A flip phone at 15 is unheard of; it’s something you just don’t hear of anymore.  

 There’s fifth graders who have the newest iPhone, not because they need it, which they don’t, but because it’s a status symbol.  

When I got on the bus in the third grade, I was astonished at what I saw, my friend had two phones, not one but two phones.  

I didn’t even know what a cell phone was because I was eight. At that time, we had a landline, a phone I wasn’t even allowed to touch without my parents. My parents had a phonebook which sat in our junk drawer, we had a TV which was 20-inches wide in the back. 

Back then I could actually go outside and read a book without having to know what time it was just that when it started getting dark it was probably dinnertime. That summer we got a TV that was at max 8 inches wide, we still had DVDs and a VHS player. After we got our new “flat-screen TV,” we got this thing called the internet.  

 And all I knew about the strange black box that hummed was that I shouldn’t touch this. I don’t know why we got all this “new technology” in the 2010’s though because internet has existed since the early ‘80s.  

When we first moved to our new house though, my dad and brother went under the entire house and ripped out all the phone connections that ran into the separate rooms. 

 My parents were both born in the early ’60s, and both fit the Boomer stereotype. I think that was a part of the reason we got this technology so late in the game. Both my parents’ passwords to everything are almost exactly the same because they can’t remember any of their passwords. And I’m the only person who can switch the TV from HDMI 1 to HDMI 2 and I’m practically a god when I do. Once I was woken up at 11:23 at night to help my dad get from YouTube to Prime Video, and our remotes have the buttons to automatically take you there. 

I think it was a good idea to wait a little longer to get such “advanced” technology though, nowadays I see three-year-olds in Walmart operating the IBM better than Dorothy Vaughan could. But it definitely gave me a better chance to develop mentally; in the seventh grade I could read at a senior’s reading level, which I was proud of to say the least. I think I had more of an imagination too; I could write whole stories in my head, and they’d be decent as opposed to this where I had a harder time starting than coming up with a plan which was fairly hard. I thought I had a fairly decent attention span too, in the ninth grade I could listen to my teachers talk forever. 

So, when my friend got on the bus with two phones his parents had bought him it was confusing. I didn’t even know what they were called much less what they could do. Nowadays, I do know and it’s amazing.