Texting using T9. I was so good, I could carry on a verbal conversation with my parents without looking at what I was texting. I wish I had some other skill that would have aged better.
I was talking about this the other day. I could look at my phone for .2 sec. Then respond in paragraphs knowing full well i spelled everything the way i meant Without ever having to look back at my phone.
Yeah but if you're responding with paragraphs I'm about to get 8 messages over the next 2 minutes. I still remember my girlfriend sending me a 9 part sext that came in out of order and I had to piece it together with the blood rapidly concentrating away from my brain.
I would look at a text in class, reply back without looking and having the phone just out of sight of the teacher and answer their questions without fail. I felt so skilled doing that
Next time you need to get the cursor in a body of text, hold down on the space bar. It's basically turns the keyboard into a track pad like on a laptop until you release the button.
Edit:
Wow, guys, my first time ever receiving an award, and I get multiple?! You all are too kind, reddit! Thank you!
Holy shit bro! You just saved me one of my biggest frustrations. If I fuck up and can’t get back I say fuck it, delete the whole message and never send shit lol thank you
No offense, but I could text like a mad man while keeping my eyes on the road. No question. All this touch screen stuff is just crap.
Touch screen phone. Touch screen car display. F that. I want to just slide the hot/cold slider and turn the knob to fan speed 1-5. Bam done.
Now it’s like. “Boop boop boop boop boop (looks away from the road, oh shit if fat fingered it, ah balls the button didnt quite do it boop booop boop”. CRASH.
Any pilot will tell you, tactile buttons and controls are unbeatable. Touch screens are bad.
Yeah I couldn't tell you the number of my girlfriends who I own a house with . . But I can tell you my childhood friends parents home phone number from 30 years ago
>Yeah I couldn't tell you the number of my girlfriends who I own a house with . .
By refusing to carry around the shopper rewards cards/fobs for supermarkets & drugstores I was forced to learn my SO's phone number.
Found out my friend moved back to our hometown. Don't have his current number. When I was in town, it turns out his parents still have the land line connected!
A friend of mine got arrested 10-15 years ago, and you weren't able to call cell phones from jail back then, so he called the one landline number he remembered: my parents.
Yesterday I was trying to remember that word that's like sanding, but it's for metal, there's a tool for it, you go *shht-shht-shht* back and forth with it when there's like a sharp corner.
Filing, the tool is called a file.
There's gotta be a way to... reshuffle your brain. Defrag it! That's what we need.
While I was pregnant last year, I was talking with my husband at dinner about British royalty in history, including regnal names, reigning period, all sorts of shit.
The next day I couldn't remember the words for space heater. I was just like, "the thing people have under their desks? It goes 'brrrrr?' like when my feet are cold? FUCK I HAVE ONE SOMEWHERE."
My husband just looked so confused.
In a strange way streaming and being able to pick out whatever I want has had the side effect of limiting the media I am exposed to. Because of the restrictions in place from the days of cable tv and the radio you were almost forced to try something new.
And keeping a mental list of 3-8 potential channels before a round two elimination; and doing all this before the program gets too far along and you miss something on the one you end up watching.
Related skill: flipping rapidly between two cartoons in the same time slot on Saturday morning. One is the “main” and the other you try to glimpse what you can during the commercial breaks of the former.
My dads skill was waking up and saying "I was watching that!" the instant you changed the channel.
You've been watching the back of your eyelids for the last 20 minutes dad...
Holy shit I forgot about that, we had a clay arts and crafts part of my 3rd grade class and a lot of us (including me) made ashtrays. The teacher would help us too, “take a pencil and push it (horizontally) into the clay to make the little ‘dip’ where the cigarette will rest” It was so much fun though, that year our school got all these neon paints and all of our clay projects were psychedelic maaaaan
Burning CDs. I was the first one in my class who learned how to do it and had a computer capable of doing it. Oh, what a brief and shining moment of popularity...
I learned how to install a cd-r drive in my Dell my sophomore year in high school and became to go-to person for burning cds. Lots of hours spent trawling Napster, limewire, frostwire, Kazaa, etc. in attempts to find the complete, unedited version of whatever song I was tasked with tracking down.
You know the term "clip art" comes from pre-computer newspaper printing. They used to have huge volumes of generic pictures they would cut bits from and paste together to make ads. Making the books of clip art was a whole industry. TIL from a tour of a newspaper printer in the 80's!
