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“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”

Stewart Brand

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My wife and I have decided to end the life of our home telephone, which is something we recently discussed and surprisingly agreed to.

For those who knew that I worked for New England Telephone decades ago in Vermont, it probably comes as a shock. It’s not that we can’t afford the low monthly cost of our OOMA phone system but rather the fact that why pay for both of our cell phones and then another phone for our home. If either the electricity or cable service gets cut we lose our home telephone and yet our cell phones keep on working.

It sounds like such a simple decision to make and yet I have withdrawal symptoms thinking about disconnecting an old friend.

It’s not that I haven’t seen changes in the electronics during the six-plus decades of my life. I grew up in the Connecticut River Valley in New Hampshire surrounded by hills and mountains. Today that might not make a huge difference but the first radios I listened to ran on vacuum tubes and only had the AM frequencies. During the day that type of radio didn’t receive many stations because there were only a few local stations. What was worse was that rock and roll music was just getting popular and if I wanted to listen to that, I had to wait until after dark in order for the signal strength to be strong enough for the radio to pull it in. That might have been a good thing because my father hated rock and roll music so he usually would be sound asleep.

Then the Space Race came along and a new invention hit the streets, the transistor radio. This tiny radio even had a new frequency called FM. It was indeed something grand because one could listen to radio stations from far away, which led to an electronic gadget one could connect to the automobile AM radio in order to listen to FM stations. Oh yes, I spent money on that but spent even more money to add an 8-Track player to my car. People were just amazed at all of the great electronic innovations hitting the streets when, bam, here comes the cassette player. Of course I had to buy the adapter to convert my 8-Track player into a cassette player. Life just couldn’t get any better than this.

But somehow life did become better because record players were challenged by reel-to-reel players and then another miracle came along called the CD player. What I find really humorous is that my wife and I only buy used vehicles and finally have two that have CD players. I gave up on cassette tapes years ago but my wife had them to play in the previous car she owned. She has CDs in her vehicle and I have none in mine. It’s not that I dislike music but the fact that I have some tone loss and some of the music I am listening to is lost on me. Nowadays, we can download in multiple ways, most of which I don’t understand.

I should mention GPS devices as well because they have become mainstream today. The technology is great because I recently purchased an Android phone, which is equal to the digital camera and palm recorder that I already have. But I fear that there is one drawback to all of these electronic devices, including computers, is that the government or even worse, criminals can hack into our lives and steal whatever they want. They can listen to what we say our on phones, they can track us with GPS and I have no doubt that they can do even more.

So I’ll end up by asking if you have mailed a package lately. Even if you didn’t ask for a tracking number, one is affixed to the package. Then the postal clerk has to type into the computer the address where the package is going.

Lane Hiltunen of Windham believes 1984 is 30 years stronger.