This is Part 2 of 3 of "Don't talk to your phone (or the trees). Doing so makes you dumber than your phone (and the trees)."

I remember the days of lifting the black handset off the black rotary dialer to hear the operator say, “Nommer asseblief!”

You might wonder what she said, so I’ll tell you. She asked me which party I wanted her to connect me to. (In those days, talking to a person you could not see was as good as a party. Hence the terminology.)

Some of you probably wonder what a rotary dialer is, so I’ll tell you. It’s the black box that we used to contact a human operator who would then connect us to the person, I mean party, with whom we wished to communicate.

There are two other interesting facts about that communication process. Our only privacy concern was whether the operator was bored enough to bother listening in on our conversation. The other fact has become more important today. Back then we were smarter than the black box.