No, really. No one would send you an email at night.
July 13, 2023 10:40 PM Subscribe
Young People Have No Idea What We Used to Do After Work. "The very idea that, once work hours were over, no one could get hold of you—via email, text, Slack, whatever—is completely alien to contemporary young people, who never let their cellphones leave their hands. Yes, it’s because they’re addicted, but it’s also because we’re all expected by bosses, co-workers, and friends to be online and available pretty much every time of day."
No, this isn't last week's What Did People Do Before Smartphones? post from The Atlantic, though you'd be forgiven for mistaking it. In this piece from Slate, author Dan Kois interviews some younger GenXers about what work (and life before and after work) was like circa 2002, before always-on culture and toxic productivity took hold.
You had to pay by the incoming call on your cellphone. Once someone called me and it was the wrong number and everyone laughed, like, “That just cost you a buck!”
You had to plan more ahead and hope it worked out. People didn’t flake as much. There’s no option to text someone 10 minutes before, because you knew they were waiting for you.
But Moviefone didn’t sell tickets. So you’d have someone get there early to get tickets. Or if you really worried the movie would sell out, you would go to the theater box office at lunch.
Even for those of us who lived through it, it's hard to believe how it used to be.
No, this isn't last week's What Did People Do Before Smartphones? post from The Atlantic, though you'd be forgiven for mistaking it. In this piece from Slate, author Dan Kois interviews some younger GenXers about what work (and life before and after work) was like circa 2002, before always-on culture and toxic productivity took hold.
You had to pay by the incoming call on your cellphone. Once someone called me and it was the wrong number and everyone laughed, like, “That just cost you a buck!”
You had to plan more ahead and hope it worked out. People didn’t flake as much. There’s no option to text someone 10 minutes before, because you knew they were waiting for you.
But Moviefone didn’t sell tickets. So you’d have someone get there early to get tickets. Or if you really worried the movie would sell out, you would go to the theater box office at lunch.
Even for those of us who lived through it, it's hard to believe how it used to be.
I recently had to explain to my colleagues what a microfiche was.
posted by blnkfrnk at 12:01 AM on July 14, 2023 [18 favorites]
posted by blnkfrnk at 12:01 AM on July 14, 2023 [18 favorites]
People didn’t flake as much. There’s no option to text someone 10 minutes before, because you knew they were waiting for you.
This is one of the aspects of smartphone behaviour that irritates me most of all. Always keeping other people waiting is clear evidence you don't care about wasting their time, and that's just bloody rude. How does a perfunctory text help me when you've left me hanging like that? I'll have already worked out for myself that you're not there.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:22 AM on July 14, 2023 [31 favorites]
This is one of the aspects of smartphone behaviour that irritates me most of all. Always keeping other people waiting is clear evidence you don't care about wasting their time, and that's just bloody rude. How does a perfunctory text help me when you've left me hanging like that? I'll have already worked out for myself that you're not there.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:22 AM on July 14, 2023 [31 favorites]
My father was a doctor and he had to carry a pager. If it beeped at him we had to hunt for a public payphone and put some coins in so he could call the hospital.
Allegedly if you go even further back (before there were pagers) emergency medicine wasn't really a thing until the 1970s where it became a specialty on its own.
posted by xdvesper at 12:52 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Allegedly if you go even further back (before there were pagers) emergency medicine wasn't really a thing until the 1970s where it became a specialty on its own.
posted by xdvesper at 12:52 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
I had a pager at uni; there were special codes you could send that meant a specific message, but most of the time my parents used it to say 'call me' so I'd know to find a public payphone. No landline at the student digs, and mobile phones were still half-brick sized and super expensive. I had email at the lab workstations, but they didn't. Everything just seemed to run at a slower pace back then. It'd take more effort to arrange a meetup like a film or meal, but you turned up on time or people would just go on without you... Or you just had a regular (pub) meeting place, and you'd go and see who was there that night.
I still have notifications turned off for my work accounts after hours. Only my direct boss will come through, and they know I won't be answering it unless it's an actual genuine major emergency, and she'd be more likely to call me instead. Very few work people have my mobile number now, I learned from that mistake! Fighting to try and keep some kind of sane work-life balance has been hard over the years, but I remember when it was the defacto default and I ain't giving in easy. - I do my best to have my team have the same.
Though in my first job, they had no compunction about repeatedly ringing your emergency contact numbers (i.e. parents and siblings) if you didn't answer your own landline in order to get hold of you because someone had flaked out of a shift, and by god they were keep badgering to make someone do it at the last minute.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 2:46 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
I still have notifications turned off for my work accounts after hours. Only my direct boss will come through, and they know I won't be answering it unless it's an actual genuine major emergency, and she'd be more likely to call me instead. Very few work people have my mobile number now, I learned from that mistake! Fighting to try and keep some kind of sane work-life balance has been hard over the years, but I remember when it was the defacto default and I ain't giving in easy. - I do my best to have my team have the same.
Though in my first job, they had no compunction about repeatedly ringing your emergency contact numbers (i.e. parents and siblings) if you didn't answer your own landline in order to get hold of you because someone had flaked out of a shift, and by god they were keep badgering to make someone do it at the last minute.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 2:46 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
I recently had to explain to my colleagues what a microfiche was.
When I joined a uni dept in 2005, I was shown the microfiche readers they had contracted on for 25 years in the 1990s to "future proof" the dept.
posted by biffa at 2:59 AM on July 14, 2023 [18 favorites]
When I joined a uni dept in 2005, I was shown the microfiche readers they had contracted on for 25 years in the 1990s to "future proof" the dept.
posted by biffa at 2:59 AM on July 14, 2023 [18 favorites]
I was recently interviewing with a company. The hiring manager (CTO) was 26 years old and would email me at midnight to set up calls. Red flag for me, but then I was eventually rejected citing concern I would not make the company "my top priority". Ouch.
posted by keep_evolving at 3:15 AM on July 14, 2023 [18 favorites]
posted by keep_evolving at 3:15 AM on July 14, 2023 [18 favorites]
Nicole: If someone didn’t show, you would sometimes have to call your home voicemail from a payphone, and put in your code, to see if they had left a message for you on your home phone.
I do recall how "modern" it all seemed to call a number, punch some digits and listen to your voicemails from anywhere. Then you'd maybe hear the message from someone who had been trying to reach you all day for some reason. Then you'd call them back only to get their voicemail.
posted by vacapinta at 3:23 AM on July 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
I do recall how "modern" it all seemed to call a number, punch some digits and listen to your voicemails from anywhere. Then you'd maybe hear the message from someone who had been trying to reach you all day for some reason. Then you'd call them back only to get their voicemail.
posted by vacapinta at 3:23 AM on July 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
My father was a doctor and he had to carry a pager
I'm a doctor and carried a pager until 2018! In my current job, we had to put an app on our phones that functions as an e-pager. At least with the physical pager, when you were not on service (on vacation, or just plain not on call) you'd hand it over to someone or sign it out (like call forwarding). Can't do that with the app; it's literally always on.
The irony is that the residents just text, which is terrible overnight because I'm not going to wake up from brief text notification, but I sure will when the dang pager won't shut up.
I refuse to put work email on my phone. Boundaries.
posted by basalganglia at 3:36 AM on July 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
I'm a doctor and carried a pager until 2018! In my current job, we had to put an app on our phones that functions as an e-pager. At least with the physical pager, when you were not on service (on vacation, or just plain not on call) you'd hand it over to someone or sign it out (like call forwarding). Can't do that with the app; it's literally always on.
