With cell phones in airplane mode, how do couples communicate during a cruise

[lenquixote66]

11 hours ago, ldubs said:

 

And technology came up with electric ones, which I'm sure just about everyone wanted, even though they got by just fine with the old manual ones.   The IBM Selectrics were awesome.  I could actually backspace and correct typos!   

True

[navybankerteacher]

13 hours ago, lenquixote66 said:

I graduated college with a dual major of Psychology and Sociology.I minored in English with a concentration in Literature.When I was in my senior year of college I went to the placement office to look for post graduate employment.There was a listing for a health insurance company that was hiring grads who majored in Psychology to work in their Industrial Psychology Department.I applied for the job and spent 38 years working in Health Insurance.

My major was American Studies with dual minors: Naval Science and Economics. In those pre-computer, pre-calculator days, you always carried a slide rule.  Leaving the Navy with zero marketable skills, I landed a training program with a major bank - leading to 35 years before taking up teaching.

[sverigecruiser]

22 hours ago, ldubs said:

 

Me too and using the cell helps us do that.   There seems to be this conviction in several posts that using a cell phone prevents that.   Truth is convenient communication via cell phone promotes "togetherness".   Instead of hiking to the cabin for a post-it, finding a house phone & hoping someone in the cabin picks up, or waiting to meet at the pre-planned rendezvous point,  it is a simple matter to give your partner a call or text to meet up somewhere.  

 

Is a cell phone needed to get in touch with your traveling partner?  No.  It is a heck of a lot more convenient?  Yes.   

 

We are together so we can just open our mouths when we want to communicate!

[Toofarfromthesea]

4 hours ago, Mum2Mercury said:

You've used WhatsApp on a ship?  Without having any paid ship internet?  If so, this is good news. 

 

 

I was responding to the person who said that if you have iphones AND THE INTERNET you can text.  And I was making the point that IF YOU HAVE INTERNET, you don't need an iphone, any smartphone running WhatsApp can functionally do the same thing.  In fact I specifically said IF YOU HAVE AN INTERNET PACKAGE.  So I don't know where you got the idea that I was saying that this would work if you DIDN'T have an internet package.

[Toofarfromthesea]

On 2/2/2023 at 10:27 AM, ldubs said:

 

Yup.  I have the connumification app on my phone!  😀

LOL,  got me.

[Toofarfromthesea]

15 hours ago, Hlitner said:

As a fellow senior, I would remind you that the 40s were about 80 years ago!  Times have changed

 

Hank

 

Hey, I had a very happy childhood growing up in the 1850s without those newfangled typewriters.  All we had were slates in my one room schoolhouse.

[RoyMartin]

5 hours ago, Mum2Mercury said:

But then I really saw what was going on in one family, and it made me think again:  Four kids, the second child (still a minor) was big-time into drugs.  He was bringing drugs into the house, where anyone could have found /used them, and he was hanging around with a dangerous crowd.  After many attempts at rehabilitation, the parents put him into a half-way house of sorts because they feared he would "corrupt" the two younger children with his negative influence.  It wasn't an easy choice for them, but I see why they did it. 

Don't get me wrong. I didn't say I'd never kick a child out of my house. I believe in accountability. Just that I'd never kick the child out of my heart.

Reminds me of a story I heard about a woman who got attacked on her way to a weekly meeting with a Buddhist or Vedic spiritual teacher of some sort. It was told to me as if true so I assume it was. She arrived at the class, upset and disheveled. She'd managed to scream and get away. The teacher looked at her and addressing her by name said, "You should have summoned all the love in your heart and hit that man over the head with your umbrella".

There was a point when one of my children was acting out. He pulled a knife on his sister. I didn't think he would actually hurt her, and she didn't either, but just the same one doesn't ignore something like that. I called the police. An officer came to our home and scared him half to death, telling him if it ever happened again he'd spend the night in the juvenile detention center, sleeping on a thin mattress over concrete, waiting to be arraigned by a judge in the morning. That seemed to take care of that method of acting out but he remained troubled. I worried that I might have to, at some point, send him to some private institution if things got out of hand.

Fortunately, we were able to muddle through. He's doing well now. Really well. He's a software engineer earning close to half a million dollars a year. Emotionally he's still young but he's learning and growing. For years he dated women who were older. His mom abandoned him at age three, which was super traumatic, so I assumed he was subconsciously seeking the mom he didn't have. But now he's finally with a woman who's younger and they seem to get along great. He's 31 and she's 24 but it's a good match because emotionally he's around 25 or so. Plus, unlike the older women, she's not pressuring him to make commitments like marriage or children for which he's not remotely ready.

[Joebucks]

I always get a chuckle at arguments of how inconvenient it is to have a device on your where you can communicate, have your fun times, and always have a camera on you. How awful. Here come the different strokes!

[RoyMartin]

24 minutes ago, Joebucks said:

I always get a chuckle at arguments of how inconvenient it is to have a device on your where you can communicate, have your fun times, and always have a camera on you. How awful. Here come the different strokes!

I get both perspectives. Perhaps because, coming up on age 60, I have a degree of techno-phobia but I'm also big time reliant on my phone. My father-in-law, who's 80-something rejects anything more than a flip phone and I get it. The effort it would take him to learn something new isn't worth it -- at least as far as he's concerned, and he has that right. My mother-in-law, who's a couple of years younger, tries and struggles (needing to learn the same things over and over again). She doesn't even really get e-mail, though she manages to use it a bit.