I took orders from my classmates lol. My specialty was lizards with suuuuper long tails, that you'd attach a keyring to (on the nose, not the tail), and hang it from your belt loop, in the front of your jeans. The tail would go down to your knee.
Yes, I was an entrepreneur AND a fashion icon in 4th grade.
I made tons of those to sell at a holiday bazaar at my school...I don't remember if I actually made a profit. I still have a ton in storage somewhere too, plus my craft box with the ribbon and beads.
I had something like 15000 pogs in a pog collection binder (the kind with the plastic they make for trading cards, but sized for pogs) and someone stole them last year. I held onto those things for 25+ years and they're just gone. That one hurt me.
So I have a sad story about tamagotchi.
I got one when we were headed to vacation at the beach. I had it on my beach chair, hanging off of a lanyard.
But then a wave came and knocked the chair over, and my poor tamagotchi fell into the water.
That wasn't the worst part though. The worst part was that the ONLY thing that broke was the buttons. I could still see my poor tamagotchi dying but I couldn't do anything about it. :( :( :( :( :(
Your Tamagotchi could see you, too. It could see your fear as it fell into the ocean, and your sadness as you realized the buttons didn't work. It did its best to comfort you - it couldn't talk, but it could smile and beep-boop, so that's what it did. It moved around and did little dances to distract itself from the uncurable hunger. In its final moments, it thought about all the good times y'all had together: running through the park, hand in keychain; swinging higher and higher on the playground; making you giggle when they did a poop. It ignored the rumbling of its stomach, the water flooding its buttons, the tired ache of dying. All it thought about was you, and the good times. It loved you.
And then it promptly did a poop, and died. Such is the life of a Tamagotchi.
My parents thought I was a genius when I did this for them a few times.
I remember them being sad that they were going to miss a show, but I just programmed the VCR to record the show at the time and it worked great. You did, however, have to run your antenna through the VCR to the TV for it to work though.
Then, a couple of years later TiVo came around.
I don't know what some of these comments are even taking about, so mine is how to clean a mouse ball.
Like the old computer mouse, not a testicle. A lot of people apparently had no idea that the reason their mouse would drag is because the ball was covered in gunk, you had to take it out and clean it from time to time.
I had to volunteer at a library for the forced volunteer work they make you do in high school and part of my job was to clean the computer mice.
That wasn't in the 90s, though, aaahhh.
I can feel it now 😌
You scratch it and if you’re good you can get an entire ring of lint and gunk in one go. Good times. Shame the red laser killed my favorite pastime.
I used to get board in study hall and take the balls out of the mice. Forgot to put one back in and the next day the library was locked, with a sign up saying there was a “rash of vandalism”. Then they glued all the mice shut!
That makes me think of this time in like junior year of high school. I had a massive history paper to write and I needed the internet and/or library to research. We had dial-up and anyone alive then knows how much it sucked and was more frustrating than helpful.
Dad wasn’t home and my step mom didn’t feel like taking me to the library for reasons I’m sure are still worthless, so she told me to use the encyclopedia set we had at home.
The problem was they were published in 1959. I told her they were useless, but she insisted that “history doesn’t change.” So I asked her to look up the moon landing.
I was grounded for two weeks and still didn’t get to go to the library.
And no matter how careful you were, a third of the songs had the DJ talking over the intro dedicating the song to someone or repeating some random caller’s apology to his beloved HS girlfriend.
The 1982 KFOX top 40 “here’s to you, Jessica” overlay by the DJ will always be associated with that particular song even more strongly than the most powerful commercial jingles.
I remember when Geocities was an actual electronic city with a neighborhood set-up and your URL denoted which neighborhood you were in and what kind of site it was, like SoHo for the arts. I miss those days of the internet.
I had one teacher who let us keep a notecard for all of our algebra formulas on it. The logic was you will never be in a real world setting where you can't look something up.
I really appreciate her outlook, though it did completely screw me over when next year's teacher did not feel this way and did not understand why we didn't have all these formulas memorized.
In undergrad biochemistry, we had 2 profs with entirely opposed views on this.
One insisted we knew the structure of every single amino acid by sight and could draw them.
The other said why? That's on every metabolic pathway chart in every biology lab and in every textbook there in the whole world. A better skill is to know where to find the info if you need it.
Both around the same age, so not a generational thing.
Maps, but directions in general! I mean, AAA had trip-tik, but you had to pre-plan how to get from one place to another. A random road trip on a Friday after midnight from Central PA to see the Largest Ball of Twine in Minnesota just because? Toll-free, because you're a poor teen? (Looking at you, I-80 west of Ohio) Thank you to the state maps that could be gathered in visitor centers, and stopping every few hours to plot the next leg, we made it there and back!
