Personal essays
Waiting for a special delivery
Money
I hardly use actual cash anymore.
I use a credit card or, more often, my phone to make purchases from online orders to getting on a bus yesterday.
When I used to travel I would land and head for an ATM to get local currency.
Before that, we’d have to get traveller’s checks or order foreign currency from our bank well ahead of when we traveled.
It occurred to me that I’ve seen the rise and am now seeing the fall of ATMs.
When I was in college there were no ATMs on campus. There were ATMs in town but not here and there but only in the outer lobbies of banks and you needed an ATM to open the door to those lobbies to prevent unauthorized people from hanging around the machines.
Well, to try and prevent.
Our campus didn’t have an ATM but we did have Mrs. Schneider.
Mrs. Schneider had an office in the Student Center and students would queue up during the few hours each business day that she was available to cash checks.
“But Daniel,” you say, “why didn’t you just use your phone.”
Phones
In 1977, not only didn’t we have smart phones, we didn’t have any phones that weren’t hard-wired in a specific location.
So all of our dorm rooms had phones. If the phone rang and no one was there to answer it, you didn’t get the message.
Sometimes you’d come back and someone living on the same hall would say, “you’re phone’s been ringing all night.” That might be enough for us to hang around and wait for them to call back.
We might drop by a friend’s room. If they weren’t there, we’d leave a message - actually write something out.
They wouldn’t get the message until they came back to their room.
You couldn’t text, “hey, I’m heading to dinner, meet me there.” You had to make plans ahead of time.
Student Centers were really important - and not just because they gave Mrs. Schneider a place to come to work each day.
The mail room was in our Student Center.
Letters
Not only didn’t we have smart phones in 1977, we didn’t have our own computers.
We brought typewriters with us and paper. No spell check. No internet. No AI. We each had a portable dictionary and if we made a mistake we had to somehow fix it or retype the page.
You kids have it so easy.
No computers and no Google.
If you were hungry at night you either went somewhere that was open or you waited for the sandwich man to come to your dorm. It was a guy with a cooler filled with sandwiches going dorm to dorm.
How did our family send us messages other than the telephone? How did they send us cards for our birthday or clippings from the local newspaper?
They took out a piece of paper and either used their typewriter or an ink pen and wrote a note that began “Dear
They put this paper in an envelope, addressed it, licked a stamp and affixed it.
“Licked a stamp?” you ask.
There were no peel and stick stamps in those days.
If you were sending a message from one person to another on campus you didn’t need a stamp - you could just drop it in a slot with their box number on it or tape the message to their mailbox.
And so your mailbox was very important.
Serendipity
You’d stop in the mailroom multiple times a day.
That means you’d bump into friends checking their mail multiple times a week.
There were synergies from having the mail room in the Student Center. You could sit and have coffee with a friend or call to them as they entered and you exited to set up a meeting later in the day or week.
When I was in grad school, the undergrads had their mail delivered to their dorm.
More convenient - sure - but these chance meetings of people with different majors and interests didn’t happen.
Now? Now we get everything on our phones and computers.
I’m not against technology and progress, but there was something nice about needing to go to the Student Center.
It was nice to bump into people at the mail room.
It was nice to see someone in line for Mrs. Schneider and walk over and say “hey.”
It was nice to go through the day without a phone in my hand.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 232. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe