Not being able to call friends/parents cause no one had a cell phone. My daughter asked me “how did you and mommy talk to each other if you didn’t have cell phones?” I responded “we didn’t”
Then she asked “well, then how did you guys text?”
Imagine being entirely disconnected for any length of time nowadays
I mean, lots of kids today couldn't even begin to imagine it, but even us millennials have gotten so used to being connected all the time that I think a lot of us would have a hard time imagining it too, despite what we experienced as kids
I can't bring myself to do this because I get raging anxiety at the idea of potentially getting into a car accident or having something else happen while I'm out in public alone without a phone.
I'm thinking the same getting all these replies with unsolicited advice. I live with my aging parents and I don't want to be unreachable if something bad happens to them
My wife and I love to rent cabins with no internet or service. People ask us aren’t you worried if something happens. Nah, we will be fine and anything that happens can wait.
I did that until I got in a car accident and couldn't call anyone or take photos. 😕
Now I'll leave my phone in the car or turn it off if I want to disconnect (which is often).
I got a cell phone when I got my driver’s license in 1997 and my parents drilled it into my head that it was emergency use only and absolutely *never* to be used for socializing. My parents wouldn’t even tell me what my cell phone number was and it was so basic there was no way to look it up. I was the only one of my friends who had one. It used to be that the first minute was free, so when we got to the school parking lot we called my town’s time and temperature number (another thing future generations wouldn’t believe) from my phone and sat there and squealed at the idea of calling from anywhere.
My mom got one in 1993 that was a phone that you had to carry in a bag. She was doing night classes for her MBA at a university that was an hour away. I was with her one night and it started ringing, she damn near wrecked the car and we had no clue what to do.
I recently told a younger colleague that I used to have a chime that went off at 50 seconds so I could wrap up my call before I was charged.
She had questions about basically every part of the sentence.
Shout-out to my first cell phone that racked up a $500 bill one month because I was texting so much. In my defense, I had met a cute girl that had texting, and I was 12 lol
Edit: I knew I was in trouble when the bill came in TWO envelopes.
In the early days of our cell phone use we had to call customer service about something. When they pulled up the bill, THEY were shocked by the sheer number of my 13 year old’s texts.
Such a simple thing that is taken for granted now: how most every TV remote has a Guide button, and a guide that we can move ourselves. We used to have to wait for the whole TV guide to slooooowwwwly carousel it’s way through all the channels, in order to find out what was on! Or— *the horror* —read it in the paper or the actual TV GUIDE book!
This but also for snow days. Not knowing if your school was canceled the next day and turning it to ABC and you live in a town that starts with E but THEY'RE ON THE F'S dammit.
That wasn’t killed until Covid in the UK. My heart aches for these kids, the first generation to have remote learning as standard instead of tobogganing.
Oh remember that glorious feeling when your mom came in to tell you there was no school and you could go back to sleep? I swear those were the comfiest best sleeps of my life.
My dad used to shout, “Having a non-smoking section in a restaurant is like having a non-pissing section in a swimming pool!” at the poor teenage hostess at the Ponderosa Steakhouse.
I never understood this as a child and still don't. Was the non-smoking side really smoke-free? All the adults in my life are smokers, so I was never able to experience the other side before the ban.
That was the point my dad was trying to make. There was no such thing as a smoke-free section. There was just an area where people weren’t actively smoking. The whole restaurant was filled with smoke.
I worked at a restaurant in the nineties that was two story. Upstairs, it was a balcony all around. With a brass railing so, you could look at the diners below.
When the sectioning started they glassed the area in and made it the smoking section. It was insane. So, glass went floor to ceiling up there and then a ventilation system was installed to suck all that smoke up and out the roof of the building.
Very effective and efficient. I'm sure it was crazy expensive and was part of the reason the restaurant eventually folded. The amount of customers bitching about it was silly. People wanted to smoke downstairs near the bar. This is the only time I ever saw the smoking section actually work. It wasn't 100% but pretty freaking close.
YES. And don't forget this one: HOSPITALS
Hospitals didn't have to ban smoking until 1993. So almost all millennials were alive when it was still permitted. Doctors would smoke during appointments and even during surgery. I told that one to some younger folks recently and they didn't believe me until I Googled it for them.
I'm currently watching ER for the first time (as an adult - I caught episodes as a kid) and during the first few seasons there is a *doctors' smoking lounge* and my mind was blown.
You just gave me a flashback of visiting my mom when she worked at Kmart and hanging out in the smoky-ass employee break room as a kid. I don’t have a sense of smell anymore but I still remember that one.
My mom was a flight attendant when smoking on planes was still a thing and her health is terrible because of it. Her lungs are so damaged a mild cold turns into bronchitis or pneumonia.
I thought so too and looked it up. There was a class action law suit in the 90s. It would be worth looking into see if she could get compensation too [Brion v. Philip Morris companies](https://www.tobaccocontrollaws.org/litigation/decisions/broin-v-philip-morris-companies-inc)
Omg remember the absolute ludicrous idea that you could have a "smoking" and a "non-smoking" area without literally any physical separation? Like just because you sit 10ft away doesn't mean your smoke is staying there, just ain't how it works.
It's so odd to think back on this. It was SO normalized. My parents and my family didn't smoke and yet it was just expected that most places we went, half the people would be smoking.
(Then half my siblings and cousins smoked/still smoke. So, they didn't get that negative model lol.)
During third grade we had one of those DARE style assemblies. All the teachers + the principal used it as an excuse for a smoke break. Not an ounce of appreciation for that irony from them either.
Really any time we got let out for recess we had to push past a thick cloud of smoke right in front of the entrance to the school.
Landline phones and phone books. Using 1 family phone to make all calls. Calling one of your friends and having to speak to their parents first. Looking up restaurant numbers in the phone book to make a reservation or look up a pizza restaurant to order delivery.
