You want to beat up Billy Idol?
I don’t think it’s weird for people to carry cash, but I think people probably carry less than they used to. When I was a kid, one of my parents went to the bank every week, deposited their pay and kept enough cash to get through the week. That meant enough to do any shopping that needed to be done ( groceries, clothing, drug store, whatever), buy gas , give us spending money , pay for the newspaper delivery etc. Credit cards were only used for large purchases like furniture or car repairs. They probably got about 25% of their combined pay in cash. And they carried it, because the alternative was to leave it home with us.Now, most of the expenses my parents paid cash for I pay by debit- supermarkets,clothing and drug stores all take debit, I pay by debit before I pump the gas , the newspapers automatically debit monthly or quarterly for delivery. Really, all I use cash for is to make small purchases like a cup of coffee or once in awhile to buy lunch. I generally only carry between $20 and $40 at a time- it’s not like it’s difficult to get more if I run out
Something I haven’t seen mentioned yet. I was born in '61. My Dad was a doctor… he smoked. As did most of his doctor friends. There was no such thing as a non-smoking area of a restaurant.
And if someone was diagnosed with cancer of any type the first question was “how much longer do they have.”
You know what my parents version of a remote control was?
ME!! :mad:
Seriously, it didn’t matter what I was doing. My Dad would yell “Hey boy, get in here.” I’d run into the living room “Change the channel” click, click, click “Ok, stop!..” watches for a few seconds “Ok keep going.”
Geesh!!
No way, it’s much harder today. You guys think a cell phone and internet is an improvement, I call it a hassle…and an expensive one at that.
First, email. That’s the worst invention in the past 50 years. People email you, and they expect you to read it and answer. You can’t leave the phone off the hook or unplug it anymore. You can still make excuses with a cell phone, but it’s much harder. How hard is it to keep a cell phone charged nowadays?
Then, let’s talk about cost. Today, I pay $140 a month for cell phone, cable, and internet. Back in the day, I paid $8 for a pager, TV was still free, and land lines were under $30/month. We didn’t have 2 year commitments either. What really burns me is gas and cigarettes. I started smoking and driving the same year, and cigarettes and gas cost the same: $1.20 per gallon or pack.
Lives were simpler, easier, and cheaper…and guess what, we liked it and we survived. Nowadays, I can’t imagine surviving with at least $1k/month income to pay for all this crap just so my wife can call me 24 hours/day to find out where I am.
“We hurtled through the windshield in our flaming pajamas, AND WE LIKED IT!”
Seriously, technology can be a blessing or a curse, and it’s up to the user to control how much it takes over.
E-mail is great. It allows relatively quick communication without both parties having to be available at the same time. All my correspondents know that I may only check mine once a day, after my kids are asleep, so no one expects 1 hour turnaround. Only a few people know my cell number, and I screen calls on the landline with extreme prejudice. We have free TV, which we can still record thanks to . . . new technology!
If we needed to, we could scale things back a lot to save money. We have so much more house than my grandparents did - three bathrooms and each kid gets their own room, plus a guest room and a play room? A dining room and eat in kitchen? A living room and a family room? They would have been shocked. We also have a car for each adult - something that is a relatively recent standard.
As far as inflation goes - you get paid more too. Sure, gas prices are volatile these days, but around the time I was born, there was gas rationing and giant lines to get gas!
As a Gen Xer with a kids, I pity them for one thing - the fact that middle school never ends. By this I mean that when my son gets home from school, the drama is still going on with Facebook, texts and calls to his cell. When I was a kid, I knew that once I got off the bus, I was free until the next day. Calls to someone’s home MIGHT happen, but since you had to go through someone’s parents, they were rare.
All the drama, backstabbing, bitching, etc. NEVER EVER STOPS. It keeps going every single day, for every waking minute.
They might have the tech, but they are paying for it.
Why does a middle school kid need a cell phone? That’s something a parent can control. You can certainly monitor what’s coming and going on it.
That’s something that bothers the hell out of me, and I think younger people take for granted - advertising everywhere, all the time. You paid for cable, so no ads! You paid for a movie, so no ads! That sure didn’t last long.
We go to our local branch and get trip guides for our vacations still. I think they’d do a route for you if you wanted, but Google Maps has that covered pretty well.
A little bit, yeah.
