You get a ride to the airport. You find out your flight has been delayed for two hours. What did you do before we had mobile phones? Call someone on a payphone by long distance? Maybe. You either used a prepaid calling card or you used your credit card. If you didn't have these, I guess you got change or called collect? If the person on the other side wasn't there, they might get the message or they might not (and fuck answering machines too, btw, also glad they're gone). It actually wasn't quite as stupid, because you'd usually use an ad hoc communications system: call someone you could trust to push the message for you from a landline. How could anyone get in touch with you if you were away from your home phone? Pager, maybe. If not, then they'd call the airport (or wherever you were) and either page you over the public address system or otherwise hope the message got through.

You get to where you're supposed to be but your ride isn't there. How do you get in touch with them? If they have a pager, then a numeric code you'll hope they understand. Of course, they can't actually get back to you without having to jump through hoops mentioned above. Otherwise, wait patiently. Like an animal. What do you do with your time? Read a book, if you brought one. Otherwise, NOTHING. You do nothing. No wonder so many more people smoked back then. You wait as long as you can and then you work on alternatives: bus, taxi. Of course you'll get to where you're going and they aren't home and the cycle of stupidity continues. All of this nonsense has been done away with by the mobile phone and GOOD RIDDANCE.

Your parents got rid of you by flying you off to the relatives. Awesome. One of the things they hand you as they shove you out the door is a prepaid calling card. It's a piece of plastic-coated paper promising something ridiculous like 500 minutes. They get you this so you can call home and not run up your aunt's long distance bill. There are so many problems here and I hated every single one of them…

Is it easy to use? Oh, hell no! Call this 1-800 number. Input this 32-digit code printed by the worst printer in the world. Then wait for it to tell you that it's not the right code. Do it a second time! Now you can finally dial the number you're trying to reach. You can already guess that after all that trouble, that they're not home! That's not enough, though. You can lose these cards. The slightest moisture causes the code to blur. Do you actually get 500 minutes? Of course not, because lying to consumers is just legal, apparently. Not that it ever mattered, because you'd lose or destroy the card first or otherwise let it lapse before you used all of it… what a great invention. Oh, and they always had to the nerve to ask if you wanted to add funds to this awful piece of shit with a credit card.

Even a legit credit card-based calling card sucks. You still have to key in a 1,000 digits to make a call… and it was usually more expensive than the prepaid options. At least the ink didn't blur…

What a piece of shit these were. It's a one-way means to transmit a single phone number. That's just pathetic. A huge step up over nothing, but still not great. They had these radio pagers that could transmit a voice message with about the clarity you'd expect from a subway PA system. There were also alpha-numeric options, but either way, the mobile phone killed these and I'm glad.

Covered in filth from top to bottom, offering excellent call quality on par with a child's walkie-talkie set, built to take a grenade blast, but somehow two of the solid-steel keys are broken. What a great thing these were, right? At one point they cost $0.25, which made sense because you might have a quarter. Then it went up to $0.35 for local calls briefly, which was inconvenient because who the fuck carries all this change around with them? And then they went to $0.50 right around the time that no one used payphones anymore. I like to imagine that the four payphones in the country that the phone company forgot to remove are now priced $4.44 for maximum inconvenience…

How about a separate device in which you store your calendar and contacts? Doesn't that sound great? Oh, it gets better. First off, it's huge. It has a terrible monochrome “touch”screen. If you want any response at all, you have to jam it with a separate and easy-to-lose stylus. It's about 100 times the size/weight of a single piece of paper and not as useful. Want to move data to it? Oh you know, how about through this proprietary serial cable. It has a calculator, but by the time you've found it and opened it, you could have done the math by hand. Battery life? It's pathetic. And it's like $300+. So now you're obligated to carry this thing around with you because otherwise, you've just wasted your money! Oh, let me see about that, I'll look it up! Let's just stand here for three solid minutes while I fiddle with this thing for the few moments I can before the batteries die…

I don't mind wireless charging though. That's OK.

Navigating was terrible in the past. You glanced at a map, guessed where you were going, and hoped you ended up there. You didn't know where you were, you didn't know what lane to be in, you didn't know you were terribly off-course, and then you were in San Pedro. Again. My TomTom was a great improvement in my life. It was easy to use and did what it promised, which is surprising for any product. I do remember that it couldn't pronounce Los Angeles and said it “Los Angle-Hees.” One had the voice of Homer Simpson, which was briefly amusing. Unfortunately, if anything changed or you went somewhere with new development, it either didn't know the way or assumed you were lost and driving in a field. Constant updates are what make GPS worthwhile and so we all use our phones now. However, this thing saved me so much fuel/time I grant it reprieve from sucking a dick.

It's too bad there aren't many options for phones with a physical keyboard. Only Blackberry seems to have one. It's hard to make a decent protective case for something that slides apart and it's hard to make something by Blackberry cool anymore. I'd sacrifice screen space for a keyboard, but since I'm the only one who would, looks like that feature's never coming back. It helps that on-screen keyboards are much easier to use now and it can pretty well guess what you're trying to say well before you say it, but I still miss this…

It's kinda shit, isn't it? This is where Apple gets a point from me. Only one. Their cable is superior.