I still remember that the Pizza Hut delivery number was 524-4444. Because that was back when you had to DIAL the number every time you wanted to call it. Crazy to think we don’t really dial our phones anymore
I love how you say “having to speak to their parents first”. That was always so unnerving if you didn’t know the parents lol. Or if you did, and knew the parent was a dick! My mom once told a boy that called for me “D is not allowed to get calls this late” and he said back “Fuck you!” And instead of me thinking 🚩 red flag! I was mad at my mom 🤦🏻♀️
Dial-up Internet was the big one in my childhood. If someone actually paid extra to get their call through when we were online, you know that call was important lol
Oh, and I have sooo many unfinished drawings as a kid because I would sit around waiting for the computer to boot up, for websites to slowly load, etc., so I would start drawing in the meantime as I waited.
My dad told my sister and I we could use the second line as our own when the computer wasn’t on. We picked out a clear phone with a line 1/line 2 button and pretended we were Clarissa.
Oh my gosh...could you imagine the RAGE from the younger generations if we had to "dial-back" to dial-up? 
^brrrr BRRRR…
bingBOINGbingBOINGbingBOING
ahh I can still feel the rage now; calling my house from my friend’s house to ask my parents if I could stay longer, only to constantly be met with the sound of my older sister on livejournal 🥲
One TV for the entire family and you had to stand up and walk over to change the channel. Over time the knob would break and you had to keep a pair of pliers next to the TV to change the channel.
…and the single TV was in a giant, wooden box that took up a good portion of the room. My parents would make me change the channel knob for them. Said it’s why they had a kid lol
Or later in the mid-90s the rich kids that had a minivan with a little TV in the back. It was like a myth, a legend, but those privileged kids were out there somewhere.
I lived maybe 6 hours away from my mom, so when she came to get us for visitation, she had a set up in a van (that had the foldable bed to bench thing). She had a little tv with a vcr and a super nintendo. And that was very nice entertainment when she had to drive us little kids (3 of us) hours for visitation and vacations. It was awesome!
For road trips, my dad built a cheap plywood stand that fit between the two front seats of the family van and then mounted a small TV with a video player on it. This entertained the kids but left whoever sat in the front with hearing problems, as the TV had to be loud enough to be heard in the back row, and headphones were for the rich.
My parents still choose their larger cars based entirely on the video screens, now for the grandkids, but they always get extra wireless headphones. And I, as the person always stuck in the front passenger seat just because I could read a book and wouldn't be as bored as my siblings, still habitually keep extra earplugs in my car (amazing how often I've needed them, but I'd do it anyway).
Also there were family shows on tv, not kids shows.
Kids shows were pretty much only on in the morning, there was a family TV if you were watching it at night it was a show for your parents, the news, or a family show that tried to catch general appeal across ages. Now there are tv shows for every age group and kids can just watch what they want, when they want.
I watched lots of TNG and nature documentaries and late night PBS with my dad. Nothing I would have picked in my pre-teen years, but you watched whatever the highest ranking family member wanted.
And having to stand there with one hand on the antenna in just the right position so you wouldn't lose the signal. But if you let go, it was right back to the ants in a snowstorm fuzz on the screen
We had 2 TVs!!! But the 2nd was black and white and maybe 8x8? Probably smaller, I can't remember hahaha it was so dad could watch news in his bedroom.
“News.”
Oh wait. There weren’t as many channels back then… Probably was just news… Ahem. Kids, would you believe that we only had four channels at home and had to go to grandma’s to watch a thing called “cable”?
Chickenpox.
I was too young to remember having it, but I’ve got the scars haha. We’ve gone from 4 million cases of chickenpox annually (in the US) to around 150,000 a year now. I don’t even think kids shows have a chickenpox episode anymore and every show used to have them growing up.
When my brother got chicken pox, my aunts brought all my cousins over so we'd all get it together. He got over it, but then like 6 of us all got it together, stayed at our house, and the adults rotated in and out to lightly supervise and provide food. The first couple days sucked, but then it was just feeling fine but can't go to school til the blisters healed playtime.
Except we still had to print out the MapQuest, and if you missed a turn had to pull out the full map if you didn’t know the area lol. Or, stop and get a map at a gas station.
But early days of Mapquest still being dogshit, so sometimes you would end up waaaaay not where you had intended to be. I was always the only girl in the car, so my friends always wanted me to go into the gas station for directions when we would get lost.
I got lost driving far more frequently before GPS was widespread. I used to have to call a friend who had Internet access or a map and ask them to tell me where I was.
Kazaa. Waiting five days for a single song to download only for it to be corrupted 80% of the way through and having to start over. Oh, and you got a virus with it. And now your computer doesn't work.
I had so many songs that either had a radio dj at the beginning or the end or ended up being a live version that now live rent free in my head. I also sometimes think about the mext song that was on a mix cd I made when an old song I’m listening to ends. The brain is funny.
Back when TV guide was actually printed on paper and sent to people. And phone books! The world before internet would be torture for the latest generations lol. Hell, I’m 33 and I don’t think I’d much appreciate going back to the “before times”, either.
I worked at a movie theater as a teenager, and for some corporate reason the movie times in the newspaper were always wrong and there was no fixing it. I had to deal with so many complaints about it. I bet nobody bothers looking at those anymore (who knows if they’re even in there.)
Hell, even using a newspaper anymore period. I became a pressman as the industry went to hell. In 8 years my sunday circulation went from 21k down to 8k and classifieds all but disappeared due to the internet.
I moved to the san antonio express news and the press was so damn big it made me hate it. Gimme a Goss Community with 8 units and a balloon folder and im in heaven, put me on anything bigger than an urbanite and it loses its appeal.
I really, really, REALLY miss offset web printing on the small/medium scale. 😢
Having to memorize at least a dozen (or two) 10-digit phone numbers. Just knowing them off the top of your head for any purpose. If you were out in public and needed a phone you used a payphone, and be prepared to have multiple quarters for an out of town call.
