Are there letters and numbers flying through the air?

Disa touched Grandma’s number on her phone. She waited for the many signals she knew it took for Grandma to answer the old grey Bakelite rotary phone on the kitchen window sill. As the phone was lifted Disa could hear an echoing sound in the background from the last signal came. Disa didn’t know anyone who had a phone like that, except for the novelty ringtone on their mobile. A miracle the old phone still worked!

Grandma answered as she always did with her full eight number phone number, one number at a time. ‘5, 8, 7… 2, 0…’ she rattled off. At the start, phone numbers had only had 5 digits, but when the Stockholm and its vicinity were assigned a single common dialling code, eight numbers were needed. Grandma adapted and learned the whole long number by heart, but sometimes she forgot and just said the five digit one she had used for over 60 years. Answering by reading out her number was simply a remnant of the past it seemed to Disa. Back in the day, you needed to know what number you had been connected to, so you knew the switchboard operator had connected you to the right person.

They greeted each other, with Disa mentioning she was sitting in her office at their home as not disturb Michael sleeping.

‘Is the cord on your phone that long?’ Grandma asked.

‘No, I’m calling from my mobile phone, it doesn’t need a cord, you know.’

‘No cord you say. That’s right. The things they come up with. No cord.’

Disa pictured Grandma sitting by the kitchen table with her grey Bakelite phone with cord that didn’t reach farther than the kitchen counter. That’s where she had been stuck all these years when she used the phone.

‘The things they come up with,’ Grandma repeated herself. ‘If I hadn’t been sitting here talking to you on one of those cellular phones right now, I would never have believed you. It can’t possibly work. Not without a cord. It sounds like some kind of science fiction,’ she said, pronouncing science fiction in a Swedish accent. ‘Are you saying that our voices aren’t coming over a cord but going through the air?’

‘You can also send text messages these days,’ Disa said.

‘You meant texts as in letters? That there are letters and numbers flying through the air?’ Grandma sounded doubtful as always and Disa laughed. ‘How does that work?’ Grandma wondered.

‘They are like radio signals, in the same way your radio or TV works. You have an antenna on your radio that takes in signals from the air.’

‘Yes, I suppose your right, that is the same thing isn’t it? You’re right in that. Well, the things they come up with,’ Grandma concluded with admiration in her voice. ‘Can you imagine?’

Disa went to get the laptop from the hat shelf. ‘Grandma, we talked about computers earlier, remember?’

‘Yes, you talked about working by writing on one of those computer machines,’ Grandma said.

‘Exactly. And today I brought my own computer to show you what it looks like. I figured it’s easier to show than to describe it.’

‘Did you bring a computer machine? Here?’ Grandma looked incredulous.

‘Yes, I brought my small laptop to show you.’ Disa placed the laptop on the table and turned it on. ‘This is what it looks like. This is the keyboard, sort of like a typewriter,’ Disa said while the computer hummed to life. ‘And here’s the screen that shows you what you’re writing.’

‘Well, you don’t say. Can you imagine,’ Grandma said impressed. 

Disa paged through the pictures and showed the four buildings that symbolised the four elements with the atrium in the middle, the open plan office where she sat in the Water building and the many floors looking up the bright and airy atrium from the entrance.

‘Well, can you imagine. The things they come up with. Photographs inside a typing machine. Or whatever they are called, a computer machine it was,’ Grandma corrected herself.