The irony is that the residents just text, which is terrible overnight because I'm not going to wake up from brief text notification, but I sure will when the dang pager won't shut up.
I refuse to put work email on my phone. Boundaries.
posted by basalganglia at 3:36 AM on July 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
no it's not i literally just don't talk to people if i don't feel like it
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 3:38 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 3:38 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
It was a bit of culture shock when my (Zoomer) kids called me every day from college. What for? I wasn't a helicopter parent. When I (Boomer) was in college, I could go months without talking to my parents because I didn't have a phone and calls were charged by the minute. My kids called me because they could, and that's just natural to them. Now it's Facetime, too. If either of them ever gets a job, they will have to set some boundaries.
posted by Miss Cellania at 3:44 AM on July 14, 2023 [23 favorites]
posted by Miss Cellania at 3:44 AM on July 14, 2023 [23 favorites]
But Moviefone didn’t sell tickets. So you’d have someone get there early to get tickets. Or if you really worried the movie would sell out, you would go to the theater box office at lunch.
Sometimes I try to explain to my kid that you had to open the newspaper, which was a thing that was delivered to your house at like 5am and contained not only daily news but also movie and TV listings, find the movie listings, figure out which theater was showing what you wanted to see at a convenient time, and then show up like an hour early so you could wait on line for tickets, get popcorn, and still find a seat.
Now you roll up like 15 minutes after the scheduled start time and sit in a giganto recliner that's reserved for you. It's wild, man.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:23 AM on July 14, 2023 [29 favorites]
Sometimes I try to explain to my kid that you had to open the newspaper, which was a thing that was delivered to your house at like 5am and contained not only daily news but also movie and TV listings, find the movie listings, figure out which theater was showing what you wanted to see at a convenient time, and then show up like an hour early so you could wait on line for tickets, get popcorn, and still find a seat.
Now you roll up like 15 minutes after the scheduled start time and sit in a giganto recliner that's reserved for you. It's wild, man.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:23 AM on July 14, 2023 [29 favorites]
Sometimes I try to explain to my kid that you had to open the newspaper, which was a thing that was delivered to your house at like 5am and contained not only daily news but also movie and TV listings, find the movie listings, figure out which theater was showing what you wanted to see at a convenient time, and then show up like an hour early so you could wait on line for tickets, get popcorn, and still find a seat.
Try to explain this one...There was a time, in my lifetime, when there were no showtimes for movies. They were shown in a continuous loop all day. You just walked up, bought a ticket, maybe grabbed some popcorn and a drink, and found a seat in the theater. The movie (or the second feature or cartoon. This was the era of double-features) was already playing. You just sat and watched it through, until it eventually ran back to the point where you came in. Then you left. Or not. You could sit there all day if you wanted.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:39 AM on July 14, 2023 [48 favorites]
Try to explain this one...There was a time, in my lifetime, when there were no showtimes for movies. They were shown in a continuous loop all day. You just walked up, bought a ticket, maybe grabbed some popcorn and a drink, and found a seat in the theater. The movie (or the second feature or cartoon. This was the era of double-features) was already playing. You just sat and watched it through, until it eventually ran back to the point where you came in. Then you left. Or not. You could sit there all day if you wanted.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:39 AM on July 14, 2023 [48 favorites]
Ignoring things is one of the perks of the 21st century, honestly.
I enjoyed reading the piece, though.
posted by Peach at 4:53 AM on July 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
I enjoyed reading the piece, though.
posted by Peach at 4:53 AM on July 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
Technology is insidious. It is great for many things but insidious.
posted by DJZouke at 5:16 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by DJZouke at 5:16 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
In France, you don't have to answer work emails at all hours.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:30 AM on July 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:30 AM on July 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
As I entered the working world, my dad always reminded me that the first time he ever saw a pager it was worn by a friend of my grandfather's who was an IBM repair technician. This guy got paid half his normal hourly rate on the weekends to go fishing while he was "on call".
All he had to do was promise that he would call back within an hour of being paged to receive his assignment. And even though he spent most of his weekends on call, he still managed to do a lot of fishing.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:37 AM on July 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
All he had to do was promise that he would call back within an hour of being paged to receive his assignment. And even though he spent most of his weekends on call, he still managed to do a lot of fishing.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:37 AM on July 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
In fairness, people might have emailed you at night. But if they did they'd have the decency not to expect an answer until the next convenient block of business hours.
My phone, on very rare occasions, will ring while I'm out in public and I'll pull it out, look at the number and, almost always, put it right back in my pocket. (This usually happens when I forget to mute the ringer and I'll turn it off before putting it back in my pocket. I'm not a monster!) People look at me like I've grown an extra head. Even friends will ask me, "aren't you going to answer it?"
No. No I'm not.
"But what if it's important?"
That's what voice mail is for.
"But what if they don't leave one?!!"
Then it wasn't important.
I don't know. People are weird. Probably I'm the weird one. I'm okay with that.
posted by Mister_Sleight_of_Hand at 5:40 AM on July 14, 2023 [45 favorites]
My phone, on very rare occasions, will ring while I'm out in public and I'll pull it out, look at the number and, almost always, put it right back in my pocket. (This usually happens when I forget to mute the ringer and I'll turn it off before putting it back in my pocket. I'm not a monster!) People look at me like I've grown an extra head. Even friends will ask me, "aren't you going to answer it?"
No. No I'm not.
"But what if it's important?"
That's what voice mail is for.
"But what if they don't leave one?!!"
Then it wasn't important.
I don't know. People are weird. Probably I'm the weird one. I'm okay with that.
posted by Mister_Sleight_of_Hand at 5:40 AM on July 14, 2023 [45 favorites]
We used to have a proper country.
posted by jonp72 at 5:44 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by jonp72 at 5:44 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
What really annoys me is that sometimes I'll be up late working on something and someone will see via Teams that I'm active and take that as an excuse to call and talk with me about completely unrelated work.
(I'd set my status to unavailable or busy, but that would hide the fact that I actually am up and working on shit which I do want to broadcast to anyone else who's up)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:48 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
(I'd set my status to unavailable or busy, but that would hide the fact that I actually am up and working on shit which I do want to broadcast to anyone else who's up)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:48 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
If you had a serious job, it sucked.
Let's see:
You couldn't travel anywhere where you couldn't get and return a phone message or send or receive a wire/telex (pre-early 80s) or fax (post-early-80s). You had to provide all of those numbers / contact details anytime you were away from home or office, in advance.
When things were somewhat hectic you couldn't travel beyond easy courier delivery range.
When things were definitely hectic you couldn't travel at all.
When things were really hectic you couldn't leave the office. If your office didn't have shower facilities, you'd literally get a hotel room across the street so you could wash up.
You had to check your office (which had a 24-7 switchboard and message center) obsessively for calls and packages. Once voicemail systems came in, you had to check those every couple of hours other than midnight to 8 am and people would leave 3-4 minute voicemails with detailed instructions and requests you had to play back four times to make sure you got all the nuances.
You picked up your house phone nights and weekends and people called all the time. You had sometimes, but not always, had a home fax machine, and if you did people faxed you all the time, including your office's central 24-7 fax room.