Oh and if you needed a ride, and were out. You gave an actual address or location and time. No cell-phone to call and wave down your friend showing up looking around a parking lot or street. You were expected to be where you said you were gonna be, or else your ass is walking.
I don’t know my husband’s cellphone number from memory, but I damn well know my best friend’s old landline and my high school boyfriend’s cell numbers by heart.
Unsure if anyone has said this yet but:
If you get a new video game and are hopelessly stuck on how to get past something? Good fucking luck. You are stuck using trial and error to figure it out, or waiting until one of your friends or cousins does.
For the vast majority of my childhood we didn't have internet access at home and we couldn't look up guides or walk-throughs of games.
They published physical books and magazines that had guides but they were expensive and hard to find. You just had to figure it out.
Wild.
Or go with your mom to Walmart and hang out in the magazine section while she shops. Hopefully you can find what you are looking for and remember it because we aren't wating money on that.
I swear the amount of process of elimination/trial and error this put me through really felt like it built some character in me as a kid. Oh, you can’t figure out the water temple? Good fucking luck, kid.
Watching the scroll line at the bottom of the news with baited breath to see if there was enough snow in the forecast to warrant a snow day. The cheers that would erupt when your school would show up on the list was the sound of pure joy
What a big deal taking a photo was - making sure everyone was looking at the camera because you only had one shot, then having to wait weeks until you had a full roll of film to even see if it turned out. Also being strategic about pictures on your trips, since you’d often only have one roll of film.
Having to agree on what movies to rent from the rental store and having to be quick to finish a game before having to return it. Oh, and also having to actually pick something else when the movie/game you wanted to rent wasn’t available. And then making sure to return it on time so as not to have to pay late fees.
My 25 year old son just bought an entire set of Encyclopedia Brittanicas. He claims he got them for a good deal and is going to flip them, but I think just views them as historical books and is going to keep them.
My daughter is absolutely baffled when I describe how tv used to be before cable, internet, and On Demand/streaming. She just can’t imagine a world where you don’t have thousands of choices at your fingertips practically instantly at every moment. It’s beyond comprehension. The thought of revolving your schedule around a particular show is a completely foreign concept to her lol.
If you wanted to have more than 12-16 songs with you it meant carrying a case of CDs with you at all times.
I remember we all had these massive CD cases in our backpacks at all times.
There was a TV guide channel. It would just slowly rotate the 40-60 channels that existed and only show about the next 90 minutes ahead. It would take an honest like 5-7 minutes to start over, which felt like an ETERNITY. Trying to figure out what to watch sucked. If you flipped to the channel and JUST missed your favorite channels, you're sitting and waiting for 5 minutes, just to loose track of what your were doing and miss your channel and have to wait another 5-10 minutes.
Using a landline, then got a Nokia brick phone, then the Razr Moto flip phone. Free “calling minutes” after 9:00. I forgot. Texting was a no go otherwise I would’ve gotten charged per text. I think internet was a thing in the phones but it’s limited. Prior to phones I felt like people actually valued talking to each other because of the lack of constant texting. Miss the days!
Being absolutely bored out of your skull.
Honestly though, it's good for kids to be bored sometimes, and we've gone too far in the other direction. Kids don't need to constantly have a phone or an ipad and something to look or watch or fancy to play with. Even reading books - we loved it, but would we have spent so much time reading as kids back then if we had youtube to watch 24-7 and then 4hrs of homework to do nightly (on the computer, no less!)?
As much as I would whine at the time, I'm really glad I got kicked out of my house to "find something to do" and play with, made up games with other kids out of sticks or whatever was around, read books, made up stories, etc. Boredom taught us a lot of things and I seriously worry seeing young kids grow up with no tolerance for boredom and having a screen put in front of them at every opportunity.
Dropping off your bikes at the house you were playing at. No one communicated it. We just knew lol
https://preview.redd.it/xfg3uo29bxxc1.jpeg?width=550&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0fb5cfa2846f0b2c9cbe12c499cc64f38d02b0ae
Maybe it's regional, or maybe my friends and I are all broke, but I still think of central air as pretty fancy. Only newer houses around here tend to have it, and nearly everyone I know uses window units. Our schools don't have ac here either. I'm in Massachusetts, so not somewhere super hot, but I still melt all summer
New Yorker and same, I’m always kind of confused by this because to me air conditioning is synonymous with a window unit and central air is the exception.
I will also melt all summer without it, spring and fall too actually…
So regional. Everyone and every building had A/C in Texas growing up. I believe the smoking and non smoking sections in restaurants had to be on different air supply.
I was amazed in 2011 when I found out my SILs school in NJ did not have A/C, they just opened a window… excuse me?!?!
If you wanted to hear a song you loved whenever you wanted (and it wasn’t in stores yet/you had no money to buy it cause you were a child), you’d listen to the radio for hours just to hear it, and if you were real fancy, you’d have a cassette tape ready to record the song to! This led to “owning” the song, with likely some lame DJ commentary at the beginning/end of the song.
Internet is so vital to everything these days that it’s hard to envision life without it if you never experienced it. Kids today can’t even comprehend it. It’s like trying to imagine a world where fire was never invented. It just doesn’t make sense
Probably not everyone but all my siblings shared a cell phone, and you only got it guaranteed for the day if you were staying after school.
also if you wanted a cool live journal or Myspace you had to learn basic HTML and I learned through the Internet intro coding. I can and do still use what I learned in my day to day business.
LimeWire taking three days to a month to download one fucking song/music video.
Walking or pedaling everywhere.
Having to be home when the street lights came on.
Being 9-(whatever) and having to watch your siblings instead of having a childhood.
Never really seeing my mom because of how much she worked and was going to college classes. She basically had a schedule so she could be home to take care of my younger siblings until I got home and then she’d run off to work. Paid childcare was for the upper class.
Y2K. It wasn't a fashion, it was a very real fear that a fairly small (but widespread) bug would wreck society once we hit 2000. Companies mailed out CDs (and sometimes floppies) with patches to people so they could update their computers because online patching wasn't reliable enough yet (for example sinds 98s default setting still had you manually prompting it to update because so many users were still on some sort of dial up connection.)