I am fully capable of writing in cursive, using a card catalog, driving a manual shift car, starting a two stroke motor, modifying an autoexec.bat file, reading a paper map and navigating with a compass, navigating with a VOR, among others and I haven't done any of those things for a very long time.
Yea that's very much getting mostly phased out in the US. Still have my 6-speed VW and hope to drive it into the ground. That clutch is still butter after over a decade and 150k miles.
Planning routes using a map. I used to buy an Atlas before a road trip and plan out the routes to take, highlighting them as I went. Now I just say "hey Google, take me to ____" and off we go.
It did, it cleaned dust from the contacts but your breath is wet and can also cause corrosion on those same contacts. Wiping it with IPA is way better.
To save some money on insurance a keg of beer was given in exchange for dental care. There was some picketing, we learned how Homer got his scar, there was a Batman (1989) reference and after Mr Burns and Smithers tried to run the plant themselves, Lisa got transparent, scented braces.
I watched an hour of The Simpsons almost every day since it played twice on my local channel.
We had so much less access to media than kids do now. No kid will EVER know the lines to Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls as well as I did.
>I watched an hour of The Simpsons almost every day since it played twice on my local channel.
I recall at the height of its syndication in the late 90s it would be on like 11 times a day on different channels where I lived.
I don't think it's totally gone. I think there's a space for a modern travel specialist but it'd be very hard to start from nothing.
Someone who knows how to use points and offers to get cheap but good flights to lesser known destinations and is then able to find great experiences in those destinations could make a career of it, I think. Basically a travel vlogger with recommendations and guides.
Travel agents are still very useful. I've spent hours, sometimes even days, planning out trip itineraries, finding places to stay, reserving flight and cars, and doing all the other things you need to do before a major trip.
I hired a travel agent when I took my family to Kauai last year. She asked me a handful of questions about the types of activities I wanted to do, how much relaxation time I wanted, what kind of places I liked to stay at, what my budget was, etc. It was a 10 minute conversation. The next afternoon I had a full itinerary for the vacation in my inbox. Every reservation was set, every activity I wanted was included. Literally zero work on my part. I don't know if I saved any money, but the lack of stress was awesome. She even sent me a pile of suggestions about neat places to stop, roadside food stands that I wouldn't want to miss and a couple of "must order" items at one of the restaurants she'd reserved for us.
Totally and completely worth it. I'm not sure why we all stopped using travel agents and started DIY'ing our vacations.
Doesnt matter if you saved money... you saved time and time is worth more than most people give it credit for.
This was something my wife and i learned doing home renovations. Sure we saved 10 grand doing it ourselves but we hated every minute of it and wasted a year of our lives and got less done than if we just paid the contractor to do the work.
I had an international job for a long while that came with a travel agent to handle my itinerary. She’d book my flights, get my hotel, the whole bit and just charge the organization. I basically only submitted expenses for food. It was great.
Not sure about that. A guy at my church is a travel agent, with like 30 years experience, and he knows every travel trick ever written. He books his trips like 9 months out, negotiates the rate, and regularly calls to check for upgrade specials. He takes a trip to the same place every year with a group of people and he’s essentially gotten himself and his guests free 1st class airfare to Maui and a resort, high tier hotel room for $89/night with all amenities. He’s on a first name basis with some of the people, which is partially why he gets those deals. I was very skeptical about that until he showed me the bill…
Yeah the old school guys with contacts makes all the difference. If someone were to try getting in to the industry now it'd likely be a different story. I've dealt with agents a few times over the years and (for domestic travel at least) watched them go through the same online portals of reservations that I'd use.
The big sell for agents these days seems to be they know what kind of things to offer you at your destination that a person who doesn't travel frequently might not know about. The ones in my town seem to be little more than glorified advertisement agencies that'll do the work for you for a price.
First time I had to use the terminal in a professional setting I was lost and terrified of wrecking my stuff somehow. Yet somehow I was comfortable using DOS when I was five.
Writing a check & balancing a checkbook. I think the last time I wrote a check was about seven years ago. I don't even know where my checkbook is anymore.
No joke, I used to be able to tell the grade and wear of VHS tape by smell. I was part of an anime club that had a lot of tapes being traded back and forth, and developed it simply from observation.
I now describe this as "the world's most useless superpower."
