They still haven’t idiot-proofed most things.
I’m a certified idiot who can’t perform many simple tasks, but it has long seemed to me that many, many tasks could have been made much simpler by making instructions much easier to read. For example I was just taking apart my CPAP machine for cleaning (admittedly we didn’t have CPAP machines when I was a kid, but this is just an example) and every friggin time I need to do this, for cleaning, I always have to take considerable time out to figure out how to get it apart, where to pick interlocking parts to release them, how to press on other parts to unstick them, etc. THE manufacturer could easily have written instructions right on the machine with little arrows (better yet, BIG arrows) in RED INK saying “PUSH HERE” but no. Every time I have to figure out how to do it.
Color-coding would help me too. There are about four separate devices installed that make my TV work, and all of them are black. When I have to call my cable company to get my TV service going again (a whole other issue—I need to call about four times every year, at a minimum) they ask me things like “Is there a green light on the combonitatrator?” or tell me “Unplug your detumbling medom” when I can’t tell which part is which. But if one of them were green and orange, I think I could take a stab at it.
And the serial numbers! They are printed in gray on the black devices in tiny print, and the cable people want me to read them off to them. Like they couldn’t possibly have printed them in white letters, and big ones too?
We did have DVDs when I was younger—has anyone figured out a better way to design DVD boxes so that it’s possible to get a DVD out of or into the case without getting your greasy fingers all over the playing surface? Or boxes in general? Why are all boxes made so difficult to open? I’d imagine that the first few poorly designed boxes that required a pair of scissors, an exacto blade, a chisel, a completed course in body-building and an engineering degree to open up would have alerted them to make easier the process of extracting your purchase from the box? It’s like the people who design these things read the angry letters from highly dissatisfied customers and conclude “Hmmm, seems like we aren’t pissing off as many people as we could these days.”
There’s also a weird belief that there were very few fat people back then. But growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I distinctly remember lots of fat people. My 7th grade English teacher must have weighed at least 250 pounds, and she was in her 30s and short-statured. Yet we didn’t give it a second thought.
Did anyone ever invite someone to hang out, but that person said no because they didn’t want to miss the new episode of [whatever show]? Or, maybe you said no to people for that reason. Seeing how we didn’t have streaming services and we couldn’t watch the new episodes at our own pace.
Another example of people ignoring each other before social media/modern Internet.
I remember one afternoon I told my friend I couldn’t come out to play, because I had to take a nap so Mom would let me stay up to watch Gone With the Wind.
I’m visiting my mother and I’m sitting in the same dining room that I sat in sixty years ago.
Of course, I’m posting on an online message board so that’s different.
Table-top RPGs and Wargames are very much the same, though that’s given that individual games were always changing. But many of the settings (Grayhawk, Forgotten Realms, Warhammer 40k) are still the same, given a never ending release of whatever the New Hottness Edition / Mini / Setting was. And new an exciting games/settings come up with novel rules, grow big, and then maybe bust and die only to be reborn.
But while I haven’t had a local TT-RPG group in years, when my friends play (without me, bad cess!) or I see an online group playing, I could swap myself in from 40 years ago and it would feel the same, even if the rules had evolved.
Maaaaybe a bit healthier towards girl gamers, though that did then, and does now, vary a lot by the group.
Confirmed today: Chocolate milk is still completely awesome.
I wake up in the morning to a clock radio, as I have since I was eight years old. The only change to that is, in 1988, when I was in graduate school, I switched from the analog General Electric clock radio my parents had give me, to a digital General Electric clock radio; I’ve been using that same radio for 38 years now.
I don’t remember having a GE analog clock but I do remember having a digital GE clock radio. In fact, it worked perfectly fine until 10 or so year ago when the numbers started to fade. I bought a new one (not GE, I couldn’t find one), but the alarm on it started to not always work in like a month. So now I have to choose between telling the time or getting up when I need to. I am shy of getting another one in case it too breaks in a month. So now when I really need to get up on time, I set my alarm clock but also set my cell phone alarm.
I’m fortunate that mine hasn’t suffered from that yet, though there is one LED in the clock face (the “ones” digit for hours) which flickers and dims a bit when I turn the alarm on. I will be sad when this clock radio finally gives up the ghost – the picture below is the model I have, though the printing along the controls is largely rubbed away on mine.
I had an analog. It looked like this:
If that’s not the exact model I had from ~1973 to 1988, it’s close.
I’ve used the same ones for years and years on end but that’s a grandpa of a clock. It’s always the same cause of death: the buttons stop working reliably over time. My previous one had wires hanging out by the end where I’d soldered in a snooze button bypass.
I’ll say it again: there’s a little man with bright, red eyes living inside your clock/radio and at one minute past ten o’clock he’s looking out at you.