"You're Old!!!" moments
 

Have you ever had somebody say something to you that made you feel old all of a sudden? My first such moment was about 10 years ago when I was interviewing a student to work in the college computer lab I managed, and she called me "Sir."

Most recently, this afternoon we were doing some almost-last-minute Christmas shopping at the mall. I was looking for a hat for myself, and I was at a department store examining a grey fedora and calculating the sale price. As I stood there with the hat in my hand, a chick-let dressed like a somewhat younger, not-as-rich version of Paris Hilton went by with a guy. They paused for a moment, and then walked on. As they passed, the girl said, "No, not those hats... we need the kind of stuff young people would wear!" :cool:

The summer of 2000 showed me that either I was getting old, or that I worked with a bunch of crackhead college kids. I'm going to go with the latter...and keep in mind, this was in suburban Washington, DC.

The company I worked for at the time marketed products to college kids...and during the summer (our busy season), we had quite a few college kids working with us.

One day, one of the girls that worked for us was inviting some coworkers to a party at her apartment later that night. It wasn't something I would have went to anyway, but I made a half-joking, half-smartassed remark, "Damn, don't I get an invite?" Her reply was, "No offense, Terry, but you're old"...and she sounded so serious when she said it.

At the time this incident occurred, I was 24, and had only been out of college for a year and a half. :(

It's all good though...I probably make more than any of them at this point anyway...stupid motherfuckers.

Nope, not me.:blunt:

My forensic sciences teacher was telling the class one day that when he was in college, ballpoint pens had <i>just</i> come out, and everyone was all up in arms because they said it would "ruin people's handwriting". Apparently, back then, everyone still used ink and quill.

And despite the rudeness, I actually said, "My God.. how <b>old</b> are you???"

I'm twenty-four, now, and I can say I've experienced similar things as of late. Two years ago, I returned to my high school to visit and speak with my old Chemistry teacher. Students were still milling about even after classes were over with and they overheard me talking about college and how classes were treating me. I'm not sure how we got on the topic, but the student looked at me strangely when I mentioned cassette tapes.

"You know, for music?"
"Huh?"

Yep -- after further questioning, I found out that the graduating class of 2002 only knows compact discs. They have never owned magnetic media for music.

Another extremely depressing moment happened in my undergraduate psych class just this recent semester. The discussion: episodic memory storage. The instructor was trying to find a way to explain to the class that instructional memory is not stored in the same way you store episodic.

"Episodic, you see, is when something dramatic happens", he said after stomping on the stage loudly to make everyone jump, "and there are some things you will never forget. You know, like Challenger -- I will never forget exactly where I was when I saw it lift off and explode and neither will you."

The class, at this point, was giving him confused looks. Someone in the back raised their hand and said it would be better if he used September 11th as the example because "I was, like, one year old at the time, but my parents told me all about it".

Shit.

I refuse to accept that the kids from the class of 2002 are clueless about cassette tapes. Vinyl, I could almost understand their confusion, but not cassettes. They have to be some dumbass kids to not know cassettes. Most of their parents probably have cassette players in their cars.

Ten years from now, yeah, then I'll believe the cassette is something they might view as a curiosity seen only on Antiques Roadshow.

Actually, the getting old thing for me was duly noted when I raged at a supermarket checker for attempting to card me for cigarettes. When I was in my thirties, I got carded for alcohol (which I thought was cool), but this was too much. It was early in the morning. I was running late, I was obviously NOT 18, and my ID was in the car.

Some other highlights: Rotary Dial phones, Burnt Sienna as a Crayola Color, and Play-Doh comes in more than four colors (but at least it still smells the same).

And on the "flashbulb" memory example ...

Your experience shows a shift also ... the KEY event was always "where were you when Kennedy was shot?"

