I have a long history of poor sleep. When I was still working, a colleague and I used to joke that we should have called one another at 4:00 a.m. because we were both up at ridiculous o’clock every day.
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The Extension

The big telephone issue these days of course is whether or not to give up our landlines.   But the big deal when I was young was whether a girl could convince her folks to have an extension to the family telephone installed in her bedroom!

If they would,  l remember promising my parents,  I’d be completely happy and would never ask for anything again!

And – to the envy of friends who were then still extension-less  – I got it,  a beautiful pink princess telephone with an extra long cord so I could carry it all around my room as I chatted away.

I had a big crush on a boy named Warren at the time,  and one afternoon he called me and of course I ran upstairs to take the call in the privacy of my attic bedroom.  We had been talking for quite awhile when I heard my mother calling me from downstairs.   I told Warren to hold on and I went out to the top of the staircase to hear what she was saying.

She was calling me to dinner,  and so I hurried down to eat.

We were at the table a bit later when the doorbell rang and my father got up to answer it.  It was Warren who’d come over to say I’d left the phone off the hook and no one at his house could make a call!

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

Smart people can do or be many things.
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