What is this all about?
If you have something you want to say to me, just say it.
Actually, you’d be surprised what you can find out. No, you can’t find out what condition someone is in, or what test results came back, but if you call patient information, you can easily find out a patients room number, what part of the hospital they are in (pulmonary, ICU, transplant, day surgery etc), if there is family in the waiting area. A few hospitals, upon asking for a patient room number will simply connect you to their room and let you ask them yourself, but most will give this up pretty freely. Of course, this is system is in place so people can can find family members as well as florists being able to find patients. There’s not a lot of wiggle room to abuse that system, the only thing I can really think of is if you told someone you were going into the hospital for, say, knee surgery and they called to send you flowers and found out you were in the cancer surgery area.
I don’t know what the HIIPA rules regarding this are, but all the major hospitals around me allow you to call up and get patient room numbers without batting an eye.
(Maybe I’m mis-remembering a jacked up experience I had last summer, where I got zero information when I called. but that was for a mentally deficient adult who wouldn’t come to the phone, and no one would tell me what was going on with his mental or physical health. They did admit he was there, but that was it.) Just calling the hospital and asking to be connected to so-and-so’s room sometimes works, you are right.
If you see a USA Today box on a street corner, you know the movie came out in 1983 or later.
For me the instant dating, if nothing else, is the width of men’s lapels. The wider the lapel, the older the movie. It’s almost a more durable method of dating than hair or eyeglass styles, but put the three together and you can get within a 2-3 year period.
The other thing that comes to mind is the wardrobe styling of films set in futuristic utopias or dystopias. In films from the 60s, all futuristic societies featured people wearing metallic fabrics. In 70s films, it was all jumpsuits, all the time. By the mid-80s, films had pretty much given up on “future clothing” with the exception of tech-in-clothing like super textiles and the like, and were most likely to indicate a dystopia simply by having everyone in dark, drab colors.
In addition to everyone who’s weighed in, I defy you to go buy a set of cordless phones for your household that doesn’t have a (potentially superfluous) answering system in the “base” unit if it has more than two handsets. We shopped around for one last summer and couldn’t find a single one. We have the answering machine set to answer after 10 rings, voicemail answers after 4/5, so it’s the backup for when Verizon does something stupid (as they are wont to do frequently) and pulls the plug on our voicemail (as they’ve done thrice in the last five years) and we need a failsafe.
Also confirming that this is still done in Europe. My favorite hotel in London has regular keys on foot long rods that you turn in and pick up. They’re not kept in plain sight, though, but in an arcane cubby system without any visible correlation to the actual floor/room layout.
Along with the lapels is ties. In the 40’s we had the very very short ties, in the 60’s narrow ties, in the 70’s wide ties. I know the type of knots played into it as well, but I can’t tell one from another.
Any movie set in the “future” where the computer screens are green-tinted, chunky-pixeled Apple IIe-style.
Whever I’ve been hospitalized I’ve been verbally asked if I wanted to “be listed in the hospital’s directory”. I always decline. For the hospital to share actual medical information with anyone I needed to sign a HIPA waiver that indentified the person by name. The last time I was in hospital I expressly told my mother (who drove me to the emergency room) that I didn’t want any visitors. Naturely Mom went ahead and told a whole bunch of relatives that I was in Hospital X, but didn’t give out the room number. So the next day my brother, aunt, and one neice showed up, and asked reception for my room number. Since I wasn’t in the directory the receptionist had to call my room to ask if she could give them my room number. I politely responed that I would sue the hospital if she even confirmed I was a patient. That was that, they went away confused, and I got a very angry phone call from my mother.
This is supposed to be the standard for all American hospitals, as evidenced by the one where my wife works. It’s worth your job (or at least discipline/suspension) if you give ANY info on ANY patient.
I’ve had friends come up to me and say “Your wife was wonderful when I was in for that vasectomy! I’m sure she told you about the doctor with the toupee we were joking about…” And I have to say “Uh, sorry, I didn’t even know you were there…” Because she can’t tell me a thing.
I am, of course, leaving aside my sympathy for your aunt (who just wanted to bring you a Tupperware bowl of her homemade chicken broth). But you were clearly within your rights.
And, just to prove I am on topic, it really does date those old hospital shows, even ones like Emergency!– as does a lot of casual disregard for protocol/cleanliness in hospitals portrayed in the 70s and before.
Body hair.
Less flesh was exposed in decades before but in the 70s & much of the 80s hairly chests etc were common - since then, they’re the follicles that dare not speak their name.
In “adult” video . I’m still bemused by the almost total elimination of pubic hair , to the extent that, a women who is not shaved , is considered some of “fetish” . How times change. when I was growing up it was so normal in porn even Playboy type mags.
Tattoos are another marker for 90s onwards -
Remember the original Miracle on 34th Street? When the mother gets home while the Thanksgiving parade is still going on, she asks her housekeeper where Susan, her daughter is. And she finds out that the kid is visiting alone to the apartment of one of their neighbors, a single man, stranger to them really. And the mom isn’t upset about that, but that the guy is talking to the kid about Santa Claus.
The packaging on products, particularly Pepsi cans
Movie posters and book titles
Video game systems
I remember reading about a university’s Interior Design studies department that had a huge collection of vintage porn. It enabled their students to have reference material for how homes and apartments were actually decorated, rather than the idealized version presented by Hollywood.
In Back To The Future Michael J. Fox asks for a “Pepsi Free”, a moronic bit of product placement for their then-new sugar free variant. That dated the film immediately, as the product name changed in two years.
Thought of another one: computer graphics. However, there’s been a recent trend to use the old monochrome graphics again, I guess they’re cheap/easy to animate.
No, not really. It is just a stylistic choice. The building objects and animating them is the expensive part - processing power has gotten to the point where game systems blow away former state of the art rendering quality.
Actually my guess is that “real” computer screens show up poorly on film. If you film a computer screen, you see those refresh lines going up/down the screen, therefore, any computer screen in a film must have been animated.
It really is amazing how quickly cell phones turned some movies and TV shows into period pieces. We were watching Buffy, and it seemed every other episode someone had to tear over to someplace to warn someone of the terrible thing that was about to happen, only OH NO, it’s too late! And this was a series from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.
One of the plot points in “Curious George” involves someone taking a picture of some archeological site with their cell phone. And this was supposed to be a perfectly normal unremarkable thing. Except it proves that we’re living in THE FUTURE! And kids today don’t realize it!
It’s still common practice here in Japan. I always figured it was to prevent guests from losing their keys while out.
He also asks for a Tab, which hardly anyone drinks nowadays. Certainly I’ve never been to a restaurant that serves it.
Part 2 I believe, where his future son (played by Fox) orders the pepsi free.