[jsn55]

21 hours ago, ldubs said:

 

And technology came up with electric ones, which I'm sure just about everyone wanted, even though they got by just fine with the old manual ones.   The IBM Selectrics were awesome.  I could actually backspace and correct typos!   

Oh my, the Selectrics!  I could type a thousand words a minute on a Selectric.  When I moved to SF, my desk had an IBM Executive, the one with variable-spacing, i.e. a 'W' took up more room than an 'L'.  They turned out very elegant docs.  BUT you had to memorize how many back spaces were needed for a typo.  Great fun.

[ldubs]

20 hours ago, RoyMartin said:

Oh, how I longed for a Selectric. Never happened. Next stop, dot matrix printer and a desktop computer with 8 megabytes (8 million bytes -- approximately since computers don't work in base 10) of memory. Ridiculous now. My laptop has 16 gigabytes (16 billion) and that's by no means that much anymore.

For a time in the early "90s, I was in the IT field. It was the twilight of the mainframe era but they still us stuff like how to flip a single bit because memory was so precious. They called it "learning to program a toaster", which in those days was a joke. Now you toaster probably has a computer chip or two. Suffice it to say no one is flipping bits anymore. Software engineers work through layers of software, each level compiled upon the next. They can create stuff that accomplishes so much more. As an example, it was in the late 90s that we began to see home computers that could run crude video. In the 2000s, we began to see streaming and streaming services. Stuff no one dreamed possible back in the day except as an exercise in "someday", a form of science fiction. 

 

Times have changed almost beyond imagination.  Way back, I had an Apple II+.  48K, cause I couldn't afford the upgrade to 64K.   Pretty basic low resolution monitor.

[RoyMartin]

3 hours ago, ldubs said:

 

Times have changed almost beyond imagination.  Way back, I had an Apple II+.  48K, cause I couldn't afford the upgrade to 64K.   Pretty basic low resolution monitor.

Yes, and a full desktop system. Now our phones are way more powerful and the screens are light years ahead. Imagine what our children and grandchildren could live to see.

[sparks1093]

All of this tech talk reminded me of a story I read once. A High School football coach needed someone to keep the score sheet for him and a young lady volunteered. He was showing her how to fill out the form and showed her how to use carbon paper. She exclaimed, "This is neat! This will make copiers obsolete!" 

[CPT Trips]

On 2/1/2023 at 1:49 PM, Mum2Mercury said:

1. Talk to one another 

2. Leave sticky notes in the cabin 

 

Seriously, we have no problem when it's just the two of us.  

Better yet, leave the stickies in the elevators

On 2/3/2023 at 3:03 PM, Toofarfromthesea said:

 

Hey, I had a very happy childhood growing up in the 1850s without those newfangled typewriters.  All we had were slates in my one room schoolhouse.

Making impressions in the clay with the stylus wasn’t all that great. But it worked. 

[RoyMartin]

1 hour ago, CPT Trips said:

Better yet, leave the stickies in the elevators

Making impressions in the clay with the stylus wasn’t all that great. But it worked. 

What, no chisel and stone?

[Philob]

On 2/3/2023 at 7:02 PM, jsn55 said:

Oh my, the Selectrics!  I could type a thousand words a minute on a Selectric.  When I moved to SF, my desk had an IBM Executive, the one with variable-spacing, i.e. a 'W' took up more room than an 'L'.  They turned out very elegant docs.  BUT you had to memorize how many back spaces were needed for a typo.  Great fun.

We had a couple of Selectrics, I ended up with the ORATOR font. 

23 hours ago, ldubs said:

 

Times have changed almost beyond imagination.  Way back, I had an Apple II+.  48K, cause I couldn't afford the upgrade to 64K.   Pretty basic low resolution monitor.

TRS-80 here. I worked at RS, spent a lot of my paychecks getting one. 

[CPT Trips]

1 hour ago, RoyMartin said:

What, no chisel and stone?

No, that’s a more modern method. More used for signage than for record keeping.  

[RoyMartin]

2 hours ago, CPT Trips said:

No, that’s a more modern method. More used for signage than for record keeping.  

Ah, record keeping, yes. A pile of rocks suffices perfectly. As the bison pass out of the gate, move a rock from one pile to the next. Return them to the original pile as they come back home. With each birth, add a rock to the pile. With each slaughter, remove a rock. Perfect, double ledger accounting.

[lynncarol]

On 2/1/2023 at 5:30 PM, Hlitner said:

#1 Rule,,,Grandchildren can do no wrong 🙂

The pressure is really off with Grandkids, unlike raising your children. After all, who ever said, "That child is a real brat. He/she must have terrible grandparents"

[wcook]

Back in my day, we used two tin cans and a long string to communicate. And we liked it. Don’t know if that would work today; ships were smaller back then. Anyway,  while I respect those who want to do without cell phones on a cruise, I find them way too useful. Nice to be able to text somebody “I’m up in the sky lounge and there’s a band you would love. Come on up.”

[wcook]

Americans are more likely to have Facebook/Messenger on their phones than What’s App.