I don’t remember those at all! But IIRC beer commercials in the old days weren’t allowed to show anyone actually drinking the beer, so the ad guys had to come up with creative concepts.
I believe in the U.S., it’s still true. No one drinks beer in beer commercials. I’m not sure what the source of the rule is. Googling, it appears to be a totally voluntarily “guideline.”
Ah, that explains why I’ve seen some drinkin’ going’ on in the last few years. People aren’t necessarily following the “guidelines”.
A surprising number of our new neighbors have those metal boxes on their porches for dairy delivery. I hadn’t seen any of those in over 40 years. I don’t know if they put cash/checks in the box. I’ll have to ask.
I remember our dairy farming relatives putting notes and money among the milk cans for the dairy truck driver requesting things like butter (figures) and eggs (what?).
Re: soda caps. I remember cork, never cardboard.
Dadgummit! I did write ‘cardboard’ instead of ‘cork’.
Ditto, though I got it at the beginning of my senior year in high school.
My first calculator had LEDs, did only simple arithmetic, and had to be plugged in. Before that, I used one of these.
Between school and university, I had a job clerking in the local council’s housing rents office (yes, local government still directly administered large amounts of social housing), basically reconciling what the rent collectors (yes, they still went door to door collecting cash) had banked against what they were supposed to have collected from each property. This meant totting up and comparing two columns of figures on mechanical adding machines (and if there was a single penny discrepancy, we had to manually compare the printouts to spot and correct the error) - adding machines like this.
But the ones we had were so light that if you worked up any speed you ended up chasing the machine round your desk
And now I come to think of it, later I had a job in the era before computers and word-processors, that required Gestetner wax stencil sheets for printing up form letters (of which there were many), with a boss who went by the economy-mindedness of the 1940s, and insisted on re-using previous years’ stencils, and expecting the typists to use correcting fluid (the fumes!) to change dates and other details. I held the store of them all, in a special metal filing box.
“Everyone in the region was given a copy of the book” – for free!
“If you didn’t want to be in the book, you had to ask to be left out.” – Worse, you had to PAY to be left out!
In the other direction: we kept our diaries on paper – and they came with cases which we kept locked. Nobody else was supposed to read your diary. A very close friend might be offered the option, but even that was unusual.
Somebody else’s knowing your address and phone number meant – that they knew your address and phone number. It didn’t get them any other information about you. And to send you mail they had to pay postage on every piece, and somebody had to put it in an envelope; and to call you up a live human had to call each person individually.
And if they wanted to look in your back yard, somebody had to go there in person; and risk a tresspassing charge.
My dad was a produce manager at a supermarket. Before the days of electronic calculators, he had to lug home a monstrosity like this one to do the inventory.
I recall using these as well. Not in a grocery store setting but I do recall we had them.
Use to be when you went to a filling station (they still call them filling stations, right?) you had to drive across a black rubber hose that caused a bell to ring inside, telling the attendant there was a customer outside who needed their tank filled, windshield washed and oil and tires checked. All the kids in the car would pile out and start jumping up and down on the hose, making the bell ring. Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!
I do understand the term, but it never heard it used in the NY/NJ area. Normal people call/called it a gas station, and a minority say/said service station. No change over the decades in my experience.
But yes, I do remember those hoses. (There must be another term for them, but I can’t imagine what.) I wonder why they aren’t around any more. The simple answer is that they are useless at a self-serve pump, but self-serve is still illegal in NJ and yet those hoses have gone away anyway.
Those hoses are still alive and well around here at filling stations + mechanics in towns that refuse to permit the gas+convenience “chain” stations.
Full service only, prices 60-80 cents higher than the “chains” on the larger arterial roads. Very few gas customers, the hoses are needed to alert the mechanics that a sheep has wandered in to be fleeced.
Filling stations used to have free air for your tires too. Now we have those anemic feed me quarters machines that hardly put out any volume.
I don’t think self-serve has anything to do with it. The type of gas station where I saw those hoses (and still sometimes do ) were the type that
- didn’t have a convenience store
- mostly did repairs
- had only two pumps mostly as a convenience to repair customers and had higher prices that stations that didn’t do repairs.
and the hose was needed to alert someone working in the repair shop that someone wanted gas. Self-service stations don’t need the hose and neither do gas stations that are busy enough to have someone dedicated to pumping gas.
Nobody will ever realize the intense concentration it took to carry a filled ice cube tray from the sink to the freezer.