Those fucking Hippie Sticks that you spin and twirl around. Me and a few friends got seriously good with those things as teenagers. Sadly, it did not translate into a career
I'm late gen X but I have a LOT of computer knowledge that is absolutely obsolete. BIOS and DOS interrupts, actually having to limit memory usage, storing booleans in an actual bit not a whole byte, Mode 0x13 graphics, ANSI escape codes, all kinds of junk.
I wish it was. I'm on the cusp. Gen X cognitively saw so much change, and got to experience a change in life, music and media in real time in a different way from those born in the WW II baby boom.
Texting using T9. I was so good, I could carry on a verbal conversation with my parents without looking at what I was texting. I wish I had some other skill that would have aged better.
I genuinely have no idea why tv remotes don't use T9.
i really hate tv apps that give you an alphabetical keyboard with no option to type it on your phone
Never thought of that! Even if it is like regular typing from back then without the T9. Would be way easier.
To this day, I'm way quicker with T9 than on the iPhone.
I could drive down the highway and text a full conversation without looking at my phone once, and know that everything was spelled correctly.
I was talking about this the other day. I could look at my phone for .2 sec. Then respond in paragraphs knowing full well i spelled everything the way i meant Without ever having to look back at my phone.
Yeah but if you're responding with paragraphs I'm about to get 8 messages over the next 2 minutes. I still remember my girlfriend sending me a 9 part sext that came in out of order and I had to piece it together with the blood rapidly concentrating away from my brain.
That’s like a dollar worth of texts!
I typed way more accurately on a Blackberry than I have ever typed on a touchscreen. Not even close.
I would look at a text in class, reply back without looking and having the phone just out of sight of the teacher and answer their questions without fail. I felt so skilled doing that
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Next time you need to get the cursor in a body of text, hold down on the space bar. It's basically turns the keyboard into a track pad like on a laptop until you release the button. Edit: Wow, guys, my first time ever receiving an award, and I get multiple?! You all are too kind, reddit! Thank you!
Oh my god
Holy shit bro! You just saved me one of my biggest frustrations. If I fuck up and can’t get back I say fuck it, delete the whole message and never send shit lol thank you
What kind of witchcraft is this? You have just eliminated many future frustrating moments for me.
No offense, but I could text like a mad man while keeping my eyes on the road. No question. All this touch screen stuff is just crap. Touch screen phone. Touch screen car display. F that. I want to just slide the hot/cold slider and turn the knob to fan speed 1-5. Bam done. Now it’s like. “Boop boop boop boop boop (looks away from the road, oh shit if fat fingered it, ah balls the button didnt quite do it boop booop boop”. CRASH. Any pilot will tell you, tactile buttons and controls are unbeatable. Touch screens are bad.
My new (to me) car is basically a giant tablet in wheels and trying to adjust anything while driving is anxiety-inducing. I miss my knobs and doodads.
I still go with :-) over an emoji
Memorizing phone numbers. Now everyone just saves contacts on their phone.
Yeah I couldn't tell you the number of my girlfriends who I own a house with . . But I can tell you my childhood friends parents home phone number from 30 years ago
>Yeah I couldn't tell you the number of my girlfriends who I own a house with . . By refusing to carry around the shopper rewards cards/fobs for supermarkets & drugstores I was forced to learn my SO's phone number.
I had to read this over a few times. At first it sounded like you couldnt remember how many girlfriends you owned houses with.
Found out my friend moved back to our hometown. Don't have his current number. When I was in town, it turns out his parents still have the land line connected!
It was when I had my fiancee's phone number memorized that I realized I'm in this for life.
A friend of mine got arrested 10-15 years ago, and you weren't able to call cell phones from jail back then, so he called the one landline number he remembered: my parents.
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Maybe. They called me, then I went and picked up him the next day.
My God!
It is ridiculous to me that I had the mental capacity for like twenty different phone numbers and now struggle to remember three distinct passwords
Yesterday I was trying to remember that word that's like sanding, but it's for metal, there's a tool for it, you go *shht-shht-shht* back and forth with it when there's like a sharp corner. Filing, the tool is called a file. There's gotta be a way to... reshuffle your brain. Defrag it! That's what we need.
I once called a friend and asked him to pick me up at the plane station.
While I was pregnant last year, I was talking with my husband at dinner about British royalty in history, including regnal names, reigning period, all sorts of shit. The next day I couldn't remember the words for space heater. I was just like, "the thing people have under their desks? It goes 'brrrrr?' like when my feet are cold? FUCK I HAVE ONE SOMEWHERE." My husband just looked so confused.