If it was important enough, messenger cars would drop off documents, and if was really important the messenger car would wait while you read and marked up the document or wrote a reply, and then bring it back. If you were at your kid's soccer practice when the courier arrived at the house your wife would give him the address of the soccer field and he'd drive over and you'd deal with it from the sidelines.
When traveling you had to check the hotel front desk obsessively, and hotel voice mail too, and you got tons of calls and faxes which you had to deal with. Not infrequently the call or fax was "cancel your vacation and come back to office tomorrow."
Sometimes you had to have pre-mass-market-pricing mobile tech, like pagers, car phones and bag phones, but the comprehensiveness of the above measures made that tech not mandatory for lots of people, and outright rare in a lot of industries.
posted by MattD at 5:57 AM on July 14, 2023 [20 favorites]
Let's see:
You couldn't travel anywhere where you couldn't get and return a phone message or send or receive a wire/telex (pre-early 80s) or fax (post-early-80s). You had to provide all of those numbers / contact details anytime you were away from home or office, in advance.
When things were somewhat hectic you couldn't travel beyond easy courier delivery range.
When things were definitely hectic you couldn't travel at all.
When things were really hectic you couldn't leave the office. If your office didn't have shower facilities, you'd literally get a hotel room across the street so you could wash up.
You had to check your office (which had a 24-7 switchboard and message center) obsessively for calls and packages. Once voicemail systems came in, you had to check those every couple of hours other than midnight to 8 am and people would leave 3-4 minute voicemails with detailed instructions and requests you had to play back four times to make sure you got all the nuances.
You picked up your house phone nights and weekends and people called all the time. You had sometimes, but not always, had a home fax machine, and if you did people faxed you all the time, including your office's central 24-7 fax room.
If it was important enough, messenger cars would drop off documents, and if was really important the messenger car would wait while you read and marked up the document or wrote a reply, and then bring it back. If you were at your kid's soccer practice when the courier arrived at the house your wife would give him the address of the soccer field and he'd drive over and you'd deal with it from the sidelines.
When traveling you had to check the hotel front desk obsessively, and hotel voice mail too, and you got tons of calls and faxes which you had to deal with. Not infrequently the call or fax was "cancel your vacation and come back to office tomorrow."
Sometimes you had to have pre-mass-market-pricing mobile tech, like pagers, car phones and bag phones, but the comprehensiveness of the above measures made that tech not mandatory for lots of people, and outright rare in a lot of industries.
posted by MattD at 5:57 AM on July 14, 2023 [20 favorites]
Focus modes on iOS has been a blessing. A bit of work to set up, but after, it will automatically silence calls from people based on context. If it allowed me to add contact groups, rather than individuals, it’d be great but just knowing that when I’m at home the work contacts don’t ring through? Love it.
In grad school I learned the hard way that answering email at off hours led people to the impression that you would always be available and responsive. I’ve tried hard since then to only answer work mail during work hours, with rare exceptions. So far so good.
On my first day my boss told me “I don’t pay you to work when you’re not at work.” If it’s an emergency, fine, but otherwise, when my shift is over I don’t work until the next day. I keep telling my direct reports the same thing. Basically, “I don’t want you to have to work after hours. But if you do, for damn sure submit overtime. And if it happens every week, we need to talk about why you’re so busy that you regularly can’t finish your work at work - because if that’s true, I’m putting too much work on you…”
I want a good work-life balance, and it’s supremely unfair if I create one for myself by ruining the work-life balance of my employees. Work can (nearly always) wait until tomorrow.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:03 AM on July 14, 2023 [20 favorites]
In grad school I learned the hard way that answering email at off hours led people to the impression that you would always be available and responsive. I’ve tried hard since then to only answer work mail during work hours, with rare exceptions. So far so good.
On my first day my boss told me “I don’t pay you to work when you’re not at work.” If it’s an emergency, fine, but otherwise, when my shift is over I don’t work until the next day. I keep telling my direct reports the same thing. Basically, “I don’t want you to have to work after hours. But if you do, for damn sure submit overtime. And if it happens every week, we need to talk about why you’re so busy that you regularly can’t finish your work at work - because if that’s true, I’m putting too much work on you…”
I want a good work-life balance, and it’s supremely unfair if I create one for myself by ruining the work-life balance of my employees. Work can (nearly always) wait until tomorrow.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:03 AM on July 14, 2023 [20 favorites]
In all the rounds I've seen this article pass, I haven't seen anybody bring up that usually your work manager had your home number and you had theirs, generally so you could call in sick (in as much advance as possible) or they could call you to come in (or not) for whatever reasons. Plus you probably exchanged phone numbers with one or more work friends and might actually chat on the phone to them on evenings or weekends to backchannel/gossip.
If you were a parent, there was often a "telephone tree" for disseminating school information, which could be anything from weather closures to who's turn it was to bring snacks. So the teacher might call 3-4 parents to start the tree, they all had several parents they were assigned to call, those would then call their assigned parents etc. For the most part people took these pretty seriously and while someone would always end up with garbled information or left out, they worked surprisingly well. Pretty much any group you were involved in had phone trees - scouts, church, volunteer group, you might even have them at work for large departments (mostly just for emergency use).
posted by Lyn Never at 6:12 AM on July 14, 2023 [20 favorites]
If you were a parent, there was often a "telephone tree" for disseminating school information, which could be anything from weather closures to who's turn it was to bring snacks. So the teacher might call 3-4 parents to start the tree, they all had several parents they were assigned to call, those would then call their assigned parents etc. For the most part people took these pretty seriously and while someone would always end up with garbled information or left out, they worked surprisingly well. Pretty much any group you were involved in had phone trees - scouts, church, volunteer group, you might even have them at work for large departments (mostly just for emergency use).
posted by Lyn Never at 6:12 AM on July 14, 2023 [20 favorites]
My feeling is that we tend both to overrate convenience and forget how convenience shapes expectations. Looking back as a smartphone-haver, you might think that the nineties were a miserable age of missed connections, failed travel, oppression by managers calling you at home, staying overnight at the office during big projects, being disconnected from family, never getting food that you liked, finding movies sold out, etc - which might indeed be problems that you'd face without a cell phone in an extremely phone-centric world today.
But that stuff was all pretty rare! People made their plans considering available communication options. Certainly if you could magically have a cellphone just once in 1990, it would have solved a given problem, but on the other hand, if there was a cell phone/smart phone infrastructure in the 1990s you would be on call for work 24/7 just like you are now. Swings and roundabouts!
There sure were times in, eg, 1994 where a smartphone would have saved a lot of trouble and tears, but on the other hand, thrift stores were fantastic because picking wasn't scalable. There were records that I looked for over many years and never found but there was also the thrill of used record shopping. I had to schedule my calls with my parents, but I also had a lot of autonomy.
In most jobs, you could leave work behind most of the time. Not every job, not every time, but in general you left work and you left work. It is difficult to overrate that and mere convenience in other areas does not counterbalance it.
posted by Frowner at 6:23 AM on July 14, 2023 [29 favorites]
But that stuff was all pretty rare! People made their plans considering available communication options. Certainly if you could magically have a cellphone just once in 1990, it would have solved a given problem, but on the other hand, if there was a cell phone/smart phone infrastructure in the 1990s you would be on call for work 24/7 just like you are now. Swings and roundabouts!