I think not having my own kids has allowed me to feel more in suspended animation- there arent the daily markers...yet.
But a few years ago, one of my former elementary school students introduced himself to me in a bar. That was a wierd kinda time lapse. I didnt know him all growed up. But then, after he started talking, I could see the 12 year old smart alec in there. Turned into a cool guy.

Also, just last week when watching a 18 year old NHL player skate the warmup, it dawned on me that the parka I was wearing is older than him. and its a great parka.

I was told by my cousins (14 & 15) that I'm REALLY old just yesterday. I tried to explain my bouncing rubber ball of life theory to them but they don't get it.

Here's the theory...

When you bounce a rubber ball it bounces high and with each bounce it bounces lower and faster than the bounce before. Life is like this. When you're a child, a year seems like a very long time, and the older you get the faster the years go by until it seems like they're whizzing by faster than you can believe. You don't feel older inside, but your body starts having trouble doing the same things you did before easily. It takes longer to recover from injuries, etc.

My theory on why time flies is this:

As we get older, our attention spans increase. We become more accustomed to long periods of time going by without anything interesting happening, and (thanks to the wonderful world of work) are placed in such situations more often than when we were kids.

All of a sudden, the summer's over, and we think "How can it be fall already? It seems like Memorial Day was just yesterday." That's because we've done things that are useful to us, but often not all that much that's out of our daily routine.

Compare this to the kid who's been a little ball of energy over that period; to him, the summer vacation lasts forever (though it's still not long enough when it's time to go back to school), because he's been doing one thing after another after another during those months (and if he ISN'T occupied, he's squirming in his seat, ready to bolt off to something that _is_ interesting).

Signs of aging: My cousins have a Sega Dreamcast, and I (their decrepit gaming uncle) offered to put together an Atari 2600 emulator disc for it. They'd never _heard_ of the 2600.

Time Flying
 

I subscribe to the theory that the main reason time goes more slowly for kids is that each minute represents a larger percentage of the total time they can remember.

Heh, heh, heh.:thumb:

Well - I know I'm old - the three kids were in the backseat and Janet Jackson's "Control" came on the radio. I quizzed them on who it was and they were like "Brittney Spears?" Then I told them who it was.

"Oh - is that on the new album?" Uh no. It was on an album in the 1980's. "Really? I thought her first album was the one that had "All for you" on it.

Doh.

I got carded this week. :) Of course, I had a hat on my bald head...dulp!

I finally ruined my old hiking boots, too bad really, they only now qualified to get their drivers licence.

What, are you out of duct tape?:)

If this is the same party that I'm thinking of, then my "old" moment happened at the party: I was the oldest one there!!! LMAO! :D

Oh dear oh dear!!!!! *cringe* Confusing Spears with Janet??? Lawdy...

And MTV sucks too bad to save them!!!! ;)

Ok - me and the BF have an obsessive love of the Dave Matthews Band. When asked one time who they were - kids had no clue. Then, when told, the twelve year old stated "oh. Old people music."

ACCCCKKKKKK.

An online friend, who I won't hunt down and kill because I know he's older than I am (he's in his 60s, and a wonderful gent) sent me this recently .... fits in here, so I'm posting it.

I scored 21

Older Than Dirt Quiz: Count all the ones that you remember not the ones you were told about! Ratings at the bottom.

1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed bottles
5. Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (Olive-6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16. Hi-fi's
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19. Blue flashbulb
20. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age,
If you remembered 16-25 = You're older than dirt!

I got a thirteen. Not bad for only being 33 years old...

1-7, 14-17, 19, 22, 23, and 25. score 14

17 i guess i am getting old .
I used to think that when i was older than the playboy center folds i was getting old , but now my step daughter in older than the center folds :eek: :eek:
I freaked when i turned 25 , I wasa quarter centery old .
I turned 40 this year .

I got 15...and I'm way younger than Griff. ;)

Rho, it wasn't that party. This was some gathering that was planned a short time thereafter. But that party was a trip too...

