Old. Old? OLD!
Service technician Robert Foutz Jr. has worked on his company’s pool service route for more than four decades. During that time, he has seen generational change in pool service and the broader landscape of society—none more dramatic than in the ways we communicate.
By Robert Foutz Jr.
“Once you stop learning, you start dying.” Albert Einstein
About a year ago I was at a pool show where a sales rep was showing me a new pump with Internet access and a dozen different speed settings and available in six different languages. I told him while his new pump was nice it had too many features for me and my customer base. Plus, I would need a Ph.D. in engineering to learn how to program and operate it.
He told me this pump was the wave of the future and if I didn’t learn it, I was too old. He said only old people are afraid to learn new things. I would be too old for the next generation of the pool industry.
That really made me mad, and I have not installed any of his pumps. But the old part really hurt. Yes, I am 63, and yes, I look like Santa Claus in a Hawaiian shirt. I started in the pool industry in 1985, Ronald Reagan was president, radio stations played “We are the World” every 90 minutes, Coca-Cola changed its formula and brought us “New Coke” And this know-it-all salesman with his multi-lingual pool pump was still a pup drinking mother’s milk.
This and other reminders of my advancing age has led to a period of reflection and as a result I’ve spent the last few months thinking about all the changes I’ve seen in the pool industry.
I’ve heard it said that the average person has three careers in their lifetime; I have only one. I started my pool service business in 1985 at 22 years old and have had no other job since. And if I get my way, swimming pool service and repair will encompass my entire career.
My goal here is to write a series of articles to chronicle many of the changes I have seen in the last 40 years and have had to learn to deal with them. Things that came and things that went, and some that are still here.
Opening the Lines
By far the most dramatic changes I have seen is the way we communicate with each other. For the most part, pool service is a solitary job, and for years, I barely communicated with anyone while working my route.
In 1985, I kissed my wife goodbye in the morning, drove off in my truck at about 7 a.m., and sometimes, I didn’t talk to another person until I got home around 4 that afternoon. There was no way for anyone to contact me, unless I stopped at a payphone and called my wife.
Technology has obviously changed that lonely way of life on the service route. Nowadays, we can be in as much constant contact as we like, with messages, texts, emails, photos, videos, posts and conference calls.
The journey from the days of the lonesome road to now has been long and incremental, with some big steps along the way.
Voice Mail & Beepers
How long ago it now seems.
The answering machine was one of the best things to happen to telephone communications, but they became popular in the late 70’s and although they call it voice mail now, it is still basically the same thing. Leave your message after the beep and all of a sudden, you didn’t have to directly reach someone to communicate with them.
Answering machines were in use long before my entrance into the pool industry. Customers, et al. could leave a message for me when I got home, I could call them and get their machines and phone tag was invented.
When beepers came along in the mid 80’s; they were the greatest thing since the telephone. They were very small, about half an inch by half an inch and three inches long. You clipped them to your belt and went to work.
A beeper is not a pager; those came out a few years later. Every beeper had its own number, mine was 855X. My wife, mother, or customer would call the central number for all beepers on the network, a live human would answer the phone, and the exchange would go something like this.
“XYZ Beepers how can, I help you?
“Hi, I need to get a message to 855X please”
“Sure, what’s the message?”
“Tell him to call his wife at home.”
“I will, is there anything else?”
“No that’s it, thank you”
“You’re welcome, bye.”
Then a few minutes later the little box on my hip would go beep, beep beep, I pressed a button on top to shut it off. If I didn’t hear the beep, it would go off again in about five minutes. And if I missed that one, I was out of luck, because that’s all you got.
Once beeped, I had to go to the nearest pay phone, drop in a dime, and call the beeper company.
“XYZ beepers how may I help you?”
“Hello this is 855X, I just got beeped.”
“Yes, your wife said to call her at home.”
“Great, thanks.”
Then I had to pay another dime to call my wife.
While not the most efficient way to communicate, it worked. I didn’t have wait until I got home to find out what was happening.
Paging Power
Pagers were great but not a game changer in communication, but more an incremental upgrade. Unlike the beeper, a pager gave you the phone number of the person who wanted to talk to you, not much, but better than a beeper. With a pager you had your own phone number and no live human to deal with. You would call my phone number, there would be a computer voice telling you enter your phone number at the beep, and then just hang up.
A minute or two later my pager would beep and the phone number of whoever called me appeared on the screen. You didn’t have to call anyone back to get your message. But that’s not the best part, the pager saved the message. In fact, it saved your last five or six messages, unlike a beeper where you had to be there to hear it beep, you could leave your pager in your truck, and your message would be waiting for you when you returned. You still had to find a payphone and have an ashtray full of dimes.
My friends and I became really creative with our messaging; a phone number followed by 911 meant it was an emergency. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, if she paged me with our home address 15075 it meant come home ASAP I need you, if she paged 333 it meant meet me at the hospital because there is about to be three Foutzes.
Pagers also gave us unwanted noise in movie theaters, restaurants, church, and anywhere else you wanted quiet. It’s been about 35 years since I got rid of my pager and they still remind people to silence their cell phones and other devices. I guess some people still haven’t learned.
