Facebook: Delete Home Phones

I have an idea of how of how the Facebook, Twitting, and Texting generation can save money: they should take out their telephone. They don’t need anything other than their iPhones. When I call my sons’ home, either they can’t find the telephone so they can’t answer it, or they’re too busy with their over committed lives to take a moment to say, “Hello.” I assume they realize that if there father or I were ill, I would leave a message.

It is obvious they feel they have more control of their time if they email me news or post it on Facebook. For the first time in my life, I can truly understand the joke about senior parents telling their kids over the phone that they were getting divorced. (The joke predates iPhones and caller ID.) Their kids immediately dropped everything to come and fix the problem. When they left, their old Papa said to their aged Mama, “Okay, I thought of how to get them here this time. Next month, you think of a way.”

This morning I called one son’s home. No one answered. Then I went to my computer to do some work. Within the span of half an hour, I received one email from their home and there were two postings from two different residents in the house on Facebook. I know because I checked to make sure my children were alive and well – after all, they were out of their house before nine on a Saturday morning, which is unusual for them.

Maybe next time they call and ask what is doing, Hubby and I should give one-word answers and make sure we get off the phone in less than 30 seconds – the time it takes to post on Facebook or write an email. Perhaps once they realize we won’t take up that much time of their very busy lives, they will actually use the phone to communicate with us again.

Years ago, teachers learned that the attention span for a great lesson was seven minutes – the average time between commercials on television. Now senior citizens must learn that our conversations must be limited to no more than 30 seconds if we want to actually hear the younger generation’s voices. I guess it is a problem in the classroom also. Getting kids to write quality work with more than 150 characters is probably a challenge also – especially if spelling counts.

I wanted to end this with a texting short hand comment related to the blog, but all I know is r u :) 2day i hope u r and I’m not even sure that I “spelled” that right.