There sure were times in, eg, 1994 where a smartphone would have saved a lot of trouble and tears, but on the other hand, thrift stores were fantastic because picking wasn't scalable. There were records that I looked for over many years and never found but there was also the thrill of used record shopping. I had to schedule my calls with my parents, but I also had a lot of autonomy.
In most jobs, you could leave work behind most of the time. Not every job, not every time, but in general you left work and you left work. It is difficult to overrate that and mere convenience in other areas does not counterbalance it.
posted by Frowner at 6:23 AM on July 14, 2023 [29 favorites]
We also used to SOCIALIZE after work. We would go out to a local bar, sometimes with co-workers. We would discuss things like local or national politics or someone's crazy sibling. But that's all taken care of by phones now. Sigh.
posted by Melismata at 6:23 AM on July 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by Melismata at 6:23 AM on July 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
you had to open the newspaper… and then show up like an hour early so you could wait on line for tickets
The world just ran on paper to an extent that’s hard to picture now. You waited in line to get paper tickets for anything from concerts to a commuter train ride, to deal with cash and paper checks at the bank, and to mail your tax return. Sometimes you’d go to a copy shop to make a copy of important documents before you sent them to someone. If you lost an important document or an event ticket, it could be a huge problem, like an old thriller where somebody stole Old Man Murphy’s bearer bonds.
Anything that plugged in came with a big paper manual. You needed printed material to look up anything, from what was on TV to who wrote Jane Eyre to when the train was coming . You probably had a bunch of takeout menus at home and work. If you wanted to try a new restaurant, you might have had a Zagat guide or something similar. You had a book where you wrote all your friends’ names and addresses.
Every month you’d get paper bills, check them for errors, and pay them by check or cash. Organizations and schools would give you paper schedules and you had to put the relevant stuff in your own personal calendar. And there were magazines and newsletters about every conceivable topic, often with articles geared to a mix of experience levels.
posted by smelendez at 6:25 AM on July 14, 2023 [31 favorites]
The world just ran on paper to an extent that’s hard to picture now. You waited in line to get paper tickets for anything from concerts to a commuter train ride, to deal with cash and paper checks at the bank, and to mail your tax return. Sometimes you’d go to a copy shop to make a copy of important documents before you sent them to someone. If you lost an important document or an event ticket, it could be a huge problem, like an old thriller where somebody stole Old Man Murphy’s bearer bonds.
Anything that plugged in came with a big paper manual. You needed printed material to look up anything, from what was on TV to who wrote Jane Eyre to when the train was coming . You probably had a bunch of takeout menus at home and work. If you wanted to try a new restaurant, you might have had a Zagat guide or something similar. You had a book where you wrote all your friends’ names and addresses.
Every month you’d get paper bills, check them for errors, and pay them by check or cash. Organizations and schools would give you paper schedules and you had to put the relevant stuff in your own personal calendar. And there were magazines and newsletters about every conceivable topic, often with articles geared to a mix of experience levels.
posted by smelendez at 6:25 AM on July 14, 2023 [31 favorites]
I was taken with the number of anecdotes around having friends call you at work to make plans, and often being patched through by a receptionist who had to do it so often that they would recognize your friends' voices. That felt like the phone version of using your work email for personal correspondence.
Email was ubiquitous by the time that I started working so most of my post work plans were coordinated through my personal email. Some friends would run their own mail server with its own listserv software and hand out accounts to other friends. The listserv would eventually migrate to a Yahoogroup or a Google Group whenever that friend would get tired of running a server or would turn out to be a broken stair. But those lists were basically paleolithic social media for us. We'd send party invites there, arrange movie outings, poll who was going to the club tonight, and of course argue and post funny shit we'd see online.
I remember in 1999 I got an early Blackberry as I was working in IT and we needed to have them for coordinating after work tech incidents. I don't think I ever needed to use it for that, but I learned that you could type out a message to send to a phone number and it would call that number and read your message in this sinister Speak and Spell voice, so I amused myself with sending messages to friends like Robocop was onto them, coming to their door, and they had 20 seconds to comply.
posted by bl1nk at 6:29 AM on July 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
Email was ubiquitous by the time that I started working so most of my post work plans were coordinated through my personal email. Some friends would run their own mail server with its own listserv software and hand out accounts to other friends. The listserv would eventually migrate to a Yahoogroup or a Google Group whenever that friend would get tired of running a server or would turn out to be a broken stair. But those lists were basically paleolithic social media for us. We'd send party invites there, arrange movie outings, poll who was going to the club tonight, and of course argue and post funny shit we'd see online.
I remember in 1999 I got an early Blackberry as I was working in IT and we needed to have them for coordinating after work tech incidents. I don't think I ever needed to use it for that, but I learned that you could type out a message to send to a phone number and it would call that number and read your message in this sinister Speak and Spell voice, so I amused myself with sending messages to friends like Robocop was onto them, coming to their door, and they had 20 seconds to comply.
posted by bl1nk at 6:29 AM on July 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
I still have to carry a pager on occasion for work, fortunately it's tier 3 so it almost never goes off. We also have a cabinet full of microfiche, for which we lack a functioning reader. The one we have is broken and the part needed to fix it is unavailable anywhere.
Work life balance is a real priority at my shop thankfully, and they try to schedule after hours stuff in advance so we can plan our lives around it all. Pretty unusual for an IT gig in my experience. In my nine years there I've probably had a half dozen or so unexpected calls to put out a fire.
posted by calamari kid at 6:33 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Work life balance is a real priority at my shop thankfully, and they try to schedule after hours stuff in advance so we can plan our lives around it all. Pretty unusual for an IT gig in my experience. In my nine years there I've probably had a half dozen or so unexpected calls to put out a fire.
posted by calamari kid at 6:33 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
It's funny seeing microfiche be such an example while I'm helping people use microfiche and microfilm daily at my job and I have to price out updated reader hardware in a couple of months
posted by jason_steakums at 6:34 AM on July 14, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by jason_steakums at 6:34 AM on July 14, 2023 [9 favorites]
I'm a doctor and carried a pager until 2018!
A friend of mine is an MD (and also a very quiet mefite) and he pointed out to me once that he and his fellow staff only ceased having to carry a pager when the telecom the hospital dealt with stopped supporting them.
Thirty years ago this summer I took a days-long train trip. It was still about five years before my first cell phone and it’s odd to think that I was basically isolated from the world more than ISS astronauts are today. If some major news event happened, I would hear nothing of it unless someone brought a newspaper on board.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:37 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
A friend of mine is an MD (and also a very quiet mefite) and he pointed out to me once that he and his fellow staff only ceased having to carry a pager when the telecom the hospital dealt with stopped supporting them.
Thirty years ago this summer I took a days-long train trip. It was still about five years before my first cell phone and it’s odd to think that I was basically isolated from the world more than ISS astronauts are today. If some major news event happened, I would hear nothing of it unless someone brought a newspaper on board.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:37 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
One of the selling points of my job is the hard stop at 5. I don't ever have to look at any of it on my own time.