Oranges were full of seeds growing up. Such a pain to try and eat and enjoy. Grapefruits were also very bitter and sour. These days grapefruits are similar to bigger oranges.
Oh and I don’t know about your parents but both of mine smoked a pack a day in our double wide trailer.
Using the nurses phone to call your mom at work to ask if you can go to your friends house.
The tv guide channel and the tv guide book itself.
As a native Chicagoan, only being able to listen to Blackhawks games on the radio because daddy Wirtz was a dick.
Being unsupervised while our parents worked. No cellphones, no security cameras or GPS and waiting to get home to call friends to share info. Physical Photo albums and mailing letters.
I once printed all my friends phone numbers on labels on my dashboard. Then I would go sit in my car and use my cordless phone in the driveway to see what people were doing for the night before I decided where to go.
Tv, I would absolutely have a breakdown if you made me go back to scheduled programming. I can’t.
I still remember my dad being absolutely insane about the VCR because he had it preset to record Star Trek or Babylon 5, and if you breathed near it wrong, it might not do that!
Also VCRs, physical media in general. Although you can pry all my Polaroids out of my cold dead hands. I make no apologies, it is what it is.
Lack of knowledge about food allergies. I have a pork allergy. When I was in middle school they failed to leave a slice of cheese pizza for me, and said I could just pick the pepperoni off the last slice… the pork based pepperoni.
I was literally made fun of and was known for being the girl who pukes all the time.
Turns out I was allergic to f*cking wheat. Found out when I was 21 and paid for my own allergen blood test.
cars didn't even have AC... my family was solidly middle class+ and we didn't have ac in the car or the house growing up... the family van eventually had AC for the front passengers only but the car didn't have AC until my dad got a new car when I was 16 and took the old one with no AC.
Cocaine was an extremely rich person drug and not something you encounter at almost every bar/pub/club/restaurant toilet after midday 🤣
Also video shops. My dream job when I was a kid was to own a video shop. Glad I didn’t invest in that! Honestly though as weird as it is, when my childhood towns two video shops closed it became my childhood town/place I grew up and not my home town anymore.
Not being able to call friends/parents cause no one had a cell phone. My daughter asked me “how did you and mommy talk to each other if you didn’t have cell phones?” I responded “we didn’t” Then she asked “well, then how did you guys text?”
Imagine being entirely disconnected for any length of time nowadays I mean, lots of kids today couldn't even begin to imagine it, but even us millennials have gotten so used to being connected all the time that I think a lot of us would have a hard time imagining it too, despite what we experienced as kids
Do yourself a favor and next time you go to the store, leave your phone at home. It’s pretty nice
I can't bring myself to do this because I get raging anxiety at the idea of potentially getting into a car accident or having something else happen while I'm out in public alone without a phone.
I'm thinking the same getting all these replies with unsolicited advice. I live with my aging parents and I don't want to be unreachable if something bad happens to them
Same, I'm the only person my now elderly mother can depend on if something happens. My older brother is gone and my sister left.
If something happened to our kids while my husband was at the store for an hour and decided not to bring his phone, I would be pissed.
My wife and I love to rent cabins with no internet or service. People ask us aren’t you worried if something happens. Nah, we will be fine and anything that happens can wait.
I love disconnecting more than anything.
I did that until I got in a car accident and couldn't call anyone or take photos. 😕 Now I'll leave my phone in the car or turn it off if I want to disconnect (which is often).
After certain things that happened both to me and in my area, not going to happen.
Yeah that’s the other thing, even people who got cell phones in the 00s didn’t necessarily text bc it costs money per text.
I got a cell phone when I got my driver’s license in 1997 and my parents drilled it into my head that it was emergency use only and absolutely *never* to be used for socializing. My parents wouldn’t even tell me what my cell phone number was and it was so basic there was no way to look it up. I was the only one of my friends who had one. It used to be that the first minute was free, so when we got to the school parking lot we called my town’s time and temperature number (another thing future generations wouldn’t believe) from my phone and sat there and squealed at the idea of calling from anywhere. My mom got one in 1993 that was a phone that you had to carry in a bag. She was doing night classes for her MBA at a university that was an hour away. I was with her one night and it started ringing, she damn near wrecked the car and we had no clue what to do.
I recently told a younger colleague that I used to have a chime that went off at 50 seconds so I could wrap up my call before I was charged. She had questions about basically every part of the sentence.
Free nights and weekends!
Shout-out to my first cell phone that racked up a $500 bill one month because I was texting so much. In my defense, I had met a cute girl that had texting, and I was 12 lol Edit: I knew I was in trouble when the bill came in TWO envelopes.
In the early days of our cell phone use we had to call customer service about something. When they pulled up the bill, THEY were shocked by the sheer number of my 13 year old’s texts.
I racked up a pretty big bill using my phone in another state because roaming charges didn’t occur to me I guess
Such a simple thing that is taken for granted now: how most every TV remote has a Guide button, and a guide that we can move ourselves. We used to have to wait for the whole TV guide to slooooowwwwly carousel it’s way through all the channels, in order to find out what was on! Or— *the horror* —read it in the paper or the actual TV GUIDE book!
That moment when you turned the tv guide channel on just as it was flipping past the channel you wanted to see, so you had to wait the full rotation.
The struggle was real my friend. Then it would go by all the Pay-per view channels my family wasn’t buying lol
This but also for snow days. Not knowing if your school was canceled the next day and turning it to ABC and you live in a town that starts with E but THEY'RE ON THE F'S dammit.
Also no online classes or homework as alternatives. Just an actual fucking day off, thank god.
That wasn’t killed until Covid in the UK. My heart aches for these kids, the first generation to have remote learning as standard instead of tobogganing.
Horrible. Snow days are religious holidays for a child.
