At the cusp of the millennium, I romanced a man over long distance ‘trunk calls’ that had to be booked through an operator. My soon-to-be husband didn’t have a landline at his rental so he would walk to the neighbourhood phone booth and stand in line, sometimes for hours, where conversations unfolded jerkily, in temporal multiples of three.
As the three minutes ended, an irritable voice would interrupt our call to ask if we wanted to speak longer.
Callers had to shout their deepest kinks so they could be heard on the crackling line; code words were key in this zero privacy era. Both of us grew up in a country whose citizens waited years to get a gas connection or to buy a scooter. This place trained us to be ready for the long haul from the word go.