I recall making fun of my parents for being old as I set the actual time on our VCR having grown tired of the blinking 12:00 that had been the norm for over a year while I was at college.
Until the last year, we had to pay our real estate/personal property tax bills by check, cash (in person) or money order. They now do online payments, but you get to pay a fee for doing so! No thanks…
I’m in the 2 point category for no mySpace account or AOL address. I had my work email since the mid 90s that nobody cared if we used for whatever back then. Not too many people to email!

I will edit a text to add a missing comma.
No AOL address, no Myspace. I remember Walkman devices but can’t recall if I ever used one.
There’s an interesting divide there. The younger Gen-Xers who started texting from phones that did not have keyboards started the whole “text-speak”, because typing anything using the letters on the phone numbers would take forever. For “Hello”, you had to press 4 twice and hold it for a capital, then press 7, then press 5 twice, then 6 twice, and forget about trying to get punctuation. So you did “hi”, and “k”, and every possible way to use fewer letters, used no capitals, and no punctuation.
Older Gen-Xers, Boomers, etc, started texting only when phones had full keyboards, while younger generation carried text-speak over, and their younger siblings and from them onto the younger generations.
However, some of those abbreviations have been around for decades, and became common because of telegrams (when you’re paying by letter, you use abbreviations). Evidently, the fort recorded use of OMG was in 1917 by admiral of the fleet, Lord Fisher, who was 76 at the time, while LOL is from the early days of the internet, in the 1980s - it was used on Usenet. So the first people to use LOL as “Laugh out loud”, and, in fact, the people who coined LOL were either Boomers or Silent Generation. That abbreviation was already around before the first Millenials were born.
No MySpace for me, but yes to everything else. But I already knew that I’m old! ![]()
Understood. Doesn’t make it right. ![]()
I agree! Dang youngsters!
There’s a very funny Moth Radio Hour segment by Adam Gopnick (I think) of the New Yorker who said that when he started texting with his son, he thought that LOL stood for “lots of love.” Of course hilarious misunderstandings ensued.
When everyone you see from H’s hometown tells you he looks exactly your FIL!
This really makes me old–the local funeral home sent me an invitation on funeral planning. The nice folks there even offered to serve me lunch while we discussed it.
All you can eat buffet?
Can you take a food tester ?
Ummm, I’ve done all but 5 of the things on that list within the last 5 years ![]()
I ran into another one last night over dinner. You know you are getting old when you need to use the flashlight app on your iPhone to read the menu in a restaurant.
…and I had only downloaded the “flashlight app” within the last two weeks (and this was as a result of my daughter’s reply when I suggested that she take a flashlight with her when walking in a dark spot).
Disagree because, if you were truly old, dinner would be at 4:30 PM.
…at a well-lit Denny’s.
We’ve been laughing for years about pricey, dimly lit restaurants using teeny swirly fonts on the menu. LOL - the younger folks with good eyes can’t afford the cost. Our joke has been that they need to bring flashlights. But we now we have our cellphone flashlights.
I don’t recall the setup (Accessiblity/zoom) for this. But I have a handy thing on my iphone where I triple-click right button to open a Magnifier app (with flashlight). Great if there is some fine print on a label etc.
Ah…. I can also get to Magnifier/Accessibilty (person icon) incl flashlight by swiping at the top right corner of iphone. That is set up via Settings —> Control Center…. add to INCLUDED CONTOLS.
You can use the camera on your phone, since it goes into nighttime mode and you can zoom in, magnifying the text.
You know you’re getting old, when you are familiar with these hacks…
Plus one! Used the hack yesterday at a new fish restaurant that had menus printed on brown paper in curly, dark brown font so tiny that the entire dish description would fit into a single line…