💬 Heard the old Nokia tune on the Riyadh metro and turned around

Last Thursday on the metro in Riyadh somebody's phone started playing the old Nokia tune. Da da da da da. I turned around so fast I hit a man's elbow. Everyone above 30 in that carriage did the same. We all looked at each other like someone had said a name from school. Nobody said a word. The guy finally answered it. Very serious voice. Yes sir, no sir. It was his boss calling. My first phone was a Nokia 1100 that my brother passed down in 2006. No colour, no camera. It had a torch though. That torch got me through 3 power cuts a week during my final exams. I never changed the ringtone. Everybody I knew had the same one, so on a bus 6 people reached for their pockets. You couldn't tell whose phone it was until someone picked up. Nobody minded. Snake was the other thing. I reached 600 points in 1 maths class and the teacher took the phone for a week. My mother said she'd never give it back. She gave it back on day 3, and made me promise to charge it myself. Phones had a weight to them then. You could drop one off the roof and just replace the cover. Mine fell down the stairs about 40 times. The battery lasted 5 days. I miss that more than the tune. Now my phone has 11 different tones I never hear. Yesterday I put the Nokia one on as my alarm. It's very hard to be angry at a morning with that sound. I woke up grumpy and then smiled for no reason. The neighbour knocked to ask what the noise was. I told him it was history. He's 24 and has never owned a phone with buttons. I felt very old and also very happy.

Mine is the Samsung startup jingle rather than an actual ringtone, hearing it anywhere still makes me think of setting up my very first phone at thirteen with far too much excitement over something so small at the time.

A Nokia tone did this to me at a bus stop near Mehdipatnam a few weeks ago. I spun round looking for my own phone. It was a schoolgirl's, and she looked at me like I was mad. Funny part is I haven't owned a Nokia since 2009 and my body still reacted. Your metro story made me laugh. A carriage full of grown men all turning at once.

Mine is the Samsung message beep from around 2008. Two short notes, then nothing. I heard it in a clinic waiting room last year and turned around like someone had called me. It meant a real person had typed something to you, and probably paid 1 rupee for it.