When I was a teenager, we didn’t have individual phones. We had a solitary wall-mounted phone in the kitchen. Somehow, we managed to get along with one phone.

There were drawbacks – we shared a party line, dialing a call took forever if most of the numbers were nine, and long-distance calls cost a fortune. That old-school technology, though, offered some advantages.

We had to memorize phone numbers which kept us on our toes. I still remember our home number – 775-7993. There was no need to dial an area code because they weren’t required.

Nobody knew how many times you called or if you’d even called them. That subterfuge came in handy with boys I liked.

I could call their house to see if they were home. If someone answered the phone, I could quickly hang up and they had no idea who called. Now, there’s no hiding – you can’t hang up fast enough to hide the fact that you called someone.

With cameras on every building, corner and house, it’s rare to do anything in secret.

Almost every intersection has a camera filming around the clock. Stores and malls are nothing but cameras in every nook and corner.

On social media, if a house is broken into or suspicious activity occurs, most of the neighbors will post feed from their home monitoring system on social media.

It’s not like in the old days when spy equipment was only affordable to James Bond types. Today’s home security systems are less than a hundred bucks, so everyone has them.

Somebody’s always watching.

Retailers know all your buying habits.

Forget trying to hide those Oreo cookies. The store already knows if you like double-stuffed Oreos or if you’re a traditionalist, preferring plain Oreos in the blue and white bag.

Credit card companies know everything about you, and I mean everything. They know where you buy gas for your vehicle and the size and brand of shoes you like.

“Based on your browsing history…” is a frequent phrase the bots send me. Once I was reading a murder-mystery book, and I Googled a phrase about blood types. For months, I got all kinds of information about blood testing kits.

All from one search to understand what I was reading.

The Amazon people know more about me than my husband. They know the kinds of toys I like to buy for my grandchildren, the kinds of vitamins I take, and they know what brand of home perm kit I prefer.

Same goes for the brick-and-mortar stores. No more secretly throwing a few extra candy bars in the grocery basket, taking them out of the bag in the parking lot and eating them on the way home.

Even if you throw away the wrapper to deny accountability, the grocery store computer knows you’re a sucker for Hershey bars in the check-out lane.

I often think about the things we did as teens that would get us busted these days. More than once, I was in a car with friends late at night, all of us carrying rolls of toilet paper, and laughing as we rolled somebody’s front yard.

At slumber parties, we made crank phone calls – “Is your refrigerator running?” and calling radio stations, begging the all-night disc jockey to play our favorite song.

Now we’d be busted for criminal mischief and reach a recording instead of a real person. And every call would be recorded.

Technology is great, but there are days I long for the anonymity of days gone by.

Maybe I’ll spring that line about the refrigerator on my grandchildren and see if they get the joke. It’s not the same as making an anonymous prank call, but a laugh is still a laugh.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald