What Life Was Like Before Cell Phones

By Ann-Marie Alcántara

Updated on 3/2/2017 at 3:45 PM

NBC
NBC

Most of us have carried a cell phone around for more than 13 years, so it's hard to remember going through life without one. But there was a time when we all used to memorize our best friends' phone numbers and use a pay phone. While today's kids can't even fathom the idea of not having the latest smartphone, we relish reminiscing about the golden days. Ahead, take a look back at the lives we led with only landlines.

  1. Waiting by the door for your friend when she said she would pick you up at a certain time.
  2. Planning a time for your crush to call you late at night and picking up on the first ring so your parents wouldn't catch you.
  3. Checking the answering machine to see if anyone left any messages while you were out.
  4. Begging your parents for a second phone line so you could talk for hours to your friends.
  5. Taking photos on disposable cameras and getting superexcited to develop them.
  6. Honking when you arrived at someone's house to pick them up.
  7. Looking up directions on MapQuest, printing them out, and deleting your history so your parents didn't know where you were going.
  8. Calling your crush using *67 and saving *69 for when you received prank calls.


  1. Only making long-distance calls after 5 p.m. or on Sunday nights because of reduced rates.
  2. Using a calling card.
  3. Calling 411 or using a phone book to look up businesses.
  4. Writing your home phone number in friends' yearbooks and playing phone tag all Summer.
  5. Actually meaning it when you wrote "don't ever change" in your yearbook (because you didn't have the Facebook app and had no idea what people were up to during the Summer).
  6. Annoying your friends' parents by talking to them on the house phone 24/7.
  7. Dealing with immense boredom when you had to wait anywhere, especially at the doctor's office.
  8. Getting tangled up in the phone cord when talking to your friends on the landline.
  9. Actually having to commit to plans because you couldn't last-minute flake over a text.
  10. Passing notes instead of Snapchats.


  1. Feeling embarrassed when your parents were late to pick you up from carpool and you didn't have any way of calling them to find out where they were.
  2. Using a pay phone on the regular when you were out and needed to make a call (and never forgetting to leave your house without a handful of quarters).
  3. Memorizing the most important digits — mom, dad, BFF, Pizza Hut.
  4. Trying to come up with hilarious songs and jokes to leave as your family answering machine greeting.
  5. Getting to know your friends' and significant other's parents because they always picked up first and asked you all sorts of questions.
  6. Hailing cabs.
  7. Scheduling specific times to call relatives.
  8. Having no clue what your friends were up to at any given moment.
  9. Getting cut off from a three-way or group call if the person who started it hung up.


  1. Having to page your mom the number to a pay phone at the mall so she could call and figure out where to pick you up.
  2. Getting in trouble for "tying up" the phone line.
  3. Hearing someone pick up an extension to spy or tell you to get off the phone.
  4. Becoming annoyed whenever you heard a call-waiting beep.
  5. Asking permission to go online so you wouldn't block the phone line or getting kicked offline because someone called.
  6. Using a newspaper to figure out movie times or picking one when you got there.
  7. Having serious FOMO when you were on family vacation because you had no idea what your friends were doing.

Sure, we now have fun and faster ways to communicate, but nothing will beat growing up with a regular telephone!