How did we ever manage our lives without mobile phones?

[goldstone]

How did we organise our personal lives? If you were not at home to get telephone messages from friends/family how did you ever arrange anything? How did you get people together for a night out? Presumably everything had to be organised in advance as the chances of finding people at home for last minute stuff must have been remote?

What about business schedules? All planned well in advance, I seem to recall. If you were stuck in traffic, flight was late, train was late ... then I guess you were just late for your appointment ... no way to let anyone know.

Unless of course you could find a working phone box! We must have spent an inordinate amount of time either in or looking for phone boxes?

I guess it wasn't that long ago that we DID manage our lives without them. But how??

 

[BRIGHT ON Q]

We never had the internet either,oh and we only had 3 channels on the TV.........................

 

[gullshark]

The same way we're managing now without a device we'll all have in 5 years time.

 

[Goldstone Rapper]

I'm starting to wonder how I ever managed without Google Maps on my phone. So useful!

 

[Lord Bracknell]

It used to be possible to live a life without even a land line at home.

Coin operated telephone boxes were everywhere. People wrote letters to each other. People knocked on front doors to find out whether their friends were in. People went to pubs to meet up (or not).

People met up at the shops as well, because we didn't have freezers and we went shopping every day (except Sundays and early closing days, obviously) and we didn't have cars either. And there weren't fast food places, so we always cooked at home. Even students. Launderettes were good places to meet friends.

Life was good.

 

[Austrian Gull]

Life generally was good until the moment BT raised the minimum charge for a call from a phone box from 10p to 20p. The bastards.

 

[skr80]

and there were queues of cars at train stations waiting to pick up relatives from the delayed trains (not that trains were delayed back then eh)

 

[Austrian Gull]

Oh and I've just remembered the queue at the students' hall payphone to let Mater and Pater know I was still alive. It was a chuffin' nightmare!

Mobile phones do have some advantages in the end.

 

[BensGrandad]

I used to drive home from Islington to Epsom and always stopped off in a bus lay by in Wandsworth which had a phone box, pub and fish & chip shop next to it. The same could be said about a microwave the dinner was either left in the oven to keep warm or put on a saucepan of hot water with a lid over it.

 

[Dick Knights Mumm]

And if you were young your parents were clueless as to where you were and it was on trust what time you would be back.

 

[bhaexpress]

We never had the internet either,oh and we only had 3 channels on the TV.........................

Two for some of us and one for maybe one or two ....

 

[Austrian Gull]

One advantage is that people generally made an arrangement and turned up on time.

No need for a phone call at the last minute from someone saying they willl be 15 minutes late.

 

[strings]

I am glad that I am too young to be forced to phoned a girls landline having got her number on a night out... imagine if one of her parents answers :shockhorror:

 

[Lord Bracknell]

I am glad that I am too young to be forced to phoned a girls landline having got her number on a night out... imagine if one of her parents answers :shockhorror:

She would never have given you her number. The best you could have hoped for is some information about where you might find her with her friends.

And that was high quality information.

 

[Dick Knights Mumm]

She would never have given you her number.

And if she did - who carried a pen and paper ?

 

[strings]

She would never have given you her number. The best you could have hoped for is some information about where you might find her with her friends.

And that was high quality information.

And if she did - who carried a pen and paper ?

Ruddy 'eck - these are things that I never even considered! I, for one, am glad that things can be sorted with the simple exchanging of numbers these days (although I am not so convinced about looking people up on facebook!).

 

[Herne Hill Seagull]

Make arrangements in advance and stick to them, as once was commonplace. I don't own one of those bloody things and it hasn't affected my social life in the slightest.

The problem is that those bloody things encourage the belief that nothing need be set up first, it can just be arranged 'on the hoof'. Then when everybody gets there they end up sitting in a pub with mates but texting or talking to people who are not there on their mobiles.

 

[goldstone]

I absolutely hated speaking to girlfriends on the landline phone at my parents house. Everyone listening to your conversations. No privacy.

 

[Barrow Boy]

Back in 1972 my girlfriends parents didn't have a phone but very friendly next door neighbours who did. If I wanted to speak to her I had to phone the neighbour and they'd pop next door and get her!

 

[Lush]

People did a lot of waiting around for friends to turn up. Churchill Square used to be full of people standing around, thinking 'I'll give them another five minutes, then I'm GOING HOME!'