Timeshifting

These days, I've been listening to podcasts from NPR on my commutes to and from work. One of these is "Car Talk," with Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers. A regular feature of that program, to which I'm sure nobody needs any introduction, the Puzzler. Ordinarily, I gloss over the Puzzler, because they usually involve Higher Logic, small bits of paper with cryptic notations on them, or algebra, which I leave to the pros and concentrate instead on the often very funny byplay with the callers.

This week's Puzzler, though, I figured out nearly as soon as Ray Magliozzi read it out. Here it is; see if the answer is as immediately apparent to you as it was to me (quoting from memory):

I visited my friend Mary in her office. As I walked in, she was dialing the phone. She shushed me, saying she wouldn't be a minute, she was calling her husband. The call went through, and when her husband answered, she said, "Hi, Tim, it's me." She then asked a question that would have been a very strange way to open a conversation twenty (or thirty, or fifty) years ago. A strange question for any caller to ask anybody, not just Mary to Tim. What was the question?

Write your answer on a 5000-watt Black & Decker electrical generator, with stereo speakers, full carpeting, eight-cylinder Speedo rack-and-pinion flywheel wind-up, and a pony, and send it to...