Our parents even had remote controls for going to the store and getting stuff - us. On the upside, sometimes we got to keep the change or buy ourselves some crap, too. I can’t imagine my nieces running to the store to pick up some eggs for their mother now - first off, they’re not allowed out of their parents’ sight. Second, children don’t demean themselves by helping their parents or contributing to the household any longer.
Now you sound like a bitter boomer. Our kids do run errands for us, and each other. Of course, it helps that when I remind them that as long as I pay for their insurance and gas, they must run errands without whining.
Different debate - but even without the cell, there is Facebook and emailing going on. Even if you take your kid off the grid, the conversation among the peers is going on as well. Being taken out of the conversation is also painful to the kids.
Yes - we do lock up the electronica at times - but my point is that the drama never ends nowadays thanks to the many ways that kids can keep in touch with each other after school that simply was not happening when I was a kid.
Bill changers used to work like crap. You would be somewhere and get hungry for a bag of chip or a soda from a vending machine. You get out your wallet and find your only dollar bill was wrinkled or torn. Cross your fingers and feed it in. It would go all the way in, pause and come right back out. Try to to flatten it, feed it back in, and it would come right back out at you. Eventually you would have to try to find someone to exchange your beat up dollar for a newer one.
Now it goes in first time, every time.
Changing channels by hand was no problem. Fine tuning was. You’d have various knobs on your TV, and whenever you switched channels, or atmospheric conditions changed, you’d to to your TV and twiddle with them to get a decent picture. If you touched vertical hold you could get the picture to rotate up and down. I suspect most kids today have never seen snow on a TV set outside of the Winter Olympics. Not only do we not use the controls, they don’t even exist, since it is (rightly) assumed that the software in the TV is smarter than we are.
Bill changers? When I was a kid, they were very rare, since nothing was anywhere close to costing a dollar.
When I was in grad school, it was common practice for those not in computer science to pay someone (often a grad student wife) to type up their dissertations in the proper format. Another student set up runoff to have the right formatting commands for a dissertation, and that is what I used. However, this was before laser printers, so diagrams and equations were a royal pain. One new professor had to run his entire dissertation through a IBM selectric terminal twice in order to get the subscripts printed. With this example, I used nothing but the simplest equations in mine, and made all diagrams printable on a line printer.
Even with a decent terminal, submitting a paper involved printing it in columns, and then cutting and pasting it (with real scissors and real glue) onto a camera ready form. So, in my lab you had a bunch of PHDs doing an excellent simulation of kindergarten students.
I selected a bunch of old papers for a 35th anniversary paper collection for my conference, and I found, while scanning in ones not available in pdf, that people published stuff with corrections and pictures written in by hand.
Yeah, but I HEARD that you could make copies of dollar bills and run them through the machines pretty easily since they were based on some pretty simple technology.
This is how my mother plans trips today, in 2010. I just use mapquest like a normal person. [I’m 30, my mother is 65.]
Well, there was gonorrhea and the clap. “hey there, swingin’ bachelors! Tired of the steady drip…drip…drip… of gonorrhea?”
Rabbit Ears! There was a sense of satisfaction in being able to adjust those suckers just right to make sure you could see the blue in Donny Osmond’s eyes. . . . ahh, puppy love.
Also, it was bizarre that I could rotate a small disk on the main floor and make the antenna on my roof rotate around to accomodate my need to see the Brady Bunch on UHF.
When cable was installed on my street, my mom refused because the MTV was the product of the devil.
Going to the bank was a sense of community. Every Saturday I would go with my mom to deposit their paychecks and plan for the week. We would see the little flower arrangments done by the local florist by each teller’s window, and mom and the teller would chat about what had happened that week. They knew most of the town by name, so the tellers often volunteered to check off the names of voters on Election day - it made the lines faster.
I was watching an episode of The Cosby Show the other day, and Cliff made Theo turn the TV off. Theo offered to turn it down, but Cliff said, “Off!” Theo sighed and turned it off by hand. He had the dining room chairs pushed up to the tv so he could sit close enough to change channels without getting up and still stretch out his legs. And the minute he turned the set off, I remembered what it was like to deal with the warm up time for the tv. precious seconds you waited for that little dot to grow to a whole image . . . .
I’m 41.
I remember when I saw my first CD in high school. Shiny! And, earlier, how long I had to beg my parents to get a VCR. My friend had one before we did, but his family bought a Betamax. Suckers!
Also, we got cable TV around 1986. That was a big deal – we went from six channels (three networks, PBS, two UHF channels) to, like, fifty! And we had MTV (which played music at the time)!