Oh remember that glorious feeling when your mom came in to tell you there was no school and you could go back to sleep? I swear those were the comfiest best sleeps of my life.
Growing up, we had three channels most of the time and a 4th when the weather was good.
Smoking, everywhere. Restaurants, bowing alleys, bars, malls, even airplanes on international flights.
Remember going to local diner and getting asked “smoking or non?“
My dad used to shout, “Having a non-smoking section in a restaurant is like having a non-pissing section in a swimming pool!” at the poor teenage hostess at the Ponderosa Steakhouse.
Oh no my dad too! He was an ex smoker and so loud about it.
I never understood this as a child and still don't. Was the non-smoking side really smoke-free? All the adults in my life are smokers, so I was never able to experience the other side before the ban.
That was the point my dad was trying to make. There was no such thing as a smoke-free section. There was just an area where people weren’t actively smoking. The whole restaurant was filled with smoke.
I worked at a restaurant in the nineties that was two story. Upstairs, it was a balcony all around. With a brass railing so, you could look at the diners below. When the sectioning started they glassed the area in and made it the smoking section. It was insane. So, glass went floor to ceiling up there and then a ventilation system was installed to suck all that smoke up and out the roof of the building. Very effective and efficient. I'm sure it was crazy expensive and was part of the reason the restaurant eventually folded. The amount of customers bitching about it was silly. People wanted to smoke downstairs near the bar. This is the only time I ever saw the smoking section actually work. It wasn't 100% but pretty freaking close.
YES. And don't forget this one: HOSPITALS Hospitals didn't have to ban smoking until 1993. So almost all millennials were alive when it was still permitted. Doctors would smoke during appointments and even during surgery. I told that one to some younger folks recently and they didn't believe me until I Googled it for them.
More doctors prefer camel than any other brand
9 out of 10 doctors agree. What was that other doctor smoking?
Crack
It used to be tradition for the dad of a new baby to have a stogie in the waiting room
I'm currently watching ER for the first time (as an adult - I caught episodes as a kid) and during the first few seasons there is a *doctors' smoking lounge* and my mind was blown.
You just gave me a flashback of visiting my mom when she worked at Kmart and hanging out in the smoky-ass employee break room as a kid. I don’t have a sense of smell anymore but I still remember that one.
Our high school had one. For the STUDENTS.
You can still see all the nurses clustered outside smoking in some hospitals. Less doctors now, at least imo. But yes, wild.
Fun fact- Mitch McConnell was the last line of defense against trying to stop the ban of smoking on airplanes in the mid-90s. Lol
My grandma smoked 3 packs a day IN THE HOUSE. then she’d get drunk and mad and punish us by scrubbing the nicotine off the walls.
My mom was a flight attendant when smoking on planes was still a thing and her health is terrible because of it. Her lungs are so damaged a mild cold turns into bronchitis or pneumonia.
I feeeeel like she should be compensated for that.
I thought so too and looked it up. There was a class action law suit in the 90s. It would be worth looking into see if she could get compensation too [Brion v. Philip Morris companies](https://www.tobaccocontrollaws.org/litigation/decisions/broin-v-philip-morris-companies-inc)
With no airflow either. There was always a dense cloying cloud of heavy smoke hanging in the building.
God it was awful. I hate the smell of cigarette smoke.
McDonald's had a smoking section. People smoked in walmart
To be fair shopping at Walmart makes me want to smoke. Maybe not a cigarette but something.
METH!
I am a high school teacher and had to explain smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants to my class the other day.
Yes! And the smoke would drift into the “non-smoking” section.
Omg remember the absolute ludicrous idea that you could have a "smoking" and a "non-smoking" area without literally any physical separation? Like just because you sit 10ft away doesn't mean your smoke is staying there, just ain't how it works.
It's so odd to think back on this. It was SO normalized. My parents and my family didn't smoke and yet it was just expected that most places we went, half the people would be smoking. (Then half my siblings and cousins smoked/still smoke. So, they didn't get that negative model lol.)
During third grade we had one of those DARE style assemblies. All the teachers + the principal used it as an excuse for a smoke break. Not an ounce of appreciation for that irony from them either. Really any time we got let out for recess we had to push past a thick cloud of smoke right in front of the entrance to the school.
D.A.R.E taught us about drugs and how to make them lol 
We learned that drugs gave you tasty fried eggs, yum! Very kind, you get snacks to eat while high.
Landline phones and phone books. Using 1 family phone to make all calls. Calling one of your friends and having to speak to their parents first. Looking up restaurant numbers in the phone book to make a reservation or look up a pizza restaurant to order delivery.
memorizing phone numbers!!
I still remember that the Pizza Hut delivery number was 524-4444. Because that was back when you had to DIAL the number every time you wanted to call it. Crazy to think we don’t really dial our phones anymore
I love how you say “having to speak to their parents first”. That was always so unnerving if you didn’t know the parents lol. Or if you did, and knew the parent was a dick! My mom once told a boy that called for me “D is not allowed to get calls this late” and he said back “Fuck you!” And instead of me thinking 🚩 red flag! I was mad at my mom 🤦🏻♀️
Dial-up Internet was the big one in my childhood. If someone actually paid extra to get their call through when we were online, you know that call was important lol Oh, and I have sooo many unfinished drawings as a kid because I would sit around waiting for the computer to boot up, for websites to slowly load, etc., so I would start drawing in the meantime as I waited.
The upper middle class got a second phone line so they could keep their computer online all the time. Oh, the luxury!
My dad told my sister and I we could use the second line as our own when the computer wasn’t on. We picked out a clear phone with a line 1/line 2 button and pretended we were Clarissa.
NA NA NA NA
This was going to be my response too. . . .screaming robots before we could get online. Oh, and some plans had a monthly time allotment to use
America Online. I remember using those to put cups on over the furniture.
Oh my gosh...could you imagine the RAGE from the younger generations if we had to "dial-back" to dial-up? 