As for microfilm, we still have to deal with it, albeit our machine is on its last legs, no longer prints, cannot be fixed, cannot be replaced when it finally dies. I dunno what happens when it finally kicks the bucket.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:37 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
As for microfilm, we still have to deal with it, albeit our machine is on its last legs, no longer prints, cannot be fixed, cannot be replaced when it finally dies. I dunno what happens when it finally kicks the bucket.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:37 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
microfiche!
back a few years ago i was working on [thing] which required a lot of research into trade journals from the 1950s and early 1960s. absolutely none of that stuff is digitized despite being hugely important to [field] and [related field] and [field where practitioners don't realize it's related but omg it's so extremely related], and so i ended up haunting the microfiche reader room in the basement of [academic library] for months. i'm guessing most people who do research in [field] or [related field] (among many other fields) have similar stories.
google gives us the delusion that the sum total of human knowledge is either digitized, will soon be digitized, or will be digitized sometime this century, or is digitizable in the first place. this is a dumb lie, pure ideology, and if you fall for it you cut yourself off from all but a tiny tiny slice of what humans have been up to lately.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:42 AM on July 14, 2023 [29 favorites]
back a few years ago i was working on [thing] which required a lot of research into trade journals from the 1950s and early 1960s. absolutely none of that stuff is digitized despite being hugely important to [field] and [related field] and [field where practitioners don't realize it's related but omg it's so extremely related], and so i ended up haunting the microfiche reader room in the basement of [academic library] for months. i'm guessing most people who do research in [field] or [related field] (among many other fields) have similar stories.
google gives us the delusion that the sum total of human knowledge is either digitized, will soon be digitized, or will be digitized sometime this century, or is digitizable in the first place. this is a dumb lie, pure ideology, and if you fall for it you cut yourself off from all but a tiny tiny slice of what humans have been up to lately.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:42 AM on July 14, 2023 [29 favorites]
I joined the full time workforce in 2006, which was in that period of time before everyone had a smartphone but if you were Important you potentially had a Work Phone (Blackberry or Treo) that your employer paid for. Similar to MattD above, I did a lot of working late from the office. I remember my boss actually offering to get me a phone at one point, but I declined. I didn't get my own smartphone until 2016.
posted by AndrewInDC at 6:44 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by AndrewInDC at 6:44 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Now you roll up like 15 minutes after the scheduled start time and sit in a giganto recliner that's reserved for you. It's wild, man.
As we all reminisce about the good old days...this is an example of something that is 1000% percent better than the old ways.
posted by COD at 6:45 AM on July 14, 2023 [16 favorites]
As we all reminisce about the good old days...this is an example of something that is 1000% percent better than the old ways.
posted by COD at 6:45 AM on July 14, 2023 [16 favorites]
I was talking to someone about what used to be involved in trying to put together a group dinner at a convention-type event back before cellphones when we were all out of town together at some event. "Okay, we'll post a note on this message corkboard and agree to meet in this part of the lobby. Do you know if so-and-so was invited? Are we sure they're even here?"
posted by rmd1023 at 6:46 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by rmd1023 at 6:46 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
The world just ran on paper to an extent that’s hard to picture now
We were just talking about AAA TripTiks recently. Before every road trip when I was a kid, we would go to the local AAA office (!!!), tell them where we wanted to go, and they would bring out a little map and highlight a route, recommending motels and restaurants along the way. It's almost mind-blowing to think about doing that today: walking into a place and asking, how do I get to Busch Gardens? and getting a highlighted paper map.
I really do like paper maps, though. There's a certain joy in being able to trace a route with your finger.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:49 AM on July 14, 2023 [34 favorites]
We were just talking about AAA TripTiks recently. Before every road trip when I was a kid, we would go to the local AAA office (!!!), tell them where we wanted to go, and they would bring out a little map and highlight a route, recommending motels and restaurants along the way. It's almost mind-blowing to think about doing that today: walking into a place and asking, how do I get to Busch Gardens? and getting a highlighted paper map.
I really do like paper maps, though. There's a certain joy in being able to trace a route with your finger.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:49 AM on July 14, 2023 [34 favorites]
I never thought about it until I read this, but now I really miss the days of "Go to bar, order drink, look for friends, finish drink, go somewhere else, repeat."
posted by Etrigan at 6:52 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Etrigan at 6:52 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
on work-life balance, I will say that an interesting aspect of remote work and having a team that spans time zones is that it forces the question of work-life balance and what counts as "after hours work". In interviews, I ask explicitly about their approach, and won't work somewhere that doesn't have a defined concept of "core hours." Saying that you're pegged to a particular time zone where a majority of colleagues are, and the expectation is that everyone else adjust their working hours to overlap (aka maximal overlap -- if the team is anchored to US Eastern, US West Coast folks may be asked to meet at 7 or 8 am their time, but they're also off the clock at 2 or 3pm) or you say that everyone is expected to be online at 9-5 their local time and folks just account for that when setting up conversations (aka maximal spread) -- either of those is fine, but it's the "well, we'd like you to be online when we're online but we also want you to be doing at least 9-5 in your local time" that's a red flag. It's just a recipe for working 12 hours days.
At my current gig, we aim for maximal spread and it is really nice to both start my day at 9 or 10 in the morning Eastern and have some focus time because meetings don't tend to start until noon when the West Coast wakes up, and wrap up my day at 6pm Eastern and eventhough Slack and email traffic is going to be going all the way to 9 pm my time, I do not need to read any of it until the next morning.
posted by bl1nk at 6:58 AM on July 14, 2023 [11 favorites]
At my current gig, we aim for maximal spread and it is really nice to both start my day at 9 or 10 in the morning Eastern and have some focus time because meetings don't tend to start until noon when the West Coast wakes up, and wrap up my day at 6pm Eastern and eventhough Slack and email traffic is going to be going all the way to 9 pm my time, I do not need to read any of it until the next morning.
posted by bl1nk at 6:58 AM on July 14, 2023 [11 favorites]
I just got one of those pleasant ASMR-type feelings from remembering "Go find friends." You'd probably first drive past The Residence Where Everyone Congregates first and see if their cars are there, if not there was probably 2-3 places they might be depending on what time it was. You might have picked up another member of the gang on the way to the first place, so the two of you would chat while making the rounds, and eventually you'd find everybody.
Sometimes there was a special location at The Residence Where Everyone Congregates where a note would be left saying where they went, if it wasn't one of the usuals.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:00 AM on July 14, 2023 [11 favorites]
Sometimes there was a special location at The Residence Where Everyone Congregates where a note would be left saying where they went, if it wasn't one of the usuals.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:00 AM on July 14, 2023 [11 favorites]
Yeah, this is a very different (and much better) article from the previous one. It had me from the very first sentence: "Recently, a number of my younger coworkers expressed shock that I was able to complete a master’s degree while I held a full-time job." I did that! I worked as a clerk in a library that, while at a university with exceptionally robust online computing resources (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, early 90s), still had most of its resources in paper form; there was never, ever work to take home, and even though theoretically I could have been asked to cover in the evenings if one of the student workers didn't show up, I don't remember it ever happening.
I got my library degree the spring before Eternal September. My first professional job was at the Canarsie branch of the Brooklyn Public Library; six months after I started there, someone mentioned that they'd had a computer sent to them some time before I got there, and no one had bothered to take it out and set it up because they didn't see the point. God only knows how long it was before they were actually online. That gig was also the first time I saw someone with a cell phone (and the first time that I told someone to take it outside); at the time, pagers were generally for doctors and drug dealers. When I came to my current job, at a medical library, a bit over 20 years ago, lots of doctors were still using pagers (which made a lot of sense; you want to have a really reliable way of being contacted for emergencies--doctors tend not to want to use version 1.0 of anything), and our front desk had a phone that was supposed to be used exclusively by doctors answering pages. We got rid of it after one medical resident who I later thought might have been on the spectrum--very smart but very socially clueless--answered a page and discussed a Do Not Resuscitate order, in detail, including full names, with me sitting right there. HIPAA? What's that?
