Stories of a millennial

In 80 and 90s the telephone were considered to be luxuries. If someone has a telephone in their house they automatically were considered wealthy. They would automatically considered more respectable in the society. I remember in our society complex we had only two families who had the telephones in their house. These were the line line phone. Phones which were attached to a unit. If you want to speak with someone then you would either have to stand or sit near the unit. Looking at today they definitely were inconvenient. Back then they were prestigious.

While growing up I had a fascination towards the landline phones. Mainly because my uncle had a landline phone and we did not have it. Then I used to go to my uncle's house I would sit by the telephone. It was my favourite thing in his house. He open used to say that I visit his house to see the telephone and not to meet him.

When I was 6 years old a letter received at our house. The Postman who delivered the letter handed over the letter to my mother saying that congratulations very soon you will receive your telephone. I was over the moon. Finally we are going to have our own telephone in our house. Our home was going to be the third home in the complex who would have the telephone.

Approximately 2 weeks later a man came from the telephone company with the telephone unit and installed it. He said that there will be some formalities to be completed and once those formalities are completed the telephone would start operating. We had immediately completed those formalities. We were eagerly waiting for our telephone line to be operating. After every few minutes be would pick up the receiver and check if the telephone line is now operational. It took almost a week for our telephone to get operational.

After that the crowd started pouring at our house. People from our complex would come to our house only to see the telephone unit. Someone would say that my child really love telephone and that is why we wanted to visit to show him the telephone. Children, adult, and elderly would come to our home to first see the telephone and later to make the phone calls. At that time phone calls were free of cost. So we allowed the people in our society to use our telephone to make the phone calls.

Later the calling increased exponentially. People would ring our doorbell at 7 o'clock in the morning saying that they want to make a phone call. Someone would come at 11:00 in the night to make the phone call. Some or the other person would always be there in our house to make the phone call. At 1 we started feeling that our phone is not used by us but the rest of the society. We were thinking how to make this stop. We could not find any way to make it stop.

My mother hospitality made it even worse. She would offer beverages and snacks to everyone who would come to use our phone. It was tiresome. Still there was no way to make people stop coming to our house. My parents would never say no to anyone. I would get angry because our house was no longer our house and always someone would be at our house to make the phone call. People would be sitting in our living room waiting to make the phone call.

It was becoming very inconvenient. But then a miracle happened. The Telephone Company had accepted the application of all people who had applied for the landline phones. Due to the bulk approval people started receiving their telephone units and subsequently their phone lines became operational. The footfall in our house started reducing. Now the living room was not full of people waiting in the queue to make the phone call. Now there were times when the phone line was not busy. Our home was our again. Our phone was our for the very first time.

When I tell this stories to youngsters they feel as if they story comes from a fantasy book. They cannot imagine a world where there were limited means to make phone call. They cannot believe that landlines word a luxury. However let me remind teach and every word that has been mentioned in the story is true. We still have a lot of photos in our old photo album where you can see that how excited we were when we saw the telephone. We had pictures where we are sitting next to the telephone as if it was our family member. The telephone indeed was our family member.

These are some of the memories that I cherish even today. These memories are wealthy of sharing with the world. Even today I remember our first telephone unit and our phone number. But if you ask me what was my first mobile number I may not remember it. That is how important our telephone was back then.