“Don’t change the channel, don’t touch the dial” are the first two lines of the chorus. 
Well, Sky was satellite, not cable. 
That and the fact that there were actual payphones everywhere. Cell phones have replaced payphones. So yeah, there are cases where you need a cell phone when you wouldn’t have before, since you could’ve just walked up to a payphone instead.
I, for one, am simply horrified that today’s youth neither knows how to pluck a chicken to prepare for dinner OR could even explain how to use a butter churn. A butter churn! Who doesn’t know how to church butter? Freaking kids these days!
I’m 28, and I do know how to churn butter (though not using a butter churn).
I’m about to shake my cane at you something fierce.
Today’s kids don’t know how to tell time with antenna rotors either.
The whole neighborhood would take on a background noise of humming and whirring at 5:30 as every TV antenna on the block spun around so Dad could tune in the evening news. This was a signal to all kids to run home and get cleaned up for dinner.
Tsk. Modern old ladies get artificial hips. Get with it, grandma!
Not just that, but sometimes it’s even trickier trying to find one that’s in service. One night when my phone died, and I needed to make a call, I stopped at three gas stations before I could do it. The first two had phones physically there, but out of service.
{Twitch}I still have nightmares about trying to dial a telephone number and not being able to get it right.
Funnily enough, I don’t have nightmares about manual or electric typewriters, and typing the whole goddamned page and making a mistake two lines from the bottom and having to start all over again.
Typa-what now?
…or milk a cow. Or sew. Or use a hammer, which reminds me…
I was watching this home improvement show… and they were running out of time on the renovation because the electricity was out, and they couldn’t use their power-tools. I kept screaming at the screen… “there’s a #&/#/! HAMMER right next to your hand. You don’t NEED a &#”/ nail-gun."
I’ve never needed to pluck a chicken or churn butter with a butter churn, but I do know enough to be able to do it if I needed to. I can determine the the need, recognize the gizmo, and figure out the how-to.
I have a young second cousin who found a washboard in the backyard of a family cottage and couldn’t identify it, or even hazard a guess about it’s possible function.
My mom still swears that her wringer washer was the best washing machine she’s ever had. That’s probably another thing the young’uns wouldn’t get - a wringer washer? That you feed the clothes through by hand? This might look familiar to some of youse.
I think that’s understandable. I’ve seen people in India *using[/] washboards and I still don’t fully understand how they’re supposed to work.
Punched IBM cards.
When I was in college, these were used for registering for classes. You had to go from department to department all over campus, picking up one IBM card for each class you wanted.
If a class was to be in a small lecture hall, there would be, say, 100 cards for “Renaissance Art History, Tuesday and Thursday at 10 a.m. with Dr. Frieberg.” Unless you ran over to the Fine Arts buildng and grabbed one of those 100 cards, you were out of luck. Then you’d have to run to the English Department to try to pick up the card for that particular Lit class you wanted. When all your cards were collected, they would go in an envelope with your name and Student ID number on it and get taken to the Administration Building.
How do students register for classes now?
Our family still has my grandmother’s woodburning stove. No, not the kind you keep in the cottage for warmth, I mean her big, white kitchen, cooking stove. The one she used to bake pie and cook dinner (a lot like this one but without the tall back part). No “low, medium, and high settings” it was all based on instinct and experience. There is a thermometer on the door of the oven, but i’ts not very accurate. It’s in perfect shape because she took really good care of it and swore that it was the best oven she ever used.
Oh, I also have a young relative who was flummoxed by a linen towel roller in a diner restaurant.
Online. Florida state universities use PeopleSoft (now Oracle) software, which I think is pretty typical.
Same deal, though - if there are 100 seats available for a class, and you’re the 101st person to try to sign up, you’re SOL unless you can get in during add/drop or get the professor to let you in.
A while back I saw an article about a small company that still manufactures washboards. Apparently they were getting a bunch of orders from American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.