The Phone Pro Is Born: A story of my first love

It all started with a phone... A Nokia 1110.

I had just turned 12 years old and I had became obsessed with the notion of owning a mobile phone. I saw people in the streets wander by me and hear strange electronic noises emit from their pockets and then see them withdraw from their pockets a small plastic electronic device, put it to their head and then proceed to have conversations with said small electronic device. Wow! what is that?? I would wonder to myself. I quickly learned that this was a major advent in human history, the dawn of the age of affordable handheld mobile phones!

Over time my interest in these devices grew exponentially! My parents gifted me one of their old Sony Ericsson flip phones (battery removed of course) so I could pretend I had my very own mobile phone. I would wander around the house pretending to have conversations with family members in far off locations where I could only see or hear them in my dreams when I'd go to sleep at night. This whole notion of being able to just pick something up, push a couple buttons anywhere, any time, and be able to talk to anyone I wanted to (albeit with their mobile phone number of course) would continue to grow into my adolescent years. I would then start to see my own peers brandish their own handheld wonders. Usually they were Sony Ericsson's, Motorola's or the flagship Nokia 3310's, but they were all awestriking the same.

I would beg my parents to buy me a mobile phone so I could be like all my cool friends... To no avail!

My parents were staunchly against me owning a mobile phone and having a phone bill to pay. This to them was strictly for only someone with responsibility. They said I could own my own mobile phone on the condition that I would go out and get a job to pay for said phone and recurring phone bills. I agreed.

So off I went out into the world as a young and excited 14 year old teen doing anything I could to gather enough funds for my first mobile phone. There was a quaint phone shop located in the town square that I would frequent after school to feed my curiosities and ambitions. I would look at all the latest models on display and ask the lady who owned the store a range of questions on each one. She would ask if I had any money to purchase one I was interested in and I would say no not yet but hopefully soon and that would conclude each stop I'd make to the phone shop.

A friend of mine had one of the latest models of mobile phones at the time. It was a Nokia 1110 one of the hottest phones on the market for its time. I was enthralled. The display was super crisp, easy on the eyes with less pixels than its predecessors. I remember vividly it was a grey and red model with a silver key pad. I asked him how he acquired such a phone and he said that he'd just recently picked up a job at the local Red Rooster making burgers. I decided right then that I was going to find myself a job after school! If my best friend has one I had to have one!

So I applied for my first ever job at the local Dominos pizza store. I walked in to the store wearing my Sunday best and my hair neatly gelled (typical of the early 2000's). I asked a meek young lady behind the counter if I could speak with her manager about a job. She said certainly and went off and returned to the front counter with the tranquil looking manager Paul. He handed me an application form which I filled out right there and then. He then said if any jobs become available he would call me (obviously on my parents home phone). Only two days passed and he called me to say I had the job! He was my first boss and possibly one of the best. He was the owner/manager. This was back when owners of franchises were hands on and managed their own stores like well oiled machines. He gave me a tour on my first shift and showed me where they made the pizzas, the dough mixing machines that I would be operating, and where I would be preparing all the fresh produce for the pizzas using a large commercial dicer. I was eager to start already!

Do the work, get the treats.

For months I would clock in 10 minutes early to my shifts, get ready and talk to the supervisor who was on shift at the time for any updates then get to work making the pizza bases in the dough mixers, preparing the fresh produce and although it would get hot in there working behind the large commercial pizza oven I absolutely loved every moment of it. Well after a couple of short, busy months of school and work the time had finally arrived! I found myself standing in the phone store run by the portly lady I mentioned earlier. The store had new models already on display. In these times there was an arms race on between all of the major manufacturers to produce the latest mobile phones with the ever emerging latest technologies. The lady behind the counter gave me an awkward smile as if scripted and was ready for me to harass her with a range of questions and take more of her businesses precious time without buying anything but boy oh boy did that smile become a big, proud one in just a moment when 14 years old Ty Grogan pulled out a wad of cold hard cash and slapped it down on the counter. I already knew exactly what I wanted. I had been researching mobile phones in magazines for the past couple months flicking through them in the local news agency before buying the latest comic book of Archie and Friends. It was the Nokia 1110! The classy classic black and white one with Snake 2 on it! The lady produced a box with artwork of a young ladies smooth, soft hand outstretched, reaching forth to a young child's hand. As if to comfort and connect with them.

Success!!!

I immediately put the box in my backpack, got on my Redline BMX bike and rode home with the biggest smile on my face. You simply could not replace the happiness I was feeling. The sheer euphoria was electric and pulsing through me. I rode home, unpacked the box from my backpack and opened it. There it was. The Nokia 1110! I had worked so hard tirelessly for this phone after school, and sacrificed so much for it, and here it finally was! Following the instructions, I took the back of the phone case off and inserted my brand new, first ever Telstra prepaid sim card. I then put the battery back in place and closed the case up sealing it tightly with a snap and then fired it up for the first time ever pressing and holding the power button on.

This was what I saw and heard in my bedroom back in the year 2005

With that, a rush of excitement flooded me!! I was now the proud owner of my first ever mobile phone! This was something I had only dreamed of and now it was a reality!

The following day I went to high school although there was a mobile phone ban I snuck it in in my backpack. I asked all my friends to write down their mobile phone numbers on a page in my exercise book on my lunch break along with their names so I knew who was who. When I got home that afternoon I gleefully added them to the contacts on my phone. Back then we would text message or txt msg so to speak. You see, you had to push each individual button on the phones keypad to get to the exact character you wanted to input on the phone screen, then find the next character and do the same. The learning curb of text messaging was steep but very rewarding when you got it down pat. It eventually would become an extension of yourself. I would sit in class and be able to type out a 200 character txt message to one of my peers with very little effort and not even having to look at my phone screen at all! This was much the same as typing on a keyboard. It became all about how you'd position your thumb, learning where the center button was by feeling for two little bumps on the button to indicate that was where it was and going from there with memory and muscle memory in tow. I say 200 characters BECAUSE if you were to type over 250 characters in total you would get hit with the infamous double text message surcharge which was an extra 25 cents on top of the 25 cents you had already paid for your first text message! And no one wanted that!

So We Developed Our Own Language To Combat This

Here you can see a demo on how to send text messages on the Nokia 1110.

We would shorten and abbreviate everything we would have to text (txt) as much as possible. Not only would this combat the dreaded double charge on a text message it would also save a shitload of time trying to write out a lengthy message when you've got to repeatedly press the same button on the keypad just to get to the character you needed to input. An example of this would be, instead of typing out: Hey mate how are you going today? You would txt: Hey m8 hw RU gng 2day? It was almost like pig lattin for text messaging. And everyone did it. It was the only way for a good 5 years to convey text messages up until the dawn of the keyboard phones with larger displays, with more room for text and larger allowances from the telecommunications companies for how many characters you could use in a single text. (But I will cover all of that in another article for another time.)

The Phone Pro Signing Off

Well I hope you've found my Welcome article insightful and delightful. This was only just the beginning of the journey for me in the ways of how mobile phones played such an exponential part of my life up until this very day as I sit here and type this out on to this very blog. Thank you very much reader for being an active member of The Phone Pro. Stay in touch for my next exciting article!!