Older people: amuse me with tales of your hardships in pre-tech days that would seem trivial today

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was born at just the right time that I’m old enough to have witnessed and remember the transition from the analog to digital age, but young enough that my childhood freedom from responsibility spared me most of the really grueling and tedious stuff you all had to do back then that can be accomplished with a few mouse clicks today.

Surely some of you have tales of great lengths you went to to accomplish something in those ancient and barbaric times that would seem utterly ridiculous today. Regale me with them.

2

Looking up stuff.

As in you might have to go to a library, and said library might be days away by chariot.

Otara

3

Cell phones

Long distance phone calls

Pocket calculators

Death of slide rules

4

Most everything was more time-consuming. We wrote letters and mailed things. Long distance phone calls were very expensive and rare events. To apply for jobs, one would actually visit the company, and ask for an application, which you would fill out by hand. There were maybe 5 channels on TV. Newspapers were massive and thick. Everyone got magazines and catalogs in the mail. Instant playback on TV was a thing of wonder. I used a manual typewriter in college. For duplicates, you had to use carbon paper. Records were vinyl, or some used mechanical tapes. Cash registers were basically adding machines on steroids. Games were made of cardboard, paper, and dice. Most school library books were horribly out of date even then. Gas pumps totaled up by mechanical spinning dials, not digital. Construction drawings were done with pens on large paper. They were teaching punch card technology when I was in college. It goes on and on.
Get off of my lawn.

I used to run auctions in which the bidders would mail me the bid (from an ad I placed in a magazine), and at the end of the month, I would determine the high bid, and write a letter back for payment. Then they would send me a check, which I would deposit. After a week or two, if the check clears, then you would mail the winnings. Ridiculous by today’s standards.

Man, now I feel old.

5

There was a thing called “white out” that had to be tediously applied to spelling errors made with a machine called a “typewriter.”

6

Yeah, I know what these things are. I was hoping for some more personal stories, like a time you remember being especially frustrated or miserable over something, so that I may snicker at your suffering safely from a distance.

7

This is pretty funny.

8

The first one that comes to mind is trying to find someplace in an unfamiliar area without GPS, or course, but without even a map. Maybe, if you were lucky, you had decent directions. Otherwise it was trial and error, stopping and asking locals, calling the destination and saying “I’m next to a Denny’s on Hwy 17, am I anywhere near the right place?”.

Hell, finding a pay phone (that worked) was sometimes a chore. Now, of course, it’s impossible but mostly unnecessary.

Writing letters. I never wrote letters because I hated the amount of time it took, and I felt that the cost of a stamp required more than just a few lines; but when I was away at college I was obliged to write fairly long and fairly frequent letters home. If I had had email, it would have been so much easier.

Shopping for something specific. If I needed something I would have to go to a store that might carry that thing, and if they didn’t, maybe they would have some idea of who did. You could do this on the phone, of course, but that wouldn’t work if you didn’t know the right name for the thing you wanted (something for the kitchen, say, or some kind of hardware). Now you can just throw a few search terms into Google and you’ll probably get at least one hit that will help you narrow your search down and find tons of retailers who sell whatever it is. (The flip side of this is that stores seemed to carry more variety then; now a lot of stores seem to carry lots of the top 10 popular items, and expect you to find anything else online.)

Comparison shopping. You pretty much had to go physically store to store, and remember what you saw at the other stores and how much it was.

Music on LPs was a pretty dodgy experience (in my opinion). As soon as you opened and played a record, it was used and the more you played it the more used it got. I’ll say this for digital, it may lack that last 0.5% of nuance, but it sounds as good the 100th time you play it as the first time.

Listening to music on the go - I was a kid when the first cheap small transistor radios came out, AM only. We thought that was so cool. Later there were boom boxes. Later still were the first Walkman models, with cassette tapes. I had a reel-to-reel in the 60’s, but I was so glad when cassettes came along because they were actually portable (I never had 8-track so I can’t speak to that).

Dealing with emergencies away from home (see finding a working pay phone above).

When I was a kid we had a party line for a while. There were times you couldn’t make a call when you needed to, because someone else was on the line!

Traveling - you could submit yourself to the tender mercies of airline reservation phone numbers, or use a travel agent. Both sucked.

Restaurant reservations required you to call, often wait on hold, and then talk to someone who treated you with contempt and didn’t get the reservation right.