Some of my college co-workers decided to invite people over to hang out at their place after work one night. I thought it would be a good idea to go...it would be just like the shit my friends and I did when we were in college.

Well, Rho and I went over there...and the kids were living it up, drinking like crazy, blasting the stereo, not a care in the world...just like the shit my friends and I did when we were in college...except that I now found it to be rather irritating.

I came to the conclusion that that sort of thing just isn't for me anymore. And over the next couple of years, I finally realized that I really am getting older...my body doesn't bounce back like it used to, I can't do or don't want to do some of things I used to do, etc.

This brought me to a weird point in my life, which still exists--Rho and I are still fairly young (34 and 28, respectively), but we can't run with some of these young folks anymore. At the same time, we can't run with a lot of people our age, b/c they're wrapped up in their families. Back in Washington, we tried meeting people through a childfree website...and it turned out that the desire to not have children was about the only thing we had in common with many of them...you'd think these people would have better things to do than bitch and complain about children and their parents...

So far, we've found that the best way to handle the weirdness is to simply rewrite the book. :cool:

That makes you the expert Bruce. :thumb:

Whats a P F Flyer?

The best "soda pop" machines are still those where the bottles are right there but you can't pull them out of their little metal holder thingie until you put the money in.

And then you still try to beat the mechanism by pulling out two bottles at the same time, but it doesn't work because the mechanism is just right.

I'm sure these old machines are wasteful of energy, with the door letting the cold air out of all the bottles. And the glass bottles would break and wreak havoc, and they were heavy, and they didn't hold much, and if they were returnable somebody had to haul them back to the bottler.

But it was better dammit.

I managed a 19. Although a couple are getting pretty hazy.
Such as Word prefixes. I was taught to remember all my relatives phone numbers like this: Lansdowne-5, 2397.
That dialed my Godmother.


And my memories of the drive-in are those of a child...the last movie I saw in a drive-in (until recently) was Star Wars. And half the time I was more interested inthe concession stand..
On a side note, that particular drive-in is now a strip mall. Like Quakertown needs any more of those.

Brian

My beloved drive-in is now a Fresh Fields, a Chuch E. Cheese, and a Staples.

PF Flyers were just about the coolest shoes on the planet, before there Nike and Adidas. They outmarketed Keds and Converse back in the the day. Also, they sometimes had really cool toys that were given away with every purchase ... There was a jungle tooth thingy, the plastic tinted to look like eather ivory, with a whistle (not a regular old ball whistle, but one of those ones with the rotary blades that made a sound not unlike that of a lonely loon on a summer's evening) and helpfully provided a morse code chart so you could fail to understand the message your friend was whistling you with some authority.

Oh how I loved my PF Flyers, the ONE time I was able to convince my mom that I needed them. We were a Keds family, you see, and our regular shoe-salesman (who didn't sell PF Flyers) made a point of telling my mom how bad they would be for my feet, and how good the Keds were ....

The drive-in my family and I used to frequent is now a strip mall my mom shops at in South St. Louis County. The last movie I saw there was E.T.

Before Harley Davidson made their dealers remodel for the yuppies, Hanums in Media, had a Coke machine that sold the heavy glass 6 1/2 oz bottles. That stuff would take the scum from a 3 day binge, off your tongue. Or the chrome off your bumper.:D

Cardboard records you'd cut out from the sides of cereal boxes.

Man I forgot all about those things!

I even ate cereal I couldn't stand for those sometimes.

My next entry: actual prizes in Crackerjack ... what they are putting in there now are certainly less likely to result in a liability lawsuit, but the joy of finding the miniature compass in a tire or the bug's eye viewer can not be felt by today's children.

Cereal boxes were regularly bowed out and ripped up, to say nothing of the poor cereal, as my bro and I dug in there for gold. Cereal? what cereal?