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:01 AM on July 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
I got my library degree the spring before Eternal September. My first professional job was at the Canarsie branch of the Brooklyn Public Library; six months after I started there, someone mentioned that they'd had a computer sent to them some time before I got there, and no one had bothered to take it out and set it up because they didn't see the point. God only knows how long it was before they were actually online. That gig was also the first time I saw someone with a cell phone (and the first time that I told someone to take it outside); at the time, pagers were generally for doctors and drug dealers. When I came to my current job, at a medical library, a bit over 20 years ago, lots of doctors were still using pagers (which made a lot of sense; you want to have a really reliable way of being contacted for emergencies--doctors tend not to want to use version 1.0 of anything), and our front desk had a phone that was supposed to be used exclusively by doctors answering pages. We got rid of it after one medical resident who I later thought might have been on the spectrum--very smart but very socially clueless--answered a page and discussed a Do Not Resuscitate order, in detail, including full names, with me sitting right there. HIPAA? What's that?
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:01 AM on July 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
I recall how things changed for my group of friends once we all got PalmPilots. Suddenly it became possible to reliably schedule doing things together days and weeks out at the moment when the urge hit us. And to avoid double booking. I also seem to recall the Palm had some kind of primitive "sharing" mechanism to send the event from one device to another when they were next to each other---though I could be misremembering this.
In any case, it was amazing how my social life was changed as a result of this one simple "feature."
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:09 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
In any case, it was amazing how my social life was changed as a result of this one simple "feature."
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:09 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Memories nobody asked for: being a 14-year-old living in boarding school dorms, with a boyfriend -- or at least a boy who would pass as a boyfriend from hundreds of miles away -- and snapping to attention at the least ring of the hall phone during certain hours. Taking that phone on its 20-foot cord (or at least what had become a 20-foot cord) and closing the door on it as best you could, hoping everyone had the grace (or the homework) to avoid listening to you. Avoiding listening to them in their turn as they argued or cried or got amorous. Taking the heaviest conversations to the pay phone downstairs in the basement, where no one would be hanging out to hear you because all you had was the concrete floor. 1-800-COLLECT.
The things we said or heard each other say, about boys, about family -- today, kids would be like, should you be doing that? Should he be saying that? That's wrong! You didn't consent to that! And they would be right. But in the '90s, all you had was each other and your own best guesses.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:17 AM on July 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
The things we said or heard each other say, about boys, about family -- today, kids would be like, should you be doing that? Should he be saying that? That's wrong! You didn't consent to that! And they would be right. But in the '90s, all you had was each other and your own best guesses.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:17 AM on July 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
I turned 27 in 2002, and lived in NYC at the time, so this article is 100% my experience.
One funny thing that comes up in these articles is "if we had an argument about what movie we had seen a particular actress in, there was no way to resolve it!" Not so! I had a dog-eared copy of VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever guide, 2000 or 2001 edition. It was basically IMDB in print, and I used it all the damn time. :)
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:17 AM on July 14, 2023 [12 favorites]
One funny thing that comes up in these articles is "if we had an argument about what movie we had seen a particular actress in, there was no way to resolve it!" Not so! I had a dog-eared copy of VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever guide, 2000 or 2001 edition. It was basically IMDB in print, and I used it all the damn time. :)
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:17 AM on July 14, 2023 [12 favorites]
You had to pay by the incoming call on your cellphone. Once someone called me and it was the wrong number and everyone laughed, like, “That just cost you a buck!”
When? I got my first cellphone in 1996, a brick in a bag, and you only paid for making calls, not ones incoming, just like today. Like that was the trick when you called your mom, since my plan was limited to 30 minutes per month (!). All you say is "call me back mom". Same as the payphone trick: Please say your name: comepickmeup, and hang up.
I'm not old enough to remember movies on a loop. They had a marquee out front, you picked on from that (or from the newspaper) and went to the box office out front and bought tickets. My theatre now doesn't even have a marquee - it looks like a big box store. Sad.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:34 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
When? I got my first cellphone in 1996, a brick in a bag, and you only paid for making calls, not ones incoming, just like today. Like that was the trick when you called your mom, since my plan was limited to 30 minutes per month (!). All you say is "call me back mom". Same as the payphone trick: Please say your name: comepickmeup, and hang up.
I'm not old enough to remember movies on a loop. They had a marquee out front, you picked on from that (or from the newspaper) and went to the box office out front and bought tickets. My theatre now doesn't even have a marquee - it looks like a big box store. Sad.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:34 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Wehadababy Itsaboy
posted by Countess Elena at 7:36 AM on July 14, 2023 [30 favorites]
posted by Countess Elena at 7:36 AM on July 14, 2023 [30 favorites]
You probably had a bunch of takeout menus at home and work. If you wanted to try a new restaurant, you might have had a Zagat guide or something similar. You had a book where you wrote all your friends’ names and addresses.
Every month you’d get paper bills, check them for errors, and pay them by check or cash. Organizations and schools would give you paper schedules and you had to put the relevant stuff in your own personal calendar. And there were magazines and newsletters about every conceivable topic, often with articles geared to a mix of experience levels.
All this stuff still exists. Everywhere I have ever lived, people hang take out menus on your home doorknob on a daily (or often if not daily) basis. Schools, colleges, companies, etc still put out newsletters and you still get free newsletters and magazines in your US postal mail on a regular basis. All this stuff is what is called "junk mail". I even still get plenty of paper bills, though I pay most of them online.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
Every month you’d get paper bills, check them for errors, and pay them by check or cash. Organizations and schools would give you paper schedules and you had to put the relevant stuff in your own personal calendar. And there were magazines and newsletters about every conceivable topic, often with articles geared to a mix of experience levels.
All this stuff still exists. Everywhere I have ever lived, people hang take out menus on your home doorknob on a daily (or often if not daily) basis. Schools, colleges, companies, etc still put out newsletters and you still get free newsletters and magazines in your US postal mail on a regular basis. All this stuff is what is called "junk mail". I even still get plenty of paper bills, though I pay most of them online.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
You had to pay by the incoming call on your cellphone.
I still do, with my pay-as-you-go plan. 20¢ a text, sent or received; which is barely reasonable (as long as you don't needlessly break your texts up into little ones, as my step-son does) and I was fine with the dime-a-minute charge for phone calls, but AT&T recently raised that to 35¢/minute which is outrageous, but on good stretches (when y'all aren't bothering me) I can still get by paying around $100/year so pay-as-you-go is still working for me. Still miss the land line, terribly.
posted by Rash at 7:48 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
I still do, with my pay-as-you-go plan. 20¢ a text, sent or received; which is barely reasonable (as long as you don't needlessly break your texts up into little ones, as my step-son does) and I was fine with the dime-a-minute charge for phone calls, but AT&T recently raised that to 35¢/minute which is outrageous, but on good stretches (when y'all aren't bothering me) I can still get by paying around $100/year so pay-as-you-go is still working for me. Still miss the land line, terribly.
posted by Rash at 7:48 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
I never thought about it until I read this, but now I really miss the days of "Go to bar, order drink, look for friends, finish drink, go somewhere else, repeat."
