doug — off the record

… telegrams?

I just got a notification that I’d been tagged in a Facebook post. It was from Alfred Thompson and a screen capture appears below.

How’s that, Alfred? I’m on this eight minutes after you posted the question. I did smile a bit because I had an immediate memory to Telegram but not in your context. My father subscribed to the Toronto Telegram years ago. According to Wikipedia, it closed shop in 1971.

There is a more contemporary reference – Telegram is an instant messaging service. Again, it’s not what Alfred’s refering to.

Telegrams are a form on communication. Quite frankly, I’ve never sent one and I don’t think I’ve ever received one. You can find out all you’d ever want to know about telegrams at its Wikipedia page. And then come back here for even more!

I couldn’t help but think, as I read this, that a telegram was a precursor to fax messaging. Could that be the connection? I asked Perplexity to compare the two.

So, similar perhaps in some aspects but definitely different in others. It was strictly text messaging whereas faxes sent replicas of documents. Sans emojis for telegrams of course.

Now, while I’ve never sent or received a telegram, the concept was not foreign to me at all. Growing up, I read every Hardy Boys book in sight. My parents left me the complete collection and they’re out in the garage.

Frank and Joe sent and received telegrams all the time. You always knew when something important was about to happen because they got a telegram. I asked Gemini to create me one.

The content was always in capital letters and for some reason (I’m assuming for clarity, sentences were never ended with a period.) Instead, STOP was used so a message might be:

GOT YOUR MESSAGE ALFRED STOP WILL WRITE A BLOG POST FOR SUNDAY STOP I HOPE I GET THE FACTS RIGHT STOP

So, I wondered – could I send Alfred a telegram today? Surely, Western Union would be the place to start. No dice. But, I can send a telegram online apparently at Telegrams Canada. I’m smiling just a little here – I can send Alfred an email, a Facebook message, a Twitter message but I’d be stumped for a telegram. Wouldn’t I actually have to send it to some physical place? Wouldn’t he have to be notified that it was there? Wouldn’t he have to actually go and get it or maybe have it delivered to him?

The irony of logging onto a portal to send a Telegram message is not lost on this writer!

We’ve been spoiled by modern day technology, I guess.

Quite frankly, I can’t see a context at all with anyone that I’d care to send a telegram to – I have my phone with me all the time and it’s connected online. I have a computer (or two) that’s internet connected around here and I have connections via social media and email. Many applications allow me to save to PDF format or to fax whatever I’m working on. In my world, it seems that sending a telegram would be a huge step backwards.

Thanks, Alfred for the inspiration for this post. Quite frankly, it did take me away from my comfort zone and I did a great deal of reading about a technology that I’ve never used and probably never will. But, I now know where I could send a telegram if I had to. I even know a bit of the history of telegrams in Canada now.

How about you dear reader?

For a Sunday, your thoughts…

• before reading this post, did you know what a telegram was?
• have you ever sent a telegram?
• have you ever received a telegram?
• if you had an urgent message to send to Alfred, how would you do it to express the urgency and timeliness?
• how frequently do you monitor your communications?
• do you think people ever got spam telegrams? Are we victims of our own progress?
• this week, I watched the movie “Charlie Chan’s Murder Cruise”. From the ship, they sent a radiogram. How is that related to a telegram?

As always for a Sunday, I’d be most interested in your thoughts on this topic. Please share them in the comments below.

This is now an irregular Sunday morning themed post. You can check out all the previous posts here.