All I wanted for my birthday was a lousy phone call.

Yes, I must be old if that’s all I wanted. But this year (and rest assured that while it may seem this way, this post is not about my birthday) when it was all said and done, a good old-fashioned phone call is the one thing I came dangerously close to not getting.

Now, this was not for a lack of phones or phone numbers. To the contrary, I have three phone numbers and Skype of course, if that counts. And phones; man, do I have phones.

Nor was it for a lack of friends or family. I do okay in the friends department, at least so I think. And family, not only am I blessed with plenty but almost all of them live far enough away that a phone call is the closest thing we have to being together.

So. What went wrong this year? Nothing, really. In fact, nothing more than yet another sign of the times. As it turns out, I heard from plenty of people from all ends of the earth, and here’s how:

14 Skype IM’s

2 BlackBerry Messengers pings

1 BlackBerry Pinning ping

8 Facebook Wall writings and messages

2 Twitter DM’s

2 LinkedIn Messages

4 Text Messages

2 Transcribed Voice Messages

2 Email messages

No Voice Mails (the old kind), no faxes (who get faxes for their birthday), no video mails (2 years ago I would have predicted otherwise) and actually no video calls. When the television becomes a phone next year, I imagine that will change.

Moral of my story? Well, I’m assuming you already decoded the message. Although I should tell you that not long before my birthday expired, I did finally get a voice call, albeit a mobile one. It came from my 73 year-old father, who does not text, does not have a BlackBerry, definitely does not use (or know what Twitter is), is not LinkedIn and would not know what do with Facebook if he tried. So he had no choice.

So are we now just lazy when it comes to a voice call? Or it is just too damn easy to do it another way? Worth pondering, I say.