Shrinking Timelines

My twelve-year-old daughter asks me what it is like to use a manual dial telephone. How does it work?

I did not realise that she has never actually seen such a phone. A family we know still uses this sort of phone because they are worried about the waves radiating out of the cordless models, but my daughter hasn’t seen their phone when visiting.

So, I explain how a manual dial works.

She becomes all nostalgic, “It must have been so much fun to dial a phone, then hold the one receiver bit to your ear and the other to your mouth.”

Next she will be asking what it was like to crank up the phone… I realise that, for a twelve-year-old, timelines shrink to the moment right before they were born.