<p>I was trying to gently (without lecturing or preaching) talk to my daughter about the dangers of drinking too much in college. I told her that when I was in college (mumblesomething years ago) there were some frat parties where there was literally nothing being served except beer and chips. She said, “Couldn’t you have just carried a bottle of Aquafina in your purse?” I
explained that back in the dark ages, people didn’t carry drinks around with them all the time and that even if a single-serving bottle of water existed, no one would have been willing to pay for it. She was horrified!!!</p>
<p>As a 19-year-old, I can’t imagine frats serving chips at parties. It’s just the beer now. And sometimes punch.</p>
<p>(You should warn your daughter that it’s usually a bad idea to bring a purse to frat parties. You have to carry it all night long, beer will be spilled on it, and if you put it down and forget about it, you’ll probably never see it or anything that was in it again.)</p>
<p>Twenty year marriages? Oh, wait, this isn’t Jeopardy…</p>
<p>Please don’t forget to talk to her about the red cup drinks. Generally speaking, be careful drinking anything in a red cup and certainly never set that cup down and then drink out of it again. …</p>
<p>My d. was telling me about a friend’s parents who met for the first time at Mardi Gras. One was from east coast and one from the west coast. They corresponded for 8 months, then the one moved west and later they married. My d. kept repeating: “They WROTE letters by HAND for 8 months and hardly ever TALKED on the phone–how could they even DO that?”</p>
<p>I tried to tell her about the days of expensive long distance and no alternative to snail mail…she couldn’t begin to imagine.</p>
<p>Here’s another - plans had to be made at least a day ahead in the days before cells phones and IM and people actually kept dates (no way to easily cancel). All plans seem so spur-of the-moment these days and no social events seem to start until 10:00 earliest!</p>
<p>Not having the Superbowl. My dad was reminiscing about watching the first Superbowl, and I was shocked! It was something I had never considered before.</p>
<p>life without ATMs</p>
<p>making sure you had a dime (and then it went up to a quarter) in case you had to call home from a pay phone (a what???)</p>
<p>My D was shocked when I told her that we put our cups down to dance at fraternity parties, then went back to get them & would actually drink from them. Kids today know NEVER to do that. I never knew a single girl (or guy) whose drink was tampered with. </p>
<p>Another thing 18 year olds can’t imagine … when I was 18, AIDS was unknown. Heck, herpes didn’t come on the scene until I was halfway through college.</p>
<p>My kids can’t believe we had to use pay phones to call people when we weren’t home.</p>
<p>And we had to work with the guy in the climate controlled computer room in order to get the cards made for computer programming. Don’t even TELL them that we didn’t HAVE word processors (typewriters???).</p>
<p>No microwaves. No home computers. Manual transmissions only. Gas station attendants pumping gas (and cleaning windshields!). Wax paper wrapping for my sandwiches.</p>
<p>My mom was telling me about getting her first personal calculator and how big a deal it was, and I just couldn’t wrap my mind around her story that everyone just did long division even on really long decimals.</p>
<p>Also, the whole “uphill in the snow both ways” story. I can only assume that (given the physical impossibility of going uphill both ways to get to the same place), up until 1993, there were laws making streets one-way for pedestrian traffic, and you would have to jump off a cliff on the way home from school in order to get back on a two-way street. Can anyone over the age of 30 confirm this?</p>
<p>I forgot about the personal calculators. Yes, we really DID do long division with decimals by our lonesomes. It’s quite possible! I still prefer to do it that way from time to time, to keep my brain sharp. I actually prefer to add on paper if it’s I have to add a lot of numbers. Some of us did calculus with slide rules!</p>
<p>As for walking uphill both ways, well … I can’t say I did that, but I DID walk 7 blocks to school, home for lunch, back to school, and then back home every day. In the rain, snow, and sleet … just like the postal worker. People only had one car in my neck of the woods, and the car was not usually home during the day.</p>
<p>I thought that back then it was distilled water that was all the rage? Wasn’t that sold in bottles? Now we have so many different varieties of flavored water. :)</p>
<p>I actually used a slide rule in hs and college, and had a grey hard plastic dorky case for it! What’s a calculator??</p>
<p>Distilled water was for making saline. Remember putting the tablets in the distilled water to make saline for your contacts?</p>
<p>Pocket protectors.</p>
<p>How about slide rules? How about the thread like this from LAST year?</p>
<p>Heck, I can’t remember last month, let alone last year!</p>
<p>yeah there was a thread like this last year. I remember because I posted about the telex machine!</p>
<p>I have a old dial phone in my house. It’s been there since the day the house was built in 1956. When we moved in (2002), my son looked at it like it was a dinosaur. He wanted to know how to use it. He was pushing his finger in the holes and nothing was happening. And where was the redial button…</p>
<p>I broke the news gently.</p>
<p>I remember my dad coming home with a a TI calculator in the mid 70’s(?). Add, subtract, multiply, divide. It was several hundred dollars. We thought we were in heaven…</p>
<p>I remember I bought a calculator for college for $79.99 and all it did was the four basic functions. Then I got to college chem and the prof considered calculators cheating–back to the slide rule.</p>