17 year old teenagers baffled by rotary phone

originally posted by: Waterglass
a reply to: toms54


Excellent video. Funny. So put a 12" ruler on a table and see what happens. It can be either English or Metric. Same goes for Cooking. Hint hint ding ding. Maybe that's why no one wants to cook because this country is now at the 6th grade readable English level throughout the population and who can measure and do the math in using measuring cups and utensils. How about screwing in a light bulb. Do they know how to wipe and I am not talkin a hard drive?

TOILY PAPER!!!!!

*SCREAMS*

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

originally posted by: gallop
Is it old people? I seethe when I see old people already. They're so old, and use those rotary phones and stuff... Grrr

Exactly, I want to push them down so their hips land on their rotary phones.

My 89 year old mother did that once. She was calling me to ask where I'd left the phone, but I was on it. She grabbed it, we both fell, and she broke her hip as she landed on me holding the damn thing. The phone line was severed somehow, and we both lay there for days, becoming delirious from dehydration and dementia, till I thought "What if I just get up?" and saved us both by calling for help by screaming out of the window. Of course, the neighbours all thought it was a typical weekend, but eventually help arrived. Police arrived.

What is your point in bringing up this memory?

you're sinister aren't you.. You rotarist.

originally posted by: toms54

originally posted by: Waterglass
a reply to: toms54


Excellent video. Funny. So put a 12" ruler on a table and see what happens. It can be either English or Metric. Same goes for Cooking. Hint hint ding ding. Maybe that's why no one wants to cook because this country is now at the 6th grade readable English level throughout the population and who can measure and do the math in using measuring cups and utensils. How about screwing in a light bulb. Do they know how to wipe and I am not talkin a hard drive?

Last Thanksgiving I saw the kids struggle with how to open a can with a can opener. They couldn't do it. No cranberry sauce that day.

The irony..

"These kids cant even open a can of cranberry sauce. harrrrr ha aha!!"
"Back in my day we made cranberry sauce, using cranberries!"
"Shut up mawmaw, you old..."

originally posted by: SlowNail
Hurrhurr, look, the kids can't use those slow, unnecessary things that we rendered obsolete 20 years before they were born.

My 7 year old thinks more logically than this.

They're light years ahead of us. They're coding in primary. They're learning robotics and computer science before we knew what that dial even did.

Behave, grandad.

What loss, childhood, when to be gained, robots.

PERESTROIKA !!!

a reply to: Bluntone22

Yeah, I can't go with that.

We had half the digits and often just picked up and asked someone else to put us through. Want to find a number? Book. Want to take a number? Book.

Takes a lot more skill to master a phone today than back then.

If a catastrophic pulse hits, we're all screwed. A disaster scenario isn't really much of an argument for anything.

If there's a great flood of biblical proportions, are the old-timers going use their skillsets to build us an ark? No, they're going to sit on their arses and blame the young for everything that went wrong. Like always, right upto gurgle gurgle.

a reply to: gallop

What a great idea. Add instructions right onto each piece of toilet paper along with a directional arrow

I saw a 17 year-old kid from the city freak out because the moon was out in the daylight.

And? OP, I was in the same boat as a teenager, I knew what the landline phones were, but a rotary one? I'd never seen one in person before, and had no idea how to use one. The first one I saw was in a museum at about 14 years old. That was in the 90's, so that tech change away from them has been going on a long time.

We do have an emergency corded phone for making 911 calls if we ever need to, but that's all the landline exposure my kids have had. And to be fair, the likelihood of me EVER plugging that old boy in is zero -- I live in an 80 year old house that no longer has an outside phone line connected to it, it was removed 10 years ago. Not one phone jack in my house anymore.

The first time my kids saw a cordless one in a store, they thought it was a TV remote, lol. To be fair, so did I -- the last cordless I ever bought was a LOT more bulky (hello, circa 2000) so these looked very much like remotes to me also.

Rotaries are an archaic technology today. And landlines are dying out, too. There's nowhere NEAR the same breadth of brands available as there were 20 years ago.
Eventually, there won't be anything other than vintage stuff. That's how it goes. When was the last time you played on a Commodore 64? IMO, it's no different from that, s# evolves & dies off as needed.