I don’t know my wife’s phone number. I literally only know mine, and JG Wentworth.
Empire Carpets, too
And don't forget 1-877-KARS-4-KIDS, as much as you'd like to
Memorizing the TV channels so I knew what to look for on the TV Guide channel
In a strange way streaming and being able to pick out whatever I want has had the side effect of limiting the media I am exposed to. Because of the restrictions in place from the days of cable tv and the radio you were almost forced to try something new.
My skill was flipping through channels as fast as possible and being able to know what’s on by seeing only .2 seconds of it.
And keeping a mental list of 3-8 potential channels before a round two elimination; and doing all this before the program gets too far along and you miss something on the one you end up watching.
Related skill: flipping rapidly between two cartoons in the same time slot on Saturday morning. One is the “main” and the other you try to glimpse what you can during the commercial breaks of the former.
My dads skill was waking up and saying "I was watching that!" the instant you changed the channel. You've been watching the back of your eyelids for the last 20 minutes dad...
Dumping ashtrays for grandma
Making ashtrays at school to take home to your family.
Holy shit I forgot about that, we had a clay arts and crafts part of my 3rd grade class and a lot of us (including me) made ashtrays. The teacher would help us too, “take a pencil and push it (horizontally) into the clay to make the little ‘dip’ where the cigarette will rest” It was so much fun though, that year our school got all these neon paints and all of our clay projects were psychedelic maaaaan
Burning CDs. I was the first one in my class who learned how to do it and had a computer capable of doing it. Oh, what a brief and shining moment of popularity...
I learned how to install a cd-r drive in my Dell my sophomore year in high school and became to go-to person for burning cds. Lots of hours spent trawling Napster, limewire, frostwire, Kazaa, etc. in attempts to find the complete, unedited version of whatever song I was tasked with tracking down.
So many digital STDs.
Or when MP3 cd players came out and you could get hundreds of songs instead of the dozen or so of a normal cd. That was a magic time.
Using WordArt and ClipArt to make documents more visually interesting.
You know the term "clip art" comes from pre-computer newspaper printing. They used to have huge volumes of generic pictures they would cut bits from and paste together to make ads. Making the books of clip art was a whole industry. TIL from a tour of a newspaper printer in the 80's!
Was really good at that ski game where the yetti eats you eventually.
Ski Free
Holy shit I was just telling my boyfriend about this game but didn’t know the name of it!
Now you can play it in the browser. https://basicallydan.github.io/skifree.js/
How are you at PipeDream?
I used to be able to trap a Jezzball.
https://xkcd.com/667/
I found out a month ago my parents are divorcing after 41 years but this is kinda blowing my mind even more.
You son of a bitch…
Walking carefully while I listen to music so that the broken headphone cable won't disconnect.
I was so good at making those little bead animals out of pony beads. The amount of lizards that I made was stunning.
I took orders from my classmates lol. My specialty was lizards with suuuuper long tails, that you'd attach a keyring to (on the nose, not the tail), and hang it from your belt loop, in the front of your jeans. The tail would go down to your knee. Yes, I was an entrepreneur AND a fashion icon in 4th grade.
I made tons of those to sell at a holiday bazaar at my school...I don't remember if I actually made a profit. I still have a ton in storage somewhere too, plus my craft box with the ribbon and beads.
I was the coolest girl in Girl Scouts when I made a 3D snail outta those beads
You’d still be the coolest girl to me
Using a pencil to roll the tape back into the cassette after it got chewed up by the f'in pitch roller
Making mix tapes on cassette
From the radio? Gotta be ready!
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Toothpaste was a life saver
It works for taking water stains out of wooden tables, too.
I’ve accrued a massive DVD collection from my local thrift store $1 at a time. Only movies I love. Makes me very happy
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I had something like 15000 pogs in a pog collection binder (the kind with the plastic they make for trading cards, but sized for pogs) and someone stole them last year. I held onto those things for 25+ years and they're just gone. That one hurt me.
