out in my headstraights by appointment only

My 14 year old niece asked me for my Blackberry PIN last week.

I honestly didn’t know if she was being serious or just pulling my leg. But no, she was the proud owner of a spanking new Blackberry and wanted to BBM me. Which of course got my brain going on a ‘when I was your age’ rant.

When I was her age I got given an AED 25 Etisalat phone booth card. These things were like gold – the AED 25 had to last me the ENTIRE FUCKING SCHOOL YEAR. They were thin flimsy plastic cards, that a lot of people would strangely collect as a hobby – my best friend amassed closed to 400 of them before he finally snapped out of it.

You’d have to walk up to Etisalat phone booths with the orange phones, and stick the card in to get a dial tone. Optionally, you’d have to jiggle the card around if it wasn’t working, or just keep hanging up and trying again until you could dial properly. Then the magic would happen – as you rambled on the line, the phone would keep track of how much money you had left on your card, and would then punch a tiny hole into your card (I think it was in intervals of 5) to count down how much money was left on your card. So you’d get a hole punched at AED 20, 15, 10, and finally at 5. That was the brilliant morse-code system that was in place, and for most of us IT WORKED.

But then of course the mobile revolution busted through and now both parent and child come equipped with the latest cell phones. Heck, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before someone invents a maternity belt that translates your baby’s heartbeat into tweets!