"Before the Cell Phones"

The father of a teenage daughter was concerned with the amount of time she spent on the telephone, not so much for the time she wasted (he had given up on that long ago), but because nobody else could use the phone.

So, as a happy solution, he had a telephone installed for her with her own private number and directory listing.

Two or three days after her telephone had been installed, he came home to find her stretched out on the floor with her feet on the living room couch and chatting away on the family telephone. Her own telephone was resting silently on her dresser. "Why are you using our telephone?" he yelled. "Why aren't you talking on your own telephone?"

"I can't," she said, "I'm expecting an important call on my phone."