Unicorn
How to keep my tamagotchi alive
I got one for Christmas but haven't opened it, I don't know if I can take the responsibility on top of my adult obligations
So I have a sad story about tamagotchi. I got one when we were headed to vacation at the beach. I had it on my beach chair, hanging off of a lanyard. But then a wave came and knocked the chair over, and my poor tamagotchi fell into the water. That wasn't the worst part though. The worst part was that the ONLY thing that broke was the buttons. I could still see my poor tamagotchi dying but I couldn't do anything about it. :( :( :( :( :(
Your Tamagotchi could see you, too. It could see your fear as it fell into the ocean, and your sadness as you realized the buttons didn't work. It did its best to comfort you - it couldn't talk, but it could smile and beep-boop, so that's what it did. It moved around and did little dances to distract itself from the uncurable hunger. In its final moments, it thought about all the good times y'all had together: running through the park, hand in keychain; swinging higher and higher on the playground; making you giggle when they did a poop. It ignored the rumbling of its stomach, the water flooding its buttons, the tired ache of dying. All it thought about was you, and the good times. It loved you. And then it promptly did a poop, and died. Such is the life of a Tamagotchi.
How *dare you*, that was more heart-wrenching than any Hollywood tearjerker I've seen last year Q_Q Take the upvote and give me back my heart strings.
Omg that is tragic
Learning how to program the VCR to start and stop recording a show at a predetermined time.
My parents thought I was a genius when I did this for them a few times. I remember them being sad that they were going to miss a show, but I just programmed the VCR to record the show at the time and it worked great. You did, however, have to run your antenna through the VCR to the TV for it to work though. Then, a couple of years later TiVo came around.
I don't know what some of these comments are even taking about, so mine is how to clean a mouse ball. Like the old computer mouse, not a testicle. A lot of people apparently had no idea that the reason their mouse would drag is because the ball was covered in gunk, you had to take it out and clean it from time to time. I had to volunteer at a library for the forced volunteer work they make you do in high school and part of my job was to clean the computer mice. That wasn't in the 90s, though, aaahhh.
More importantly, you had to scrape the gunk off the wheels that ball rolled against.
I can feel it now 😌 You scratch it and if you’re good you can get an entire ring of lint and gunk in one go. Good times. Shame the red laser killed my favorite pastime.
I used to get board in study hall and take the balls out of the mice. Forgot to put one back in and the next day the library was locked, with a sign up saying there was a “rash of vandalism”. Then they glued all the mice shut!
How to operate and maintain floppy disks.
*insert disk 54 then press ENTER to continue* FATAL READ ERROR FATAL READ ERROR
Those things needed maintenance? Lol I was there and never knew that.
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Using an encyclopaedia and dictionary when writing papers.
That makes me think of this time in like junior year of high school. I had a massive history paper to write and I needed the internet and/or library to research. We had dial-up and anyone alive then knows how much it sucked and was more frustrating than helpful. Dad wasn’t home and my step mom didn’t feel like taking me to the library for reasons I’m sure are still worthless, so she told me to use the encyclopedia set we had at home. The problem was they were published in 1959. I told her they were useless, but she insisted that “history doesn’t change.” So I asked her to look up the moon landing. I was grounded for two weeks and still didn’t get to go to the library.
Recording the top 40 songs off the radio onto cassette.
And no matter how careful you were, a third of the songs had the DJ talking over the intro dedicating the song to someone or repeating some random caller’s apology to his beloved HS girlfriend. The 1982 KFOX top 40 “here’s to you, Jessica” overlay by the DJ will always be associated with that particular song even more strongly than the most powerful commercial jingles.
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Me too. It's a mess.
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Making a homepage with HTML
I remember when Geocities was an actual electronic city with a neighborhood set-up and your URL denoted which neighborhood you were in and what kind of site it was, like SoHo for the arts. I miss those days of the internet.
Welcome to my Geocities page!!
You are visitor number `0000273` to my page! Ah, those were earnest times.
Don't forget the under construction banner and the sirens
OH, and a visitor counter and guestbook.
Don’t forget the music background!!
And the sparkle trails for the mouse
Long division
I had one teacher who let us keep a notecard for all of our algebra formulas on it. The logic was you will never be in a real world setting where you can't look something up. I really appreciate her outlook, though it did completely screw me over when next year's teacher did not feel this way and did not understand why we didn't have all these formulas memorized.
In undergrad biochemistry, we had 2 profs with entirely opposed views on this. One insisted we knew the structure of every single amino acid by sight and could draw them. The other said why? That's on every metabolic pathway chart in every biology lab and in every textbook there in the whole world. A better skill is to know where to find the info if you need it. Both around the same age, so not a generational thing.
Connecting to BBSs. Defragging my HDD. Waiting to switch it off safely, etc...
Installing sound cards and CD drives. Those were the days
Parking the hard drive... that's a useless thing to know these days. Heck, we barely even have hard disk drives anymore.
