On Monday I was sitting at my desk, correcting a mistaken double entry I had made on a spreadsheet detailing our 2022 housing expenses. Susan was finishing work on our tax return and needed to have accurate numbers for our filing. I heard the familiar ring of my phone’s alert that a text message had arrived. It was from our cellular carrier, so I opened the message to read a text welcoming me to Canada. Susan had received a similar message a day or so earlier. It is a fairly common experience for us - being welcomed to Canada when we have not gone anywhere and we are quite sure that we are on the US side of the border. What happens is that when a particular tower just south of our home experiences a problem, our phones automatically search for the next nearest tower, which is on the other side of the border. Way back in 2006, when we were new to cell phones, we experienced a similar problem in northern Montana as we prepared to cross into Canada for a trip. We were making a few calls to family to avoid having to pay extra costs for international cell phone calls when our phones connected with Canadian towers even though we were still in Montana. The result was a phone bill with high roaming charges.

No such roaming charges are a problem these days. We have a cellular plan that allows us to travel to Canada without incurring extra charges. That’s a good thing because we seem to be able to “go” to Canada without going anywhere. Yesterday I read on the web site of a local newspaper that many other people in our county have experienced problems with our particular cellular provider over the past couple of days. The news report went on to say that technical difficulties have impacted general users and also some first responders’ equipment. The result was that some people were having challenges making calls and accessing the internet.

We experienced no similar problems. Our Internet service is not provided through the cellular network. Our phones seem to connect through the Canadian towers just fine when the other tower is not working. Susan has a heart monitor that uses the cellular system that continues to function normally regardless of where we are. Like cell phone calls to 911 the medical device is handled by the first available carrier regardless of which provider we use for our regular cell phone service. However the local outage of cell phone service did affect other customers of the same provider that we use.

The company assured county officials that the problem would be resolved by the end of the day yesterday and as far as I know it was.

We could switch cell phone providers. We have been customers of the same provider and have had the same cell phones since our cell phone provider was sold to the larger company years ago when we lived in South Dakota. However, we have resisted the offers of the company to continually upgrade our equipment and when we do, we don’t finance the purchase of our phones and so have no contracts binding us to their service. We would be allowed to keep our equipment and our phone numbers with our South Dakota area codes if we were to switch carriers. However, so far we have seen no particular advantage to switching even though we have been told that another company has stronger and more reliable service in our particular neighborhood.

I just like the friendly welcome to Canada that I receive without traveling. It seems to be a situation that is unique to our particular location and moment in history. I’m sure the technology will continue to change. I’m also sure that large corporations providing telecommunications services will continue to be bought and sold, changing their names and the services they provide on a fairly regular basis. It has been less than three years since we moved out here and already we’ve had two different companies providing our Internet service.

When our cell phones become so old that they need to be replaced the new ones will undoubtedly be more capable and the quality of our communications will be even greater than they now are.

I’m old school enough that I can remember when long distance calls were expensive enough that we thought twice before dialing someone in a different state. When we went to graduate school in Chicago, we were paying 11 cents per minute for out of state calls on our land line and we used an egg timer to keep from talking too long when we called home to talk to family in Montana. These days my only thought when calling our daughter in South Carolina is what time it might be three time zones to the east. I don’t worry about the cost, because it doesn’t cost me anything to call her. We talk to friends in Australia over the internet without incurring extra charges for our video calls. The times have changed.

I keep thinking how much my father would have enjoyed these small portable devices we carry in our pockets that have more computing power than the technology carried on the rocket capsules that took astronauts to the moon. One of the advantages to being old school is that I am amazed at technological advances that our grandchildren take for granted. They have never known a world without internet connected portable devices. Even though their access to the Internet is restricted because of their ages, they assume that everyone has the capability to connect and that they can talk to people in distant places without any problems. I don’t think they find it at all strange that we receive messages welcoming us to Canada when we have gone nowhere. I know they didn’t understand my joke about the wind being so strong that it blew the boundary line south of our house for a while.

They are, of course, completely used to having a grandpa who is so old school that his jokes are way beyond dad jokes. They smile politely and nod even when what I say makes no sense whatsoever. I really am a lucky guy, who enjoys a little trip to Canada every now and then.