We Have Joined the Cell Phone World

I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later and yesterday Jackie's granddaughter gave her a cell phone. Now we have four telephones in a three room plus bath and kitchenette apartment.
Two of them are the old-fashioned kind that connect to a line somewhere outside the building. Actually they aren't genuine old-fashioned phones because they have push buttons instead of a dial and they don't even come close to the kind that hung on the wall and had to be cranked before you could join the conversation on the party line and on rare occasions find no one there ahead of you so you could tell the operator, "Number 726, please." Then the operator would say, "Is that you, Dick? Did you hear that old Ed Jones slipped on the ice and broke his leg? I think it was his left one because it's not the same one he broke when he slipped on the ice last year."
The frightening thing is that young people have no idea what I'm talking about. I guess that doesn't matter because they'd be too busy sending text messages to be reading this.
Jackie's phone has all the up to date stuff like bluetooth. One of these days I'm going to read her instruction book to find out exactly what bluetooth is because in my day it would have meant calling the dentist for an emergency appointment provided no one else was using the party line at the time.
Now along with those two regular phones we have one that doesn't have a cord so Jackie can carry it around with her so she never has to hurry from one room to the next when somebody calls. This is very useful because I think it was just last July that she actually got to answer it although it turned out to be a wrong number as I recall.
Jackie says she will never use the new cell phone and she stuck to that way of thinking even after I showed her how I had entered next month's appointment with the doctor and did it in no more than half an hour. She mentioned something about having put it on the calendar in the kitchen in ten seconds.
She wasn't too impressed, either, when the granddaughter went out to her car for something and called on the cell phone to say, "I'm on my way back."
I said, "Are you in the building yet?"
"Yes, I'm in the building."
"Have you gotten to the elevator?"
"Yes, I'm in the elevator."
"Then you'll be getting out of the elevator in a minute."
"I'm out of the elevator."
Now from overhearing a great many cell phone conversations I'd say that's pretty much the way most of them go, but Jackie still was unimpressed.
It did get her attention, though, when a few minutes later the regular phone and the cell phone rang at the same time. This created the kind of confusion that used to be expressed by saying, "I didn't know whether to (expletive deleted) or go blind."
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