When I was in elementary school, most of what I knew about teenage life came from watching television. Since I'm the oldest child in my family and I was one of the oldest kids in my neighborhood, the teenagers I looked up to weren't right down the hall or even right next door; they were on TV. I imagined what my teenage life would be like by watching people like Zack Morris of "Saved by the Bell," Clarissa of "Clarissa Explains It All," and D.J. Tanner of "Full House." One thing all these characters had in common - apart from representing the finest of 90s fashions, which is now available at a Goodwill near you - was that their telephones were an important part of their lives. While Zack opted for the jumbo sized quintessential early 90s cell phone, Clarissa made her calls from a clear phone. An entire episode's plotline centered around D.J.'s campaign for her own phone line, and by the end of it, Danny Tanner gets one installed for her. Needless to say, 90s sitcoms convinced me as a young child that having a phone was a teenage right of passage.
A couple years later, on my 12th birthday, I got a purple phone for my room. I was ecstatic. I imagined my friends and I on the phone for hours every night debating what clothes to wear to school the next day or talking about the major events of the day. Even though it started off like that, it didn't last longer than a week because my mom and my friends' moms were quickly annoyed that we were tying up the phone lines. I guess they didn't get the memo from Danny Tanner that all the cool parents give their kids their own phone lines.
A couple of years after that, when I was actually a teenager, I realized that having a phone as a teenage right of passage was representative of a bygone era. No one talked to their friends on the phone after school anymore; instead we chatted the night away on AIM. After a while, I never picked up my home phone anymore because I knew no one would actually call me on that number. And if they wanted to call me, they would call me on my cell phone. And by "call me on my cell phone," I really mean, text me on my cell phone. So I went through my teenage years without ever really talking on the phone - unless it was a quick call to my mom or my dad, but those never lasted longer than a minute.
I didn't really see not talking on the phone as a problem until my first internship the summer after my first year. As part of my duties, I answered the phone about 15 times a day. I was expected to talk to customers who had questions, really important people who were calling to talk to the owners of the company and the designers of the brands the company I worked for carried. After every single phone call, my boss would get up from her desk, walk the 20 steps down the hallway to my desk and enumerate everything I did wrong. "You can't use jargon like awesome and totally," she would tell me. "You don't have to say ma'am; we don't want them to know you're only 19," she would correct. When I wasn't improving quickly enough, she took me to Chipotle and we sat in the restaurant for two hours while we practiced phone conversations aloud. When that wasn't enough, she made me answer the phone as "Kate," the more professional version of myself.
When I still wasn't answering the phones the way she wanted me to, she asked me jokingly if I had ever talked on the phone before. I responded seriously and told her I rarely, if ever, make phone calls. That's when it clicked for her - most people my age never developed a professional way of talking on the phone because we never really talk on the phone. Luckily, by the end of my 11-week internship, I mastered the telephone - a technology which has been around my whole life, but one which seemed daunting because I never really had to use it before then.
After my internship experience with the telephone, I was more willing to call companies and people and ask for information than I was in the past, where I relied mostly on email. But I never realized the power of calling someone until my search for housing began this year. Naturally, when my future roommates and I began looking for housing, we started an email thread to communicate. But tone can easily get misconstrued through email and after I sent a harsh email which wasn't meant to be harsh, I realized talking about important matters face to face or on the phone actually allowed us to come to a decision we were all happy with more quickly. I also realized that calling realty companies proves to be a faster method of gathering information than browsing their website for an hour or emailing them and waiting for a response. By calling their offices directly, I was able to get all my questions answered and they were able to point me to other properties I hadn't even considered.
Although I'm the first to admit I am an email addict, my recent experiences have shown me that Zack, D.J. and Clarissa were right after all - the telephone is a pretty cool piece of technology. Maybe it's just that it's no longer a teenage rite of passage, but a rite of passage for those entering the professional world.
Katie's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at k.urban@cavalierdaily.com.
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