Space For All Our Stuff
My family took a trip to the beach this weekend over a particularly long Memorial Day break (thanks for the extra day off, school!). While at the hotel, my 9-y/o and her friends delighted and entertained themselves with a bit of the hotel’s legacy technology—the landline phones.
We have been going to this same hotel with these same friends for years and I can’t tell you why only now they have discovered the fun to be had with phones. But first, they had to be taught how to use them. Yes, go ahead and read that again.
At first they wanted to know how to call each other from one room to the other, so one of the parents read the instructions and casually said, “Just dial the room number.” He or she might as well have uttered that sentence in Martian for all that they understood it.
What followed was a comical 10-minute class on how to use a landline phone:
“You pick it up and then push the number of the room you are calling.”
“There is no 211 button, so do I just push 2 then 1 then 1?”
“When I pick it up all I hear is enh-enh-enh?”
“No, no–go next door and tell her to hang up the phone. Hang up–put it back down. It won’t ring if she is holding it.”
[Parent dials successfully] “How did you do that mom? I did the same thing on my try and it didn’t work!”
As I said, after 10 minutes they seemed to have learned it well enough to then make a series of room-to-room calls, pretending to order pizza. For some reason all pizza orders were placed and received by people who sounded like Nintendo’s Mario and Luigi.
I share this not only because it was amusing, but because it also spoke to assumptions we have about “intuitive” technology and the bias that “everyone knows how” to use legacy technologies. And that there are a whole raft of legacy technologies still in use that people need to know how to operate, even if they don’t interact with them on a daily basis. This last phenomenon I see regularly every season on The Amazing Race, where one team is dealt a setback because they are in a country where automatic transmission cars are not the norm and they have no idea how to drive manual. [Aside. Me to the TV every season—“You knew you were going on the Race, why didn’t you learn to drive stick before you left?”]
In the case of the landline phones, the kids involved have all grown up in mobile-only households. I could have passed my daughter my mobile and she could have called anyone easily, as well as done a whole range of other activities—bought something on Amazon, watched Netflix, etc.
The lesson I have come away with this weekend is that I need to pay better attention to skills gaps, and work harder to make my child backward-compatible with legacy tech still being used.
Image: Karolina Kabat, Flickr.
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