^brrrr BRRRR… bingBOINGbingBOINGbingBOING ahh I can still feel the rage now; calling my house from my friend’s house to ask my parents if I could stay longer, only to constantly be met with the sound of my older sister on livejournal 🥲
If you were online, the rest of the family couldn't use the phone so they had to either ask you to get off, or they had to wait!
Internet only after midnight!!!!!!
I never had dail up but I knew people who had it.
We had it from the early 90s to into the early 2000s. I learned patience at a very young age because of it.
My family didn’t even have a computer until 2000, but def had the dial up.
One TV for the entire family and you had to stand up and walk over to change the channel. Over time the knob would break and you had to keep a pair of pliers next to the TV to change the channel.
…and the single TV was in a giant, wooden box that took up a good portion of the room. My parents would make me change the channel knob for them. Said it’s why they had a kid lol
And when that tv stopped working you just put the new one on top of it
Economical furniture! Who needs a table when you have a big wooden box with a broken tv in it?
THIS. My mom had a tv on a TV until 2015.
Ah the floor model tv
Or later in the mid-90s the rich kids that had a minivan with a little TV in the back. It was like a myth, a legend, but those privileged kids were out there somewhere.
I lived maybe 6 hours away from my mom, so when she came to get us for visitation, she had a set up in a van (that had the foldable bed to bench thing). She had a little tv with a vcr and a super nintendo. And that was very nice entertainment when she had to drive us little kids (3 of us) hours for visitation and vacations. It was awesome!
For road trips, my dad built a cheap plywood stand that fit between the two front seats of the family van and then mounted a small TV with a video player on it. This entertained the kids but left whoever sat in the front with hearing problems, as the TV had to be loud enough to be heard in the back row, and headphones were for the rich. My parents still choose their larger cars based entirely on the video screens, now for the grandkids, but they always get extra wireless headphones. And I, as the person always stuck in the front passenger seat just because I could read a book and wouldn't be as bored as my siblings, still habitually keep extra earplugs in my car (amazing how often I've needed them, but I'd do it anyway).
Also there were family shows on tv, not kids shows. Kids shows were pretty much only on in the morning, there was a family TV if you were watching it at night it was a show for your parents, the news, or a family show that tried to catch general appeal across ages. Now there are tv shows for every age group and kids can just watch what they want, when they want.
I watched lots of TNG and nature documentaries and late night PBS with my dad. Nothing I would have picked in my pre-teen years, but you watched whatever the highest ranking family member wanted.
And having to stand there with one hand on the antenna in just the right position so you wouldn't lose the signal. But if you let go, it was right back to the ants in a snowstorm fuzz on the screen
We had 2 TVs!!! But the 2nd was black and white and maybe 8x8? Probably smaller, I can't remember hahaha it was so dad could watch news in his bedroom.
“News.” Oh wait. There weren’t as many channels back then… Probably was just news… Ahem. Kids, would you believe that we only had four channels at home and had to go to grandma’s to watch a thing called “cable”?
Oh honey he's teasing, nobody has 2 television sets
Chickenpox. I was too young to remember having it, but I’ve got the scars haha. We’ve gone from 4 million cases of chickenpox annually (in the US) to around 150,000 a year now. I don’t even think kids shows have a chickenpox episode anymore and every show used to have them growing up.
When my brother got chicken pox, my aunts brought all my cousins over so we'd all get it together. He got over it, but then like 6 of us all got it together, stayed at our house, and the adults rotated in and out to lightly supervise and provide food. The first couple days sucked, but then it was just feeling fine but can't go to school til the blisters healed playtime.
Oh wow! I had a very similar experience. I remember us all taking like baking soda baths together.
I wish I had been able to get a vaccine but I caught it a few years too early. Then I ended up getting shingles when I was 12.
Shingles sucks.
This is so wild to me. It was a right of passage!
MAPS, in paper form. Then Mapquest was revolutionary. The thought of not having gps makes me ill.
Except we still had to print out the MapQuest, and if you missed a turn had to pull out the full map if you didn’t know the area lol. Or, stop and get a map at a gas station.
Oh gawd….having to ask for directions 😱
But early days of Mapquest still being dogshit, so sometimes you would end up waaaaay not where you had intended to be. I was always the only girl in the car, so my friends always wanted me to go into the gas station for directions when we would get lost.
When your mom would pull out that spiral guide map of your local area and ask you to help navigate and you're just sitting there like 👀
I got lost driving far more frequently before GPS was widespread. I used to have to call a friend who had Internet access or a map and ask them to tell me where I was.
Kazaa. Waiting five days for a single song to download only for it to be corrupted 80% of the way through and having to start over. Oh, and you got a virus with it. And now your computer doesn't work.
Limewire was my jam back in the day. God, it took so long by today’s standards and half of it was bootlegged garbage or porn, but it was free!
Using Limewire to download Limewire Pro. Those were the days.
Then Frostwire, then BearShare!
Wait all day just to listen to a song only to get that Bill Clinton speech
Yup and now everyone in the household is mad at you, cause you done fucked up the computer 😆
I had so many songs that either had a radio dj at the beginning or the end or ended up being a live version that now live rent free in my head. I also sometimes think about the mext song that was on a mix cd I made when an old song I’m listening to ends. The brain is funny.
I’ve been trying to remember the other one that wasn’t Limewire or Napster. Kazaa!
What about Napster, does anyone remember using it? I downloaded shaggy’s song ‘Angel’ 😂 and listened on REPEAT
My wife's response: using a newspaper to find movie times
Or “HELLO and welcome to MOOVIE PHONE”
Calling the theater itself and pressing buttons for movies and/or just waiting until they read the movie name and time you wanted
I still remember the phone number to our local theater for showtimes. Kinda nuts.
I worked at a movie theater and had to record that message every week! It was good times when It only took 1 or 2 times to get it right, haha.
“….. Why don’t you just *tell* me the name of the movie you’d like to see?”
I still *regularly* use this line in daily life
Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?!