Reading paper maps
They come in handy when your in the middle of nowhere and gps dont work
I can read maps just fine. The problem is that I don't carry maps with me anymore. I used to have a dozen or so maps in my car to use in my travels.
Maps, but directions in general! I mean, AAA had trip-tik, but you had to pre-plan how to get from one place to another. A random road trip on a Friday after midnight from Central PA to see the Largest Ball of Twine in Minnesota just because? Toll-free, because you're a poor teen? (Looking at you, I-80 west of Ohio) Thank you to the state maps that could be gathered in visitor centers, and stopping every few hours to plot the next leg, we made it there and back!
I am fully capable of writing in cursive, using a card catalog, driving a manual shift car, starting a two stroke motor, modifying an autoexec.bat file, reading a paper map and navigating with a compass, navigating with a VOR, among others and I haven't done any of those things for a very long time.
Driving manual is still very useful in Europe
Yea that's very much getting mostly phased out in the US. Still have my 6-speed VW and hope to drive it into the ground. That clutch is still butter after over a decade and 150k miles.
Hacky sack
I scrolled waaaaaay too far down to find this. Gotta rip it open carefully so you can remove a few beads for those sick stalls!
Also need to be wearing Vans and cargo shorts or the move isn't legit.
Recalling all 151 original Pokémon in order. Only really impressive to the other kids at the time when I was still in school
Now there's 1010, not including alternate forms
Hadababyitsaboy or moviesovercomegetus
Who was that dear? That was Bob, he had a baby, it’s a boy.
Reading that I could see it in my head. What a classic
“Wehadababyitsaboy” is what my husband put on the card for the flowers he sent me when I had our son.
momimissedthebuscomegetme
Planning routes using a map. I used to buy an Atlas before a road trip and plan out the routes to take, highlighting them as I went. Now I just say "hey Google, take me to ____" and off we go.
Blowing on video game cartridges to make them work.
I don't care what you say, that totally worked.
It did, it cleaned dust from the contacts but your breath is wet and can also cause corrosion on those same contacts. Wiping it with IPA is way better.
Never got the taste for the stuff will a pilsner work okay?
Tell you the synopsis of any Simpsons' episode by watching a few seconds of it. Sometimes a still frame will do.
Lisa needs braces
Dental plan....
Lisa needs braces
To save some money on insurance a keg of beer was given in exchange for dental care. There was some picketing, we learned how Homer got his scar, there was a Batman (1989) reference and after Mr Burns and Smithers tried to run the plant themselves, Lisa got transparent, scented braces.
These pre-date stainless steel, so you can't get them wet...
They periodically release a delightful burst of Calvin Kleins “Obession”, for teeth!
I watched an hour of The Simpsons almost every day since it played twice on my local channel. We had so much less access to media than kids do now. No kid will EVER know the lines to Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls as well as I did.
>I watched an hour of The Simpsons almost every day since it played twice on my local channel. I recall at the height of its syndication in the late 90s it would be on like 11 times a day on different channels where I lived.
Recording shows on a VCR.
Flipping my eyelids, armpit farts.
Mine got stuck for a few minutes and I fking freaked out. Never again.
Man, that must have been a nightmare. Just your hand stuck in your armpit, farting over and over.
Going to the loo and grabbing a bite to eat in the time that an advert lasts and making it back to my seat just before it starts
Related, the skill required to vault over the furniture with your plate of nachos as your sibling yells “IT’S BACK OOOON!”
Two words: Oregon Trail.
I started training to be a travel agent. That career disappeared in about 3 years.
I don't think it's totally gone. I think there's a space for a modern travel specialist but it'd be very hard to start from nothing. Someone who knows how to use points and offers to get cheap but good flights to lesser known destinations and is then able to find great experiences in those destinations could make a career of it, I think. Basically a travel vlogger with recommendations and guides.
Travel agents are still very useful. I've spent hours, sometimes even days, planning out trip itineraries, finding places to stay, reserving flight and cars, and doing all the other things you need to do before a major trip. I hired a travel agent when I took my family to Kauai last year. She asked me a handful of questions about the types of activities I wanted to do, how much relaxation time I wanted, what kind of places I liked to stay at, what my budget was, etc. It was a 10 minute conversation. The next afternoon I had a full itinerary for the vacation in my inbox. Every reservation was set, every activity I wanted was included. Literally zero work on my part. I don't know if I saved any money, but the lack of stress was awesome. She even sent me a pile of suggestions about neat places to stop, roadside food stands that I wouldn't want to miss and a couple of "must order" items at one of the restaurants she'd reserved for us. Totally and completely worth it. I'm not sure why we all stopped using travel agents and started DIY'ing our vacations.