We'd get in trouble if we cut out the box before the cereal was gone...on one occasion my dad tossed the empty box of Honeycomb which included a pressed record of "Sugar" (appropriate) by the Archies. Gone...gone...We raises such a ruckus he yelled at us, stormed out and returned with a new 45 (record)

This was also a time when we'd use that glass bottled milk with the cardboard top-the milkman left it on our doorstep in a silver insulated box.

Boy, now I feel old.

We had the milk delivery when I was a youth, and then it stopped. And then, in 1977, we up and lived in England for a while, and the milk delivery was back again. This time it was better: it was in pint bottles, and it was not homogenized so the cream floated to the top. You'd either pour it off for use as cream later, or you'd stir it in if you preferred whole milk.

My #1 ex's grandfather used to pour off the cream for his cereal then eat it with a fork leaving a bowl of slightly used cream for the kids.:rolleyes:

UH....i vaguely remember the invention of the microwave oven? sears came out with a geigercounter after we had it for a year...."just to check" ....I do not currently own a microwave......I have a convection toaster oven.

....and the vcr.......did any of you go beta?


what makes me feel old is when i get a loan approved for someone who was born in 1984. and i graduated in '88.

after reading this thread, though, i'm feeling slightly more sprightly.

No microwave!? How do you dry off the pets after a bath?

Or make funky designs on CDRs?

One of my HS teachers swore by Beta, and would only use VHS when necessary...and this was '93.

'93?!? whoa. i was a manager at a local video store chain and we only carried VHS. that was from '89 to 91, in the collage days.

as a kid i used to like to catch roaches with a paper towel then wad it up so they couldn't get out and the zap them until they popped in the microwave. sick i know, but i'm sure someone has done worse......

The only time i miss the microwave is when i want microwave popcorn, but as i am now 2 mos into the atkins diet, and can't have popcorn anyway, I don't miss it at all. jinx assures me that the microwave destroys most of the nutrients in food anyway. plus this toaster is almost as fast. and food is crispy not soggy.




PS. why the fuck is the semi colon where it is instead of where the apostrophe is?! i use the apostrophe all the time, and hardly ever use the semicolon. I'd like to start a revolution about this. I must have backed up 3 or 4 times to correct the semicolon typo. maybe i just shouldn;t bother. yeah, that;s it. that;s my revolution right there. i will no longer bother to correct that typo when i miss the apostrophe key and hit semi by mistake! who;s with me?!


-no i'm not drunk.....i;m just punchy from a busy day

LJ ya rebel! it;s alright on the typo;s. what? make your quota in one day did;ja?

p.s. - i need a citified redneck refill!:beer:

This guy was a nut...he had tons of old Beta machines in the A/V room. I personally haven't seen blank Beta tapes sold in at least 15 years, and I've never seen them at a video rental store.

Not to pick on jinx all the time, I swear I don't mean to, but this is one of those shit molecule theories that juju can disprove with dye and paper.

IMO, naturally

If I believed everything Rho said, I'd be dead by now, probably. And vice versa. :)

Dude, go Dvorak. Every key is in it's most logical, efficient place, based on placing commonly used keys nearer to the primary fingers (index and middle fingers). Of course, it is exceedingly tricky to unlearn the conventional keyboard, which was specifically designed to slow the typist down:
As for moments of feeling old, I've had a few. Probably my worst was last May, when my wife and I moved into our new house. A neighbor came over to say hello and introduce himself, so I called my wife to come join us, and introduced her simply as "Brittany." We talked for another minute or so, and the neighbor asked "So where's your wife?"

I indicated Brittany, and said "Er, she's right here."

"Oh!' He said. "I thought she was your daughter."

That guy is still on my shit list. Heheh. I'm only three years older than she is.... damnit. Sure, she does look young, but young enough to be my daughter? Damn.

