Conversations
Today, I decided to tell Jake, who was home sick from school, what life was like in the distant past when mommy was eight years old.
Me: Televisions only had thirteen channels. There was no remote. You had to get off the couch and change the channel.
Jake: That’s horrible.
Me: And if you called someone on the telephone and they weren’t home, the phone would just ring and ring. And if they were home, they had no way of knowing who was calling. We didn’t have caller ID.
Jake: No caller ID?
Me: No caller ID. We had to pick up the phone to find out who was calling.
Jake: Weren’t you scared? How did you know it wasn’t a robber calling?
Me: No, we knew they were our friends.
I decided to not tell him that he had just fingered the plot of more horror movies than I can list here.
About Helaine Olen
I am the voice of The Bills, a column about the intersection of money and life, at Slate. At Inc., I contribute to the Spread the Wealth personal finance column. My work on politics, economics, workplace culture and women’s issues has been published in numerous other print and on-line publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Salon, Pacific Standard, and The Los Angeles Times, where I wrote and edited the popular “Money Makeover” feature.
I'm the author of the critically acclaimed book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, and The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to be so Complicated, which I co-wrote with Harold Pollack.
What else? I’m a passionate bibliophile, a fan of 1970s pop music and a lover of rummage sales. I live in New York City.
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