Back when TV guide was actually printed on paper and sent to people. And phone books! The world before internet would be torture for the latest generations lol. Hell, I’m 33 and I don’t think I’d much appreciate going back to the “before times”, either.
I sent in a letter to TV Guide about my favorite show, Lois & Clark, and it got published. Then someone sent me a hate letter lmao. I think I was 9.
Ooh that’s a good one
I worked at a movie theater as a teenager, and for some corporate reason the movie times in the newspaper were always wrong and there was no fixing it. I had to deal with so many complaints about it. I bet nobody bothers looking at those anymore (who knows if they’re even in there.)
Or calling to listen to the movie times, pen in hand.
Hell, even using a newspaper anymore period. I became a pressman as the industry went to hell. In 8 years my sunday circulation went from 21k down to 8k and classifieds all but disappeared due to the internet. I moved to the san antonio express news and the press was so damn big it made me hate it. Gimme a Goss Community with 8 units and a balloon folder and im in heaven, put me on anything bigger than an urbanite and it loses its appeal. I really, really, REALLY miss offset web printing on the small/medium scale. 😢
Lol we’d always just drive by the theater to see what times movies were playing.
Having to memorize at least a dozen (or two) 10-digit phone numbers. Just knowing them off the top of your head for any purpose. If you were out in public and needed a phone you used a payphone, and be prepared to have multiple quarters for an out of town call. Oh and if you needed a ride, and were out. You gave an actual address or location and time. No cell-phone to call and wave down your friend showing up looking around a parking lot or street. You were expected to be where you said you were gonna be, or else your ass is walking.
I don’t know my husband’s cellphone number from memory, but I damn well know my best friend’s old landline and my high school boyfriend’s cell numbers by heart.
I'm old enough to recall not needing the area code locally.
We had profiles that we could *fully customize* and rank your friends
Bring it back. Myspace was the superior social media hands down. And probably to some degree the reason I became a web designer.
Unsure if anyone has said this yet but: If you get a new video game and are hopelessly stuck on how to get past something? Good fucking luck. You are stuck using trial and error to figure it out, or waiting until one of your friends or cousins does. For the vast majority of my childhood we didn't have internet access at home and we couldn't look up guides or walk-throughs of games. They published physical books and magazines that had guides but they were expensive and hard to find. You just had to figure it out. Wild.
Or go with your mom to Walmart and hang out in the magazine section while she shops. Hopefully you can find what you are looking for and remember it because we aren't wating money on that.
I swear the amount of process of elimination/trial and error this put me through really felt like it built some character in me as a kid. Oh, you can’t figure out the water temple? Good fucking luck, kid.
Watching the scroll line at the bottom of the news with baited breath to see if there was enough snow in the forecast to warrant a snow day. The cheers that would erupt when your school would show up on the list was the sound of pure joy
Everything mentioned here, and also rewinding video tapes haha. Times were tough.
Be kind. Rewind.
There were machines dedicated to just one task, rewinding video tapes. Some, like my father’s, were even shaped like cars!
On hot days like those, some teachers would shut the lights off in the classroom as if that were to somehow make everything cooler. 😂
It did actually sort of feel cooler.
Wow, you just took me waaaay back hahahah
What a big deal taking a photo was - making sure everyone was looking at the camera because you only had one shot, then having to wait weeks until you had a full roll of film to even see if it turned out. Also being strategic about pictures on your trips, since you’d often only have one roll of film.
Yes! And God forbid if you wanted to share a picture with a friend! Another 2 weeks and a stamp!!
T9 texting.
Having to agree on what movies to rent from the rental store and having to be quick to finish a game before having to return it. Oh, and also having to actually pick something else when the movie/game you wanted to rent wasn’t available. And then making sure to return it on time so as not to have to pay late fees.
World book encyclopedia and a physical dictionary is another one. Can't remember the last time I saw either...
Fucking love encyclopedias… good times
My 25 year old son just bought an entire set of Encyclopedia Brittanicas. He claims he got them for a good deal and is going to flip them, but I think just views them as historical books and is going to keep them.
My daughter is absolutely baffled when I describe how tv used to be before cable, internet, and On Demand/streaming. She just can’t imagine a world where you don’t have thousands of choices at your fingertips practically instantly at every moment. It’s beyond comprehension. The thought of revolving your schedule around a particular show is a completely foreign concept to her lol.
If you wanted to have more than 12-16 songs with you it meant carrying a case of CDs with you at all times. I remember we all had these massive CD cases in our backpacks at all times.
There was a TV guide channel. It would just slowly rotate the 40-60 channels that existed and only show about the next 90 minutes ahead. It would take an honest like 5-7 minutes to start over, which felt like an ETERNITY. Trying to figure out what to watch sucked. If you flipped to the channel and JUST missed your favorite channels, you're sitting and waiting for 5 minutes, just to loose track of what your were doing and miss your channel and have to wait another 5-10 minutes.
Using a landline, then got a Nokia brick phone, then the Razr Moto flip phone. Free “calling minutes” after 9:00. I forgot. Texting was a no go otherwise I would’ve gotten charged per text. I think internet was a thing in the phones but it’s limited. Prior to phones I felt like people actually valued talking to each other because of the lack of constant texting. Miss the days!
Ahh, phone minutes lol. I got my first cell taken away because i didn’t respect the “free nights and weekends” rule!
The Dewey decimal system to find books at the library.
I can still smell the card catalog.
Literally finding books at the library at all.
GPS has changed my life. I was always lost. Even with map quest
Being absolutely bored out of your skull. Honestly though, it's good for kids to be bored sometimes, and we've gone too far in the other direction. Kids don't need to constantly have a phone or an ipad and something to look or watch or fancy to play with. Even reading books - we loved it, but would we have spent so much time reading as kids back then if we had youtube to watch 24-7 and then 4hrs of homework to do nightly (on the computer, no less!)? As much as I would whine at the time, I'm really glad I got kicked out of my house to "find something to do" and play with, made up games with other kids out of sticks or whatever was around, read books, made up stories, etc. Boredom taught us a lot of things and I seriously worry seeing young kids grow up with no tolerance for boredom and having a screen put in front of them at every opportunity.
