Recently a memory resurfaced from the mid-1980s and it made me wonder what other memories people might have of times within their lifetime of how commonplace experience has changed.
Here’s my story. It was the mid 1980s and I would work during Xmas vacation at a local department store. AT&T had recently lost its monopoly on long-distance calls and competitors like Sprint and MCI were moving in. In the store where I was working one of the companies had set up a table in the main aisle by my section offering shoppers brief phone calls anywhere in the USA. People were lined up to call, back in the day long distance was was seen as expensive. Folding clothes or ringing up sales I couldn’t help but overhear. The worker would place the call, and quite often the second sentence the caller said was “No, no, everyone is ok” so perhaps the only reason many people called long-distance was to notify relatives of a death in the family. Some people were literally in tears, I guess they had not heard the voice of the person they called in quite a long time. It was touching, and at the time I remember thinking these companies are changing the world.
How little did I know, of course. This was in the days before email. before Facetime, before cell calls were essentially free. These days I imagine kids around twenty can’t conceive of a world where there are people out there you know that you’ll likely talk with seldom if ever, even if you wanted to.
So my story. I’m curious if anyone else wants to share their story of how the world in which they grew up changed.
Love it! One of the reason the recipient of the call may be so surprised by receiving a call mid day is because my family always made long distance calls on Sunday evening when the rates would go down. If we received a call before Sunday evening, we too would have assumed something big had happened.
Not to keep it on phone calls but you reminded me of a related story. My mom had lots of family overseas in France and Morocco. As you mentioned long distance was so expensive and even more so overseas. I can recall growing up - and even for a while as an adult that I would be at moms when her sister in France would call. No matter what we were doing everything STOPPED. My uncle in France worked for the police department in some way and they were allowed (or he just did) to have a family member come in occasionally and make a long distance call. They probably called 3x a year. My mom LIVED for those calls, largely her only connection to that family. She would maybe call them once a year but our home budget was tight and so she was careful.
Similarly the way my mom found out her mom died (in Morocco I believe) was through a letter. I was quite young so probably it was in the late 60s - I remember her sitting at the kitchen table, opening the letter and weeping.
We knock communication but we are in many ways so fortunate today.
It’s got to be record players. It’s very cool to see young people getting into records all over again, so they too can learn what it means to accidentally scratch your favorite record, or gently pick up the arm and move the stylus to the track you like better, or to flip the record over to the B side, or to realize you left your new LP under a sunny window, or to carefully wipe the dust off your 45 with your tshirt, while holding it with your thumb in the ring, then realizing you don’t know whre you put the little plastic round thing that goes in the middle, and trying not to scratch the record while you search for it and you don’t want to put it down because it will get dusty all over again…
I remember listening to the holiday broadcast of “Douglas Edwards at the North Pole” that our radio station would play on Christmas Eve.
I also remember my family’s first color TV. My dad was watching a golf tournament, and the colors looked so beautiful.
When I started my first job, I remember Franklin Covey planners were popular with the managers. The senior managers and executives had leather-bound planners.
The revolution in communication is truly amazing. In college, early 1980s, if I wanted to talk to my parents I’d get on the dorm’s hall phone at 6 pm and ring their house 3 times and then hang up. And then they’d call me back. With fairly quick conversations because long distance was $$$.
I have many other thoughts. but I’ll leave it at - the event it was to watch The Wizard of Oz the one night of the year it was on tv. I can remember early baths and putting on pjs and all sitting together in the living room to watch.
For us it was Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and then Wonderful World of Disney. We often were at my grandfather’s house for Sunday dinner and we’d try to get our parents to leave for the 15 minute drive home before Disney started or after it was over. Unfortunately it was often in the middle so we never found out how that week’s episode ended.
I miss that we had to ask people who “would know something” or go to the library (or call the reference desk) or look in a book if we wanted to find out stuff. I mean, I love googling on the internet as well as anyone, but still.
One thing I do not like about AI is that anytime it gives an answer, it offers to go answer something else as a follow-up. Like you can’t have ended the interaction. (It does this even though I’ve added a preference for it not to. When called on this point, the AI says it was trying to have a natural conversation like a human friend. That would be my last interaction with such a human friend.)
Ha! My youngest’s first job at Auburn University as a student was answering questions at the Foy Answer Desk! Before there was Google, there was the Foy Answer Desk, 24x7 a student would answer any question you asked! He loved it because he got to talk with some funny gals/guys trying to put one over on them and he could also do his aerospace homework during downtime and earn a little $$.
My family gathered together every week to watch Star Trek on our one tv. My mom always made a good dessert for that night, and I vividly recall being amazed even as a kid at her skill in cutting a pie into 7 perfectly equal pieces. It has been decades, and only 3 of us are left, but it feels like it was yesterday.
On the subject of TV shows I remember the pre-VCR days when you had to be at home in front of the set if you wanted to watch a show. VCRs which I think came out in the 1980s changed the experience so much!
I think it was Sunday in the LA Times there was a piece about how the teen ritual of crank calling is gone. With smart phones and caller ID the teen sleepover is forever changed.
