I was walking down a dusty road in Ajman’s industrial area when I realised there was a relic from the past on the pavement in front of me.

It was a beat-up looking public phone and just to make a point that nobody uses such a thing anymore, it had an abandoned slipper in front of it. There were no interesting phone numbers scribbled inside or any offensive messages.

I took a couple of pictures on my smartphone and when two Pakistani expatriate workers walked past looking down at their phones, I tapped on the camera icon to snap that one shot I knew would tell the story.

During the past years many inventions and everyday things we once took for granted have become obsolete. Whenever I see a replay of an old movie I snigger when the protagonist rushes to a phone booth, reaches into his pockets for loose change and makes that crucial phone call to his girlfriend who is ready to fly out of the country.

I too carried loose change in my pocket but it was to pay for my parking spot, until prepaid cards with an embedded chip were printed. Now, even that seems a bit dated because now I can just pay with my cell phone sitting in my workplace. It is another story that once in a while one of my colleagues or I let out a wild scream while we are typing a story furiously on our tiny laptops, because we had forgotten to top up the parking fee.

Then what usually follows is a wild scramble down the steps and out into the blinding sunlight to see a khaki-clad parking attendant walking away with a happy swing in his steps.

Things I cannot throw away

I posted the picture I took of the phone booth on my LinkedIn profile and titled it, “Things We don’t Use Anymore”.

Rummaging through my socks drawer the other day I realised that times have changed fast. Besides the number of socks that do not match, I have stuff that I do not use any more, and it is not as if decades have passed and new technology has replaced it.

Here are some things that I do not use but cannot seem to throw away:

1) Tape recorder: I laugh every time I see this in my sock drawer for the hard times this Sony invention gave me. Right on deadline the tape would slowly start unravelling out of the recorder like some evil spirit bent on destroying my sanity. I would have to use my sharp memory to recall what the bank manager said about how important money is in our society. Some of the things I couldn’t recall, I desperately made up after searching on Google, and nobody was the wiser.

2) Film camera: I still have that Nikon and when my wife told me to get rid of it, I shoved it in the back of the drawer, which is a good thing as the retro look is making a comeback and new cameras are made to look like the old film cameras. I remember that every time I took the roll after pretending to be a great photographer and after shooting against the sun, the Kodak guy would give me about only five printed shots . The rest were all black. “Don’t worry. It takes practice,” he would say. The years passed and I never learned how to take a decent picture.

3) Facsimile machine: This silly contraption we carried with us to every city to where I was transferred. Then email was invented and I was happy, but now with the inbox full, I am not too sure.

4) Human writers: Nowadays you have algorithms to write a better story than a news reporter.