I'll talk to her tonight and see if she can substantiate her claims. I never bother to challenge her with this kind of thing, (although i did resist the microwave thing for a while) cuz she can usually show me the why's and wherefore's. I really don;t miss the "reactor" though.

and those poop molecules are real, man! juju is nuts! i mean, who are you gonna believe? a doctor that crawled around on public bathroom floors for years doing his research or some well educated adult college student with a little red die and a paper plate!? c'mon!

i saw them but only in the mid '80;s! that guy was a die hard not-to-let-it-go personna! let me guess, he invested Thousands in the beta-max, eh?

pl, I dunno about thousands...well, maybe. I remember when VCRs were $300-500.

Regarding the microwave thing, the only semi-serious study I've seen regarding loss of nutrients is in vegetables. Though there is other information out there, a lot of it seems unsubstantiated.

You made art by pasting cutout pictures from magazines onto things? Do you have pictures??

Yes, you young whippersnapper, there was a time when BetaMax was thought to be the superior format for video distribution. (okay, the REALLY superior one was the laser disk, but that didn't last because it was too damn expensive and you couldn't record on them).

Once upon a time videos were relased Beta-only. Sony, however, made one of their rare technological gaffes ... they made the format proprietary, so no cheap knockoffs were produced and the format died a quiet death as the VHS format was produced in cheaper and cheaper units.

My first VHS VCR cost $349.99, from Hess' Department Store, and had a programmable timer (very big deal) and a wired remote control. It was a front-loader rather than a top loader. I bought it in 1984, at which time there were no video store chains (West Coast was just starting to penetrate the east coast video market, Blockbuster opened their Montgomeryville store a quite a few years later) and the mom and pop video store I joined (you had to pay a membership fee in the bad old days) in Ambler was 3/4 Beta to 1/4 VHS. I watched that ratio change over time, until they finally discontinued their Beta collection, mostly by selling it off to tape-hungry BetaMax owners. Unlike the major chainstores, the mom and pops' had the infamous "back room" for adult oriented viewing, so I was able to see such classics as Caligula and Alien Lust.

HAH. I remember typewriters that were produced without a number 1. You had to remember to type a lowercase "l". I also suffered through the use of a "proportionally spaced" typewriter. This IBM electric monstrosity produced beautiful business correspondence, unless you made a mistake, because the letters each had different widths. You also had to remember that a "W" required three backspaces, but a "n" needed only two.

As far as the microwave sucking nutrients out of food ... if you are cooking fresh foods, that doesn't seem logical, at least it won't suck anymore nutrients out of something than conventional cooking would. And, for veggies, since the cooking time is shorter, and you are essentially steaming them, just so long as you don't cook the broccoli into a gooey mess, then it should retain more vitamins than if you boil them. Prepackaged microwavable foods have the nutrients pre-sucked out of them at the factory, though. Perhaps that's what you should be worried about.

wolf...
 

I believe we both went to the same place. That's the one where one of the clerks was a moonlighting Ambler cop, right?

And membership records were kept on library-style cards in a box up front?

Brian

I;m with ya.

Yes, Brian, that's the place, next to Guiseppe's Pizza ... it was the ONLY video store in town ... until the West Coast opened up in Broad Axe about 5-6 years later.

Oh, seriously, don't worry about 'picking on' me becuase you disagree..... disagree all you want. I'm pretty confident in any decision I've made that I've bothered to research at all, you're not going to bust my bubble by cracking a little joke. And hell, if you want to nuke your food, or hold a radar gun in your lap, or live next to a cell tower - you go for it man. More power to ya!
I just don't know how you can choke the shit down... yuk. :3eye:

I was looking for a different thread and found this ... Just happened to have an experience to add.

We have a new ambulance kid at the nuthouse. He's 19, or maybe 20. I had to explain Woolworth's to him.

And then two of the guys made a joke about Kung Fu (miming picking up the heated bowl at the end of the trial), that they then had to explain.

The young man assures me, however, that he remembers his grandmother having a rotary dial phone, so today's youth are learning something of history.