reason not to reply. The funny thing is, I’ve got an existing post-paid plan from another service provider and it’s more than enough for all my work-related obligations.

I was 10 when we had our first landline at home. It was a white push-button phone with royal blue accent. During those times, having a telephone was a luxury and some sort of a status symbol. My family was not affluent but my mother made sure that we got the best things that she could afford and having a phone was one of them.

That first phone with a 5-digit number (7-30-43) had a party-line and more often than not, the relationship with them was not cordial. When I turned 11, I had a brief telephone romance with a guy that was two and a half years older than me. My ever-protective father tapped a device wherein he could hear our conversation. Love affair ended before it even started. LOL!

Since Mama was a working mother, she made sure that she was always aware of what her two tweens were doing while she was away for work. The telephone was our main source of communication outside of home. It had a disadvantage, too because my parents, especially my father, expected us to tell them our whereabouts after school. The beauty of this set-up was, we were scared not to tell them about our after-school gimmicks because there was no reason not to let hem know. Ah, the children of yesteryears!

In college, I charged long distance calls to my parents. Every Sunday, Mama and I burned telephone lines by talking about anything under the sun for 60 minutes! My mother was a great listener and her voice was enough to assure me that everything would be okay in my college life. Later on, I used payphones to call my family in Bataan. My then boyfriend’s weekly telephone call during semestral breaks was something that I looked forward to.

Six years later, cellphones hit the market and there I was educating myself with my mother’s cellphone instead of getting a beauty rest for my college graduation! When I started working, I got my own cellphone and again, I found myself awake until early in the morning because I found it an amazing piece of technology! LOL!

A year later, you could buy a phone that was half the price of what it was a year earlier. As a result, more people were able to afford cellphones. As more and more cellphones were manufactured and sold, less and less real talk between two people happened. Like, instead of asking me how the day went, my then boyfriend would just send a template message.

Fast-forward to 2017: I have two phones but less real talk with the people that I love. Oh, how I miss my mother who would surely be eager and waiting for my every phone call.