Ah, those long ago days of...last Saturday.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:49 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Ah, those long ago days of...last Saturday.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:49 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
I had a temp job in 2007-ish in which part of the job was making copies of microfiche cards and delivering them to a cubicle farm where they still had microfiche readers. This was for the government pension administration and they still largely kept all of their records on microfiche. They were transitioning to digital by changing from taking pictures of pieces of paper with a film camera (basically, that's how microfiche is made) to a digital camera. It would still be paper forms, filled in by hand, but now archived as jpeg. It very much felt like I had gone back in time.
posted by selenized at 8:00 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by selenized at 8:00 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
I also had a pager until recently and actually somewhat missed it when I moved to a phone only! Without it there was not a brief break to see the number, wake up a bit, and then call back. With a phone call it felt more intrusive and urgent somehow.
We had a happy medium with some residents and nurses who'd text me in a bit of detail, but then call to make sure I received the text, and to pass on information not appropriate to text, like identifying data.
Interesting link, CheeseDigestsAll, there is some movement toward similar Right to Disconnect legislation in Canada (only Ontario for now as far as I know).
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 8:04 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
We had a happy medium with some residents and nurses who'd text me in a bit of detail, but then call to make sure I received the text, and to pass on information not appropriate to text, like identifying data.
Interesting link, CheeseDigestsAll, there is some movement toward similar Right to Disconnect legislation in Canada (only Ontario for now as far as I know).
posted by narcissus_and_ambrosia at 8:04 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
I remember the ritual of "checking messages." Call your own phone number and if there's a message it'll pick up in 2 rings instead of 4. Punch in your special code to listen to any messages. And these were on a cassette so clearing messages was all or nothing. I'd do this several times a day until I acquired a mobile phone.
posted by microscone at 8:07 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by microscone at 8:07 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
In 1990 when I camped cross country alone for the first time phone calls were expensive enough that the safety plan was, I dropped a postcard home in the mail every night. Wouldn’t actually keep me safe, but they’d know which county to start searching in.
Now that I type that out it seems a little cold.
posted by clew at 8:13 AM on July 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
Now that I type that out it seems a little cold.
posted by clew at 8:13 AM on July 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
If any young 'uns want to see the "checking for messages" ritual for themselves, check out almost any episode of Seinfeld.
posted by Paul Slade at 8:15 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Paul Slade at 8:15 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
I was interesting to remember that we used to organize friendships at work.
Now, we are hired to organize friendships over social media, and social media can be banned at work, and so
1) we don't organize friendships at work
2) we don't organize friendships at all
3) we have not been compensated at all for making Zuckerberg, Musk, etc all umpteen gazillion dollars for "streamlining" friendship organization
4) fun and democracy have been seriously impeded by the digital panopticon
posted by eustatic at 8:16 AM on July 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
Now, we are hired to organize friendships over social media, and social media can be banned at work, and so
1) we don't organize friendships at work
2) we don't organize friendships at all
3) we have not been compensated at all for making Zuckerberg, Musk, etc all umpteen gazillion dollars for "streamlining" friendship organization
4) fun and democracy have been seriously impeded by the digital panopticon
posted by eustatic at 8:16 AM on July 14, 2023 [10 favorites]
Call your own phone number and if there's a message it'll pick up in 2 rings instead of 4.
This feature was often known as "tollsaver" and it existed to cheat the phone company. In many circumstances you'd only be charged for a call if the other side picked up. By not answering in 2 rings, the machine was telling you there weren't any messages. If you hung up before it answered on the fourth ring, you didn't have to pay for the call!
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:20 AM on July 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
This feature was often known as "tollsaver" and it existed to cheat the phone company. In many circumstances you'd only be charged for a call if the other side picked up. By not answering in 2 rings, the machine was telling you there weren't any messages. If you hung up before it answered on the fourth ring, you didn't have to pay for the call!
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:20 AM on July 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
Then you'd call them back only to get their voicemail.
And leave a message like "Phone tag, you're it!"
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:24 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
And leave a message like "Phone tag, you're it!"
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:24 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
For most of my working life, I've been a freelancer, often dealing with clients overseas. So even before I had a cellphone, I was accustomed to answering e-mails way outside 9–5 hours. I had an always-on Internet connection starting in '95 or '96 (my neighbor had an ISDN line that he used to run a tiny ISP, and I laid an ethernet cable from my house to his, until I got ADSL), so I was terminally online pretty early.
Then in 2018, I got a straight job. My boss won't contact me outside normal working hours unless it's an extinction-level event. I walk out the door and ten seconds later have completely stopped thinking about whatever I was doing at work (I just finished watching Severance—very relevant).
There was a recurring schtick in the movie Manhattan—or maybe Stardust Memories—anyhow, pre-cellphone—in which one of the characters is always calling in to his office to let them know what number he can be reached at, and what number he will be reachable at next.
posted by adamrice at 8:24 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Then in 2018, I got a straight job. My boss won't contact me outside normal working hours unless it's an extinction-level event. I walk out the door and ten seconds later have completely stopped thinking about whatever I was doing at work (I just finished watching Severance—very relevant).
There was a recurring schtick in the movie Manhattan—or maybe Stardust Memories—anyhow, pre-cellphone—in which one of the characters is always calling in to his office to let them know what number he can be reached at, and what number he will be reachable at next.
posted by adamrice at 8:24 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
This is why I’ve always thought that salaried labor was a scam. Overtime pay serves as a sufficient disincentive for my employer to bother me during off hours and it’s frightening how rare that situation is in white collar employment now.
posted by Selena777 at 8:26 AM on July 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by Selena777 at 8:26 AM on July 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
I'm the same age as the folks in the article, and by 2003, we were not talking on the phone at all except for all those annoying work/bill reasons and long distance to our families. (also absolutely nobody I knew my age had a receptionist in 2003). It was all email with my friends, and the only question was whether you got to keep your .edu email when you graduated undergrad, switched to yahoo/aol/hotmail, or were in grad school and had a new .edu address. We couldn't talk on the home phone anyway because whenever we were home, our home phones were always busy with dial-up internet (reading Metafilter, obviously).
posted by hydropsyche at 8:37 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by hydropsyche at 8:37 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
From mid-90s to mid-2000s my friend group did much of our social organizing via email -- which meant you had to be at work, or the computer lab at school, or on your desktop machine at home via dial-up. So, once the plan was made, that was pretty much it!
It was around 2001 or so that I got my first cell phone -- one of those ubiquitous little Nokia blue plastic bricks. But texting was so cumbersome! Never mind the pay-per-text hassle, just typing stuff out using the 9 numeric keys made texting not-really-a-thing, even though it was an available option. And definitely no mobile internet access. When I finally got one of those slick new Motorola Razrs in like 2005, it felt like living in the future! But even then, texting was still pretty clumsy, so email (from work, school, or home) was still the main medium for making plans. Only now we could call one another on the go in case something changed last minute. No more leaving a paper note, hoping the stragglers would find it, saying where to find everybody!
posted by fikri at 8:45 AM on July 14, 2023
It was around 2001 or so that I got my first cell phone -- one of those ubiquitous little Nokia blue plastic bricks. But texting was so cumbersome! Never mind the pay-per-text hassle, just typing stuff out using the 9 numeric keys made texting not-really-a-thing, even though it was an available option. And definitely no mobile internet access. When I finally got one of those slick new Motorola Razrs in like 2005, it felt like living in the future! But even then, texting was still pretty clumsy, so email (from work, school, or home) was still the main medium for making plans. Only now we could call one another on the go in case something changed last minute. No more leaving a paper note, hoping the stragglers would find it, saying where to find everybody!
posted by fikri at 8:45 AM on July 14, 2023
In all the rounds I've seen this article pass, I haven't seen anybody bring up that usually your work manager had your home number and you had theirs
Yes, your boss just yelled at you to wake up through the answering machine until you picked up and confirmed you were up.
