Behold…children, teenagers, and Millenials struggle to operate obsolete…but at one time, ubiquitous…technology.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rotary+phone
LOL
My kitchen wall phone is rotary. I can’t dial it anymore since getting AT&T UVERSE. It doesn’t recognize dial pulses. I can answer that phone. I keep it mostly for nostalgia.
I don’t understand why younger people have trouble with rotary phones? It’s obvious that to dial a 6 you put your finger in the hole. Can’t they figure out you turn the wheel until it stops?
I have a rotary phone lying about. I’d use it, only there’s a loose wire in the handset and I don’t know if I have the skills to fix it.
Because children not having trouble with a rotary phone doesn’t get clicks.
Which is how a rotary phone works.
Getting clicks.
They will stare at it.
They will poke their fingers in the holes…and let go, like the holes were buttons.
They will wind up the rotor by grabbing it with their entire hand and twist it.
They will try to wind the rotor counter-clockwise.
They will start by putting their finger in the 0 and stopping at the 3 instead of starting at the 3 and going all the way until their finger can’t move anymore (that little silver finger-stop…whatever that’s called ;))
And they will do all this WITHOUT picking up the receiver to their ear.
Don’t they even know how to click the cradle a few times and ask the operator?
Remember how satisfying it was to slam the handset onto the hook? 
Great way to release stress and the Ma Bell phones were practically indestructible. They took a lot of abuse without needing servicing.
I remember being frustrated getting a busy signal. After redialing a few times I’d spin that wheel hard. Getting a sore finger as it hit the stop.
Good times. 
Show them a candlestick phone and see what happens
My question is: “Have they never watched an old movie with a rotary phone?”
I mean, I’d know that older phone systems required me to actually talk to an operator to connect me with something, and I’d know how to use a candlestick phone as well, solely from watching old movies.
Millenials seem… special. I don’t know if it’s just gloating articles written to make them look that way, or if it’s a real thing, but I see more stuff about them being barely functional in the adult world than for any other group.
Stuff like this:
or the idea that there are “adulting” classes for millenials. WTF? You need a class to explain how to have your shit minimally together enough to function? What did your parents do all those years when you were growing up?
In the last few years before cell phones were everywhere, I still had all the numbers memorized that I would need on a daily basis (work, best friend, best friend’s work, boss’s home, Domino’s, tennis court, dance studio, kids’ doctor, kids’ schools, etc.). I had a rotary dial phone downstairs that I rarely used, but when I used it I realized that the system I used to memorize numbers in those days was more of the pattern, and there were some numbers I couldn’t remember if I dialed them on the rotary phone rather than punched them into the other phones. So I would sit there and stare at it for a moment–what do I do? But I always figured it out.
Yeah. Right after divestiture I went to a talk about how to manufacture Western Electric phones so that they’d be less solid, since fewer people wanted to rent them.
Fun fact about rotary phones - you could dial them by clicking the handset the appropriate number of times fast. 1 click for 1, 10 for 0.
Fun to do once. At MIT we had rotary phones for our in-dorm network, which used only five numbers, so easier to do it there.
In my opinion, fake and staged, like a huge percentage of the videos that “go viral” on social media.
For the vanishingly few remaining rotary phones, the least we can do is post instructions on how to use them - in cursive handwriting. 
Everything! that’s why they cant do anything for them selves.
I was walking by my Junior High school (grades 7 & 8) a while back, and was amazed to see the old bike rack still where it always was. I think it might even be the same one from 40 years ago. The amazing thing, tho, was there was not one bike locked to it. NOT ONE! Not only that, but there was a line of cars waiting to pick up the kids. These are 13 & 14 year olds! At a school that serves an area of maybe a 2 mile radius! In a suburb! now I know I’m treading dangerously close to old man territory (I have to regularly remind myself to stop shaking my fist at the world) but COME ON! If your 14yo cant even get to school and home again by themselves what hope is there for them to actually do something that may actually require effort?
(grumble grumble)
mc
If it is a public telephone, the kids also need to get their hands on some of those little metal discs.
We had a rotary phone in the kitchen years ago.
Sometimes a friend of the kids would want to call home. The stares they gave the phone trying to get their head around what they were looking at were priceless.
But they all figured it out within a few seconds. It’s not rocket science*.
- Umm, just ignore those things above the grids of buttons. (I knew someone who did wiring on those things.)
When I moved to the Antelope Valley in '76, they had five-digit dialing. The prefixes in Lancaster were 94x. So you could dial, say, 3-5583 and get connected. But Palmdale, seven miles away, was a long-distance call that required dialing a ‘1’, and then the seven-digit number (1-947-xxxx).
That reminds me of this music video (about 3:20) where the star has to step into a phone booth to make a call on her cell phone.
And really frustrating is that there is a row of payphones in the baggage claim of the SFO airport that has seats and little counters in front of them to make it convenient to use them and there are always millennials in the seats with junk spread out on the counters using their cell phones. There’s plenty of other seating in the area since they remodeled it a couple of years ago. These people are just oblivious to the function of the phones or that someone might want to use it.
And there was the argument I had with a popular “urbanist” blog writer who contended that the new mass transit fare collection system was oppressive to the poor because you had to either log in to the internet or make a phone call to get your deposit refunded. He claimed that there were no public payphones in the entire city (he didn’t know where to find one) and the poor didn’t have access to phones or internet.