Since I have theater experience, and since I live in a small town, the local school district has asked me to direct the local all-school play. It is a charming little comedy about living in the West Indies in the early 1960s. So I am having to get period clothes and period furnishings for the house set. One of the things I got was an “old fashioned” rotory phone.
When I got to the theater yesterday, my young high-school actors were crowded around the phone oohing and awing about the phone and then they turned to me and asked, “Mr. TV can you teach us how to use this? We’ve seen them but we don’t know how.”
I was stunned. I taught them, and they all went away thanking me. One even said, “My grandpa has one of these in his shop. He’s going to be surprised when I can use it now.”
I was also surprised the other day when a young person asked me what time it was, and he was standing right next to a large standard clock. I pointed that out and he said something to the effect that he was fine with telling time with digital clocks but was not good with analog clocks. He said many of his friends had the same problem.
Reading analog clocks is not as easy as it seems if you’ve never been taught it, and I don’t seem to recall spending more than a few minutes on it in school.
I went to the local PX for Quartermaster socks, nice and thick and warm.
Modern soldiers are about twelve years old, insanely fit and unfailingly polite to old soldiers. Like me. Makes me want to slap them, except they are all insanely fit.
My nieces don’t know how to use a dial phone either. The first time they saw one they just jabbed their fingers in the holes like they were pressing buttons.
I felt old for the first time when a woman on our bowling team was talking to some of her friends about their houses, kids and furniture and she was born the year I graduated from high school.
I just had a moment of complete panic that I’d mislaid my computer reading glasses (as opposed to the other half dozen pairs in the house). They weren’t on my head or tucked into the neck of my sweatshirt.
Thank god I realized they were on my nose before I tore the house apart.
My only real concern was that I wouldn’t be able to get to the store and back before her girlfriend got to my place and found her tied up and naked on my couch.
I would crow over only being as old as I feel, but since I threw my back out, that’s actually kind of working against me. :rolleyes:
A couple of years ago, I came to work. Lying on the countertop was a stack of flyers advertising “Flock of Seagulls”.
When I was in high school, they had several songs in the top ten, and regularly sold out stadiums. Now they play small nightclubs, and they advertise themselves as a “retro” act.
And their lead singer, who was more famous for his hair than for his musical ability, is now as bald as a cueball.
Actually, I started feeling old the first time a high school girl called me “sir”.
Now college girls are starting to do it. :mad: :mad:
Four. I can’t believe I know that. Mommy and Daddy love me 5 pecks (“a bushel and peck”) and a hug around the neck.
I think I may be the last person in the world to wear an analog watch. Actually, it just broke, and I’m pondering whether I should replace it or, like everyone else, just use my cell phone.
About 13 years ago, my son referred to LP’s in a jukebox as “big black CDs!”; and now my daughter refers to her portable CD player as her “iPod” (it isn’t) and the CD’s as “DVDs”. I’ll have to ask him later if he knows how to dial a rotary phone. Surely we watch enough television that he has to have gotten the gist…
My kids saw part of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure the other day and they loved it. Especially the time-traveling phone booth. It was wild how they came up with the idea of having the time traveling device be a pay phone, but it had to be crammed into this little box to take people places!
The fact that a phone booth was meant to evoke a modern, everyday thing (incongruously juxtaposed into historical places and times) was lost on them – for them, the idea of a “phone booth” was just another bit of surrealism.
They did get the Darth Vader reference though, while Bill and Ted are fighting with swords in armor in the medieval castle. “Fwoom… vwoom You’re not my father!!!”
You can pry my analog watch from my cold dead hands, WhyNot. I tried for a little time to go with the cellphone thing but I ended up getting a cheap watch from Target. Watch on wrist has advantage of always being at hand.
I feel old when I see posts like “I was nine when the first Harry Potter came out, tee-hee”. Ugh!
After two days, I’m coming to the same conclusion. Even if it’s in my pocket, it takes, like, 6 whole seconds to get out my cell and wake it up! Who’s got the time, man? Not me, for another 6 seconds!
Seriously - I miss my watch. I think it will be replaced.
:mad: