Notes from the Shoe Box

By Brandon Shoemaker

Nothing makes you feel like a museum exhibit faster than teaching teenagers how to use a rotary phone. They were clueless—but not as if they thought it was a fictional piece of steampunk cosplay technology, mind you (well, at least most of them: “I had a toy phone like that when I was a baby,” one of them said. “I had no idea they were real!”).

Let me back up—it’s not like I teach courses in archaeology of the mid–20th century (though, if that were an option, I would jump at the opportunity). The play I was directing at school was set in the 1960s—hence, the rotary phone. 

My lead actress walked to the phone in the scene, and, intuitively enough, began to spin the numbers to dial—but with one fundamental flaw. “You have to pick up the receiver,” I said. 

“Oh, duh!” she replied, and finished dialing before picking up the receiver. 

I explained, “No, dear. You have to pick up the phone, listen for the dial tone, and then you dial the number.” 

Later, she had to move the phone so another actress could stand on the table where the phone had been.

“Ugh, it’s so heavy!” she said as she clumsily struggled to pick up the phone, placing her hands flat on both sides of the body and lifting, as if carrying the burden of Western civilization. With forehead in palm, I said, “Bring it here!” She walked it over to the director’s table, her back arched as if she were carrying a stack of encyclopedias (not that she would know what that felt like, either). 

I then demonstrated the ease with which one could lift the device by using the handle underneath the receiver bed, perfectly sized for the average middle and ring fingers. An astonished “OH!” came from everyone at this discovery.

I told them that the handle was to allow people to “walk and talk” back in the day—although, with only about three feet of cord, nobody was walking very far from the wall.

My assistant director, who at 24 is only a few years older than our students, looked to me and said, “But you’ve never had to actually make a call on one of those before, right?” I confessed that, in the earliest years of my 44 on this earth, I indeed did place a few calls from a rotary phone.

My grandmother still had one as her primary phone, and my parents had one in their bedroom, while our kitchen phone was a wall-mounted Touch-tone. Now there was a cord you could walk and talk with, not to mention the satisfaction of unraveling the cord after a long and twisting conversation, holding it high as the receiver spun just above the floor like Scott Hamilton on the ice.

To me, the functions of a rotary phone felt intuitive. Today, that’s one of the badges of honor for the iPhone: its intuitive nature. I remember my niece Caroline, during a diaper change at 2 years old, tapping and swiping through YouTube cartoons with the ease of a seasoned businesswoman swiping through a client list while chainsmoking Pall Malls. 

But maybe that’s the nature of technology: once we can intuit the new, the old is no longer intuitive? And maybe that’s the same reason older people have such difficulty with newer devices. I’ve always prided myself on staying abreast of new technologies. I bought the first-generation iPad; same with the Apple Watch. Most recently, I even saved and bought Apple’s augmented-reality headset, Apple Vision Pro (don’t judge).

Nevertheless, on occasion, I find myself having to ask my students for help with certain apps. 

“How do I get to my saved posts on Instagram?”

“How do I edit videos on TikTok?”

“Does Snapchat have my phone number?!” 

I realize this is less about the technology itself and more about the apps and their interfaces, but the software came forth because of the tech, like a Silicon Valley “Field of Dreams,” with the ghost of Steve Jobs whispering, “If you build it, the apps will come!”

Today’s kids don’t have to memorize phone numbers or birthdays; the phone does it all. The apps do it all. The cloud remembers what we forget.

And I don’t say that with judgment. I love my devices. I talk to Siri and Alexa daily (no, I’m not an Apple-exclusive technophile). I ask my phone for directions to places I’ve been driving to for 20 years. I watch movies on my headset while virtually sitting lakeside at Mount Hood but actually still in the comfort of my favorite chair—like I’m living in an episode of Star Trek. I am not above progress.

But sitting in rehearsal, watching a group of intelligent, capable teenagers marvel at the “discovery” of a handle built into a rotary phone, I realized something.

That which is intuitive isn’t universal. It’s generational.

The things that feel effortless to us were practiced thousands of times. Dial tones. Busy signals. The rhythm of waiting. We built our intuition through repetition. And now the next generation is building theirs—through swipes, filters, disappearing messages, and whatever comes next.

Twenty years from now, that same student who didn’t pick up the receiver before dialing will be standing in front of a classroom of her own (she actually wants to be a theatre teacher, God love her), explaining how to navigate a TikTok archive or recover a lost Snapchat streak, and some teenager will look at her with bewilderment as if she had just demonstrated how to churn butter.

And they will say, “You actually had to do it that way?”

Technology doesn’t just change tools; it changes instincts. The rotary phone wasn’t heavy; it just felt instinctively different in our hands—and someday, so will everything we currently think is obvious.