Sign, sign/Everywhere a sign/Blockin’ out the scenery/Breakin’ my mind… — Five Man Electrical Band
My old cell phone needed to be upgraded to one that could receive 5G — whatever that is — coverage, and to add to my tiny woes, my former provider, to whom I had been shoveling cash since 2012, merged with another provider. After many text message alerts and e-mail warnings, I made arrangements to get a new cell phone. My new cell phone is performing as I expect, and for two months after I got it, my payment arrangements with my provider worked as smoothly as they had before. Until they didn’t.
Like many of us, I have accounts that I pay using credit cards linked to my bank accounts. And like some of the older ones among us, I still require that some accounts send me pieces of paper that show my monthly debt and delineates the amount I need to tender to continue my relationship with the company. But the services that I pay for by cell phone require me to navigate a menu using the keypad on the phone.
When I was a 15-year-old living with my mother in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, I was employed as a page in the closed stacks of the University of Pittsburgh library. I was making the hefty wage of $1 per hour and I used my funds to buy my clothing and books for school and gifts for my girlfriend. I had a room to myself on the second floor of our apartment and decided to put a phone in that room. I don’t know how I was able to accomplish that; a minor cannot make a contract with Ma Bell these days, but I had my own phone. And in the early 60s, telephones were mostly rotary, though “touch tones” were making inroads. The touch tone phones had four rows of three pads; the numerals 1 through 9 were on the first three rows, and on the fourth row was a “star” sign (asterisk) a “0,” and a “number” sign. (The keypad on our cell phones has that same configuration, though mine has a “plus” sign beneath the “0.”) Sometime in the 20th century, the number sign became the “pound sign.” And the social media age turned the pound sign into a “hashtag.” I giggle when I see social media posts that have those tags, a long series of hashtags and undecipherable statements. So it was with some amusement that when I phoned to make arrangements to, once again, pay my bill by phone, I got to speak to a customer service representative who walked me through the process of reinstating my online privileges by pressing the “number sign.”
“Press the number sign.” Is this not the 21st Century? I have come through the number sign and lived through the pound sign and laugh at the hashtag, and someone is taking me back to 1965? If the customer had been born in 1990, when the number sign had become the pound sign, how would that customer service representative explain her designation? “Please look at the bottom right corner of your phone’s keypad and press that button.” Despite my initial irritation with having to regress to the “number,” I accepted and complied, and after my account was reactivated, laughed at the many wonderful sounds and signs that strangers use to communicate with each other. Perhaps the customer service rep missed my initial irritation but as the Five Man Electrical Band sang in 1970, “Do this, don’t do that/Can’t you read the sign?”
cjon3acd@att.net