Fun & Famous

Data for the mobile era

I am so old that I worked in the era when there was no internet. Well, it was somewhere (it was used as a military computer network that was later taken over by American universities), but when I, as a budding editor, had to prepare an interview with a famous person, you ordered a folder from the clipping service in The Hague. They collected everything that was written about person X, and if you needed it, a fax would come in so long that you could wallpaper your living room with it.

And there was no mobile phone yet. That indeed had a very different impact on life (I still had maps in my car that you used to plan your route), but dating also took on a whole different dimension. Because there were no probing messages or likes and comments on your Facebook, this was the real deal.

”Portable devices had not yet been invented either”

I never remember that I, brave as I was, decided to just call my object of desire JanJaap and suggest meeting up. That had to be done with a landline phone. Portable devices had not yet been invented. Thank goodness we had one in the living room and one in my parents“ bedroom where you had a bit more privacy. And a mirror. I would stand in front of it to practice looking cool and sounding cool. I would say his name and then mine, that sounded very much in control. Here we go. Dialing the number, looking cool, waiting for it to ring and… he picked up. Here we go. I could do this. ”Hi Britt, this is JanJaap.” I said that seriously. Completely wrong. No need to say that it never really worked out between us…

A few years later, I had (hooray, hooray, champagne) just really cool cordless phones in my little apartment (think of those fridges with antennas that Carrie always walked around with) with even a ‘voicemail system’. If a love called, you could easily miss his call. Because I was buying cigarettes or something. Because the mobile phone was still not a common consumer good. It was really a shame to miss his call, but with a bit of luck, he had left a sweet message on your voicemail. My current love (whom I was only stupidly in love with at the time) once left the sweetest message on the voicemail system. But if you listened to that message, it disappeared after three days. And I wanted to listen to it over and over again. So I devised a system where I always hung up just before the message was finished. Then it always stayed ‘new’ and I could keep repeating it.

”Kissing, but then back home and back to Tilburg”

The last example is perhaps the sweetest. I had just started studying in Tilburg and suddenly kissed a boy at a party of a high school friend with whom I had sat in class for years. I always found him nice and fun, but now that I was back from my student city and saw him again, my eyes seemed to open. He was so nice. Kissing, but then back home and back to Tilburg.

The Monday after Saturday (because kissing was for Saturdays) I went to do ‘something’ with some student friends. No idea what anymore, but I was home late. Through the common room (one with a tray with holes and overcrowded ashtrays) I trudged to the door of my student room. “There’s something at your door,” said a bored housemate who was lounging on that sagging couch flipping through channels. And there it was. A bunch of roses and a lift sign saying Tilburg. So my kissing candidate had hitched a ride from Rotterdam to Tilburg to come see me.

Life may have become a lot easier with the mobile phone, but romance is another story.