Cellular Magic
The first generation of cell phones were not the phones we know and love today; they started out as an expensive tool and status symbol. First, the phone cost a lot of money and the monthly fees to use them could empty your wallet quickly, as well.
The very first ones were installed in your car or truck and you could not take it out with you. You had a battery the size of a shoebox installed in the trunk and handset in the front seat. It was very cool to be seen driving around town holding a phone to your ear. People would think wow that guy must be rich he’s talking on a cell phone in his BMW. The first handheld phones were big, they were often compared to a WW II walkie talkie or Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone (Google “Get Smart”).
I am sure many of these people needed a phone while others just wanted to show them off like a Movado watch and a diamond ring. They wanted everyone around them to think “he must be a very important person.”
And the phone tower network had holes in the coverage leading to dropped calls. Many conversations ended prematurely, “with I am going into a dead spot, call you back later.”
But as time went on, more and more cell towers were built and you had coverage all over town, and I got my first cell phone in 1993. First, I could afford one now, my business was growing. And most importantly, my wife was pregnant with our second child.
Page Me Call You
As stated earlier, cell phones were expensive. My first cell phone had a 100-by-100 plan—100 minutes at $100 a month. Once you went over your 100 minutes, all calls were 45 cents to make a call and 45 cents for the first minute. I think it went down to 25 cents for each minute after that. If your call was one minute and 17 seconds you were charged for the call and the two minutes. That could be $ 1.15, you might think that’s not a lot of money in 2025, but in 1993 a $1.15 bought a gallon of gas or a Big Mac.
It was so expensive that all my friends and I used a system we “called page me/call you.” It was as smart as it was simple: We left our cell phones in our trucks turned off. We still had our pagers clipped to our hips. When we got a page, we would try to determine if this was going to be a long conversation or a short one.
Phone calls from my mom were never short (and still are not to this today, but while it was kind of annoying and expensive in the late 90’s, and now that I have lost my father but still have her in 2025 it’s a blessing to spend an extra few minutes with her).
The world of communications and cell phones really changed on June 12, 2009; that was the day America changed from analog to digital. If your TV could not receive a digital signal you had to buy a converter box. They were like $20 and available at most stores like Sears and Radio Shack.
A friend from church worked for a large cell company and she saw me with my old cell phone and told me to come see her on Monday. She explained to me that the digital signal was smaller and the cell towers could handle something like ten times more calls than before, and switching to a digital phone I could have twice the minutes for the same price and free weekend minutes.
It was simple supply and demand, the cell companies now had half empty cell towers (supply) no demand from user, so they created more demand by giving us more minutes.
I didn’t need my pager any longer, but the problem was while I had had a cell phone for 13 or 14 years by then, I still did not know the phone number. I never called myself and I never gave it out to anyone. It felt kind of stupid when I got my new digital phone to have to ask what my phone number was.
It was free to receive calls to my cell phone! No more keeping my ashtray full of dimes (no more ash trays either), no more leaving the job site to find a pay phone. I could just sit in my truck and have a conversation.
The Mighty Email
I can’t begin to tell you how much I hated email when it first came out. I’d spend all day by the pool or in my truck, not in the office, so if my customers sent me an email instead of calling, I didn’t get the message until I got home. Most of the time it was a simple problem that could have been fixed that afternoon but now I am home sipping something cool and don’t want to go back so I will have to make special trip out there tomorrow.
Or they need a part that I could have picked up when I was at the parts house earlier that day, but now I have to make a special trip out there tomorrow. And I charged them for my time they wasted. I begged my customers to call first and then send an email. And at that time my wife and I shared an email account, no one needed 2 emails accounts. Or that’s what we thought then, oh how we were wrong.
But my emails would get mixed up with hers and not returned in a timely manner. I now have two email accounts, one for business and personal, and one for spam. I have one I give to people or companies that I know are going to spam me every other day with worthless information, I have had it for about 10 years now and never open it. (I also have spam phone number, it’s a real number but there is no phone on the other end, I give it out for the same reason.)
But now I love email! I have a smart phone with email on it so I can read my email within minutes after it comes in. I can swing by the pool that needs attention or get the parts on my way home. So now I can sip my cold after-work beverage in peace.
Another great advantage to email is sending photos. I don’t know who said a picture is worth a thousand words, but they were right. I can send photos of leaks or broken parts to my customers or property managers and sometimes get approval to fix the same day.
Text Becomes a Verb
The first time I received a text, it was from a customer asking me a question, but it was just a phone number. I had figure out whose number it was and then I had to ask to my daughter and have her explain it to me and help me text back. (My daughters gave a free hour of tech support for Father’s Day every year)
Cell phones have moved from just a phone to make calls on, to a mini computer in your hand. I want to take my wife on a weekend getaway for our anniversary I booked the room, sent her flowers, and made dinner reservations all from the palm of my hand. I did it all from my truck.
Not too bad for an old guy.
Robert Foutz Jr. and his father Robert Foutz Sr started the Purity Pool Service in 1985. Over the last 40 years, his mom, his wife and all daughters have worked the business with him. He is looking to retire and go fishing in a year or two.
Opening photo by Roman Samborskyi | Shutterstock; answering machine photo by yodamclaren | Shutterstock; pager photo by VGV MEDIA | Shutterstock; smart phone photo by ARAMAG |Shutterstock.