I’m sure there are lots more, this will do for now.
Roddy

p.s. sorry if you wanted stories, my memory doesn’t work that well any more

9

Doctors would physically write onto paper records, kept in a huge wad on a clipboard.

Oh, wait…

10

When I lived in Berlin there was one payphone in the student home for several hundred students. It rarely worked. The next nearest payphone was a ten-minute walk away. So we all trooped there and queued for a couple of hours at a time. In knee-high snow. People would go in groups, bring drinks, make it a social thing. For proper long phone calls I would travel to a friend’s house on the other side of the city - it was quicker.

11

That was stupid funny!

12

Now that’s what I’m talking about! Great mental image.

13

If you heard a song you liked on the radio you had to hope the DJ would say who played it and what song it was. Otherwise you could be left guessing for days or weeks (or try and get through to the radio station). Then if you wanted to buy said song you would have to go down to the record store and hope they had the album you wanted in stock. Otherwise you would be left waiting for days or weeks again.

Finding and getting a song takes maybe 10 seconds now online.

Oddly, the old way was more satisfying because you would really cherish those albums after working so hard to get them.

14

I was in the band in the mid-80s. Every month, to announce upcoming gigs, we would: hand-draw a quarter-page postcard with the info (who had a computer that did graphics?), go to the copy shop to make 3 copies (who had a printer?) to lay out on one page, have the copy shop print them out on cardstock, cut the cardstock in quarters on the paper cutter, and then hand-write all the mailing addresses from a list (who had an e-mail account?), stamp them, and drop them in the mail (uphill both ways). I wouldn’t call it grueling but it was tedious, took several hours all told, and could be accomplished on a computer in probably 3 minutes now.

15

When I was in high school, my birthday present one year was a phone. Not my own phone, mind you, but simply a blue princess extension phone that could be plugged into an outlet in my room so that I could talk on the phone while sitting on my bed (although I had to stretch the cord somewhat uncomfortably to reach). I was only allowed to use it for local calls, and I had to get off of it whenever my parents wanted to make a call. I was thrilled.

16

Working for lawyers, having to retype a page of a will if there was a typo. Erasures and white-outs weren’t allowed in a will. If you made a typo, you retyped the page.

Retyping multi-page documents in general, often at the last minute, to meet a filing deadline.

Oh! Like the time I was typing a 50+ page brief on a DEC – a “dedicated” word processor – printed it out but hadn’t saved it correctly.* The attorney made minor changes and gave it back, said “I’m glad you’re a fast typist, because I have a plane to catch.” I go to call up the brief and it’s gone. Just gone.

*There was a systems disc and a document disc (big floppies), the command keys were gold-colored – the damn system cost $20K and wasn’t much better than a memory typewriter. What a POS.

17

I remember getting separated from my mom at the state fair one year. We looked for each other for an exhausting two hours. Cell phones have made it so much easier to split up in busy places and then meet up again.

18

There were a couple of term papers that took me several drafts to get the typing right, so that it took probably a few more hours to get completed, maybe an extra day worth of work. The first time I used a word processing program on a proper computer in college, I was in love. Instead of using white-out or typing film, and only having a few shots at it before having to throw out a page and start over (since having half the page covered in corrections looked crappy, and some teachers even set upper limits per-page) I could go back that instant and correct it. No more hand-written drafts. I could write something, give it a day or so to percolate, come back to it with fresh eyes and correct in place in a fraction of the time it used to take to do a revised draft.

When I got my driver’s license I used to have to take my sisters to the mall. Mom insisted. Meeting them was hellish. They’d never be on time, never be where they were supposed to be, and I’d have to walk around the whole fucking mall looking for them. Half the time they’d lie and say they were there waiting for me. Now, I’d call or message them and remind/warn them that I was coming to pick them up, and call my mom to tell her that they weren’t where they were supposed to be and I was going to leave their asses there if they didn’t show up in the next 10 minutes.

19

Had a four -party phone line as a kid. Fine if you wanted to know your granny’s and aunt’s business, not so much if you wanted to have a confidential conversation.

Also, getting information for school reports and such: 12 miles to the local library, use the card catalog to find a few books, hand copy notes and bibliography cites, or pay for photocopies, go home and handwrite or type the report.

20

Losing track of the car at large theme parks with 20 acre parking lots. Now there are apps to tag your cars location and will point you right to it when you go to leave.