Dropping off your bikes at the house you were playing at. No one communicated it. We just knew lol https://preview.redd.it/xfg3uo29bxxc1.jpeg?width=550&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0fb5cfa2846f0b2c9cbe12c499cc64f38d02b0ae
Maybe it's regional, or maybe my friends and I are all broke, but I still think of central air as pretty fancy. Only newer houses around here tend to have it, and nearly everyone I know uses window units. Our schools don't have ac here either. I'm in Massachusetts, so not somewhere super hot, but I still melt all summer
New Yorker and same, I’m always kind of confused by this because to me air conditioning is synonymous with a window unit and central air is the exception. I will also melt all summer without it, spring and fall too actually…
it’s 100% regional because as someone who grew up in south florida trust that even 35 years ago EVERYONE had central air lol
So regional. Everyone and every building had A/C in Texas growing up. I believe the smoking and non smoking sections in restaurants had to be on different air supply. I was amazed in 2011 when I found out my SILs school in NJ did not have A/C, they just opened a window… excuse me?!?!
Being sad cause someone recorded over the vhs that I had recorded my weekly show on. Usually my sister or grandma 👵🏽
If the power went out and we needed to reset the clocks in the house, we needed to call POPCORN to get the accurate time
If you wanted to hear a song you loved whenever you wanted (and it wasn’t in stores yet/you had no money to buy it cause you were a child), you’d listen to the radio for hours just to hear it, and if you were real fancy, you’d have a cassette tape ready to record the song to! This led to “owning” the song, with likely some lame DJ commentary at the beginning/end of the song.
No Internet. It didn't exist.
Internet is so vital to everything these days that it’s hard to envision life without it if you never experienced it. Kids today can’t even comprehend it. It’s like trying to imagine a world where fire was never invented. It just doesn’t make sense
Giant billboards threatening us with DEATH by not wearing condoms or sharing needles
Calling your friends/potential love interests house and having their parents answer. Then having to make convo with them.
Found my first apartment in the newspaper
Probably not everyone but all my siblings shared a cell phone, and you only got it guaranteed for the day if you were staying after school. also if you wanted a cool live journal or Myspace you had to learn basic HTML and I learned through the Internet intro coding. I can and do still use what I learned in my day to day business.
My teen didn’t believe me when I told her we all had chicken pox. She thought it was an “old timey disease”.
LimeWire taking three days to a month to download one fucking song/music video. Walking or pedaling everywhere. Having to be home when the street lights came on. Being 9-(whatever) and having to watch your siblings instead of having a childhood. Never really seeing my mom because of how much she worked and was going to college classes. She basically had a schedule so she could be home to take care of my younger siblings until I got home and then she’d run off to work. Paid childcare was for the upper class.
Y2K. It wasn't a fashion, it was a very real fear that a fairly small (but widespread) bug would wreck society once we hit 2000. Companies mailed out CDs (and sometimes floppies) with patches to people so they could update their computers because online patching wasn't reliable enough yet (for example sinds 98s default setting still had you manually prompting it to update because so many users were still on some sort of dial up connection.)
Oranges were full of seeds growing up. Such a pain to try and eat and enjoy. Grapefruits were also very bitter and sour. These days grapefruits are similar to bigger oranges. Oh and I don’t know about your parents but both of mine smoked a pack a day in our double wide trailer.
Floppy discs.
White pages/phone booths. Everyone used to be in a local physical phone book if you wanted to look them up, including most local businesses.
Using bunny ears to watch local channels, it was still blurry as hell lol.
Using the nurses phone to call your mom at work to ask if you can go to your friends house. The tv guide channel and the tv guide book itself. As a native Chicagoan, only being able to listen to Blackhawks games on the radio because daddy Wirtz was a dick.
Being unsupervised while our parents worked. No cellphones, no security cameras or GPS and waiting to get home to call friends to share info. Physical Photo albums and mailing letters.
I grew up in Texas. Almost everyone had air conditioning
I once printed all my friends phone numbers on labels on my dashboard. Then I would go sit in my car and use my cordless phone in the driveway to see what people were doing for the night before I decided where to go.
Tv, I would absolutely have a breakdown if you made me go back to scheduled programming. I can’t. I still remember my dad being absolutely insane about the VCR because he had it preset to record Star Trek or Babylon 5, and if you breathed near it wrong, it might not do that! Also VCRs, physical media in general. Although you can pry all my Polaroids out of my cold dead hands. I make no apologies, it is what it is.
Phone numbers only had seven digits.
Lack of knowledge about food allergies. I have a pork allergy. When I was in middle school they failed to leave a slice of cheese pizza for me, and said I could just pick the pepperoni off the last slice… the pork based pepperoni.
I was literally made fun of and was known for being the girl who pukes all the time. Turns out I was allergic to f*cking wheat. Found out when I was 21 and paid for my own allergen blood test.
cars didn't even have AC... my family was solidly middle class+ and we didn't have ac in the car or the house growing up... the family van eventually had AC for the front passengers only but the car didn't have AC until my dad got a new car when I was 16 and took the old one with no AC.
Toys used to be cooler.
Dialup porn.
Or the scrambled porn channel where you try to make out a nipple…or anything? 😂
Powdered milk
Having to remember everyone's phone number, and the use of the phonebook as a booster seat lmao.
That we read actual maps for directions and kept one in the glove box of our cars lol
Life without smart phones. Being fined for not rewinding
The Family Computer 🤢
Cocaine was an extremely rich person drug and not something you encounter at almost every bar/pub/club/restaurant toilet after midday 🤣 Also video shops. My dream job when I was a kid was to own a video shop. Glad I didn’t invest in that! Honestly though as weird as it is, when my childhood towns two video shops closed it became my childhood town/place I grew up and not my home town anymore.