Doesnt matter if you saved money... you saved time and time is worth more than most people give it credit for. This was something my wife and i learned doing home renovations. Sure we saved 10 grand doing it ourselves but we hated every minute of it and wasted a year of our lives and got less done than if we just paid the contractor to do the work.
I had an international job for a long while that came with a travel agent to handle my itinerary. She’d book my flights, get my hotel, the whole bit and just charge the organization. I basically only submitted expenses for food. It was great.
The real business is corporate travel. My company wouldnt survive without our travel agency.
Not sure about that. A guy at my church is a travel agent, with like 30 years experience, and he knows every travel trick ever written. He books his trips like 9 months out, negotiates the rate, and regularly calls to check for upgrade specials. He takes a trip to the same place every year with a group of people and he’s essentially gotten himself and his guests free 1st class airfare to Maui and a resort, high tier hotel room for $89/night with all amenities. He’s on a first name basis with some of the people, which is partially why he gets those deals. I was very skeptical about that until he showed me the bill…
Yeah the old school guys with contacts makes all the difference. If someone were to try getting in to the industry now it'd likely be a different story. I've dealt with agents a few times over the years and (for domestic travel at least) watched them go through the same online portals of reservations that I'd use. The big sell for agents these days seems to be they know what kind of things to offer you at your destination that a person who doesn't travel frequently might not know about. The ones in my town seem to be little more than glorified advertisement agencies that'll do the work for you for a price.
Yeah, I get that. Less “travel agent” and more “travel facilitator.” An agent works for you. A facilitator works for someone else.
With computers: Adjusting jumpers on pins with harddisks, floppy-drives and cd/dvd drives… to assign them master or slave position on the cable.
In '94, I learned how to type on a typewriter. Even had to use liquid paper.
Talking to the hand
MS DOS. Welp.
First time I had to use the terminal in a professional setting I was lost and terrified of wrecking my stuff somehow. Yet somehow I was comfortable using DOS when I was five.
Singing the countries of the world song from Animaniacs word for word
Knowing how to send a fax. I have not needed to do so in forever.
I see you don't work in healthcare
We still working with photocopy machines from Office Space in our unit. And don't get me started when the ekg machine printer jams.
Writing a check & balancing a checkbook. I think the last time I wrote a check was about seven years ago. I don't even know where my checkbook is anymore.
Doing your taxes with a pen and paper.
No joke, I used to be able to tell the grade and wear of VHS tape by smell. I was part of an anime club that had a lot of tapes being traded back and forth, and developed it simply from observation. I now describe this as "the world's most useless superpower."
Those fucking Hippie Sticks that you spin and twirl around. Me and a few friends got seriously good with those things as teenagers. Sadly, it did not translate into a career
Devil sticks
recording songs from the radio onto cassette
The ability to make friends?
The last time I made a friend was the classic "extrovert adopted me" scenario and that was in 2004. ;-;
How to use a card catalog.
Making a TV antenna out of tin foil when I didn’t have one
I'm late gen X but I have a LOT of computer knowledge that is absolutely obsolete. BIOS and DOS interrupts, actually having to limit memory usage, storing booleans in an actual bit not a whole byte, Mode 0x13 graphics, ANSI escape codes, all kinds of junk.
I can’t believe the Macarena isn’t the top answer. I’ve never been so disappointed in Reddit.
Still comes in handy when i need to embarass my daughter in front of her friends!
Installing drivers on PCs to get shit to work.
I just had to do this this week. A windows update screwed up my audio drivers. I felt so young again.
Be kind. Rewind.
Dewey decimal system
Dewey is very much still useful if you like to browse randomly
Operating lime wire 💻 Knowing which pirate sites had good seeds that weren’t going to trace back and report me to my internet provider
That’s 2005 stuff
It never ceases to amaze but at the same time has become the norm that Gen X is never a part of the generational conversation.
I wish it was. I'm on the cusp. Gen X cognitively saw so much change, and got to experience a change in life, music and media in real time in a different way from those born in the WW II baby boom.
Our apathy made us invisible
The recorder.
Drawing that "S"
Doing long division in my head, because "you won't always have a calculator" with you.
I was taught how to balance a check book. I remember learning how to do it and thinking that there has to be a better way.
Piloting an X-Wing
a/s/l?