I spent a few weeks in the year 2000 literally working every minute I wasn't in or driving to/from the office, and eventually I started sleeping through all alarms that weren't someone going "Hey! Hey! Wake up!". It was hard, but I was only 19 and I got the equivalent (considering my station in live) of a now six figure bonus at the end, so it was great actually.
Anyway, this article is just as full of "every generation thinks it invented sex" as the other one.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 8:48 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Yes, your boss just yelled at you to wake up through the answering machine until you picked up and confirmed you were up.
I spent a few weeks in the year 2000 literally working every minute I wasn't in or driving to/from the office, and eventually I started sleeping through all alarms that weren't someone going "Hey! Hey! Wake up!". It was hard, but I was only 19 and I got the equivalent (considering my station in live) of a now six figure bonus at the end, so it was great actually.
Anyway, this article is just as full of "every generation thinks it invented sex" as the other one.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 8:48 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Newspapers used to have “missed connections” sections. That doesn’t happen as much anymore, now that almost everyone has easier ways to be reached (text, email, social media, etc.) and easier or more reliable ways to record (and not lose) other people’s contact info.
posted by eviemath at 8:49 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 8:49 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
When we lived in Lebanon in the early 2010s, it was still a really normal thing to set up plans like, "I'll give you a missed call when I'm out front." The government had a monopoly on the expensive phone services and even a minute was expensive. Then I'd always get in trouble for forgetfully accidentally answering and costing us each a minute. Missed calls were genius. "I'll give you a missed call if he says yes." "I'll give you a missed call when the food's almost ready." Like a one-use secret code.
posted by lauranesson at 8:52 AM on July 14, 2023 [13 favorites]
posted by lauranesson at 8:52 AM on July 14, 2023 [13 favorites]
When things were somewhat hectic you couldn't travel beyond easy courier delivery range... If it was important enough, messenger cars would drop off documents, and if was really important the messenger car would wait while you read and marked up the document or wrote a reply, and then bring it back.
Oh yeah that guy, I never met him but I heard a lot about him. He was one of the producers for a media/marketing thing. He always had to personally sign off for every edit before the massive fucking-expensive project could move on to the next step. He also liked to bugger off to remote inaccessible places to get away from it all. His assistants hated him.
Shipping desk: Hand deliver and return from Pitcairn Island? That will cost quite a bit.
PA: That cost is a tiny, tiny, fraction of the cost of every minute we get delayed past schedule.
posted by ovvl at 8:52 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Oh yeah that guy, I never met him but I heard a lot about him. He was one of the producers for a media/marketing thing. He always had to personally sign off for every edit before the massive fucking-expensive project could move on to the next step. He also liked to bugger off to remote inaccessible places to get away from it all. His assistants hated him.
Shipping desk: Hand deliver and return from Pitcairn Island? That will cost quite a bit.
PA: That cost is a tiny, tiny, fraction of the cost of every minute we get delayed past schedule.
posted by ovvl at 8:52 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
what it was like being (about) 27 in (around) 2002
I was 31 for most of 2002. I worked in the web hosting facility for a global ISP (after multiple bankruptcies the remnants of it are now part of Lumen Technologies). We had two-way pagers and an on-call rotation, plus there were maybe four all-hands emergencies that happened during off hours when I worked there where I got paged or called so I could be part of the response. We had a VPN that had limited access to certain critical systems, but you could hop through a particular server (a bastion host in the lingo) and then get into everything else accessible from the desktop admin network if you needed to work remotely.
I made use of that when I was assigned to a team that was all remote to me, and I stopped going into the office at all in late 2001 or early 2002. I'd just log into the VPN, tunnel via the bastion host to a linux box on my desk, and then tunnel everything else through that. On the very rare occasions I had to go in for a meeting, to get something off my desk, or to roll a crash cart up to a system in the data center that wasn't on the IPKVM, people would be surprised I still worked there.
I bought my own personal PowerBook G4 (released 2001) and used it for work because its battery life was better than the ultraportable Toshiba Portege that was my company-issued machine (which was otherwise really nice, although sometimes Windows acted up when you docked or undocked it). I also had a G4 Cube at home and I ran Mac OS X because it was the future. I synced contacts on my phone with the address book on my computer.
The Treo 180 came out in 2002, but it didn't work on my provider so I didn't get one until the Treo 300 came out in 2003. I actually only used a Treo until 2006, when I switched to a Sony Ericsson swivel phone. Coworkers at the time thought I was nuts, but it was better at being a phone than the Treo was and it had fewer limits on the number of contact fields you could define for a single user (Palm OS limited you to five fields, but the Sony Ericsson OS allowed you to define an arbitrary number of contact fields for a single person).
For me the biggest difference between 2002 and now is the ubiquity of the iPhone. In a lot of ways I work the same way now that I did then, but the iPhone is much more powerful than a Treo ever was. Oh, and I guess it started to be possible to get a company-issued Mac somewhere along the line, instead of being limited to Windows.
posted by fedward at 9:08 AM on July 14, 2023
I was 31 for most of 2002. I worked in the web hosting facility for a global ISP (after multiple bankruptcies the remnants of it are now part of Lumen Technologies). We had two-way pagers and an on-call rotation, plus there were maybe four all-hands emergencies that happened during off hours when I worked there where I got paged or called so I could be part of the response. We had a VPN that had limited access to certain critical systems, but you could hop through a particular server (a bastion host in the lingo) and then get into everything else accessible from the desktop admin network if you needed to work remotely.
I made use of that when I was assigned to a team that was all remote to me, and I stopped going into the office at all in late 2001 or early 2002. I'd just log into the VPN, tunnel via the bastion host to a linux box on my desk, and then tunnel everything else through that. On the very rare occasions I had to go in for a meeting, to get something off my desk, or to roll a crash cart up to a system in the data center that wasn't on the IPKVM, people would be surprised I still worked there.
I bought my own personal PowerBook G4 (released 2001) and used it for work because its battery life was better than the ultraportable Toshiba Portege that was my company-issued machine (which was otherwise really nice, although sometimes Windows acted up when you docked or undocked it). I also had a G4 Cube at home and I ran Mac OS X because it was the future. I synced contacts on my phone with the address book on my computer.
The Treo 180 came out in 2002, but it didn't work on my provider so I didn't get one until the Treo 300 came out in 2003. I actually only used a Treo until 2006, when I switched to a Sony Ericsson swivel phone. Coworkers at the time thought I was nuts, but it was better at being a phone than the Treo was and it had fewer limits on the number of contact fields you could define for a single user (Palm OS limited you to five fields, but the Sony Ericsson OS allowed you to define an arbitrary number of contact fields for a single person).
For me the biggest difference between 2002 and now is the ubiquity of the iPhone. In a lot of ways I work the same way now that I did then, but the iPhone is much more powerful than a Treo ever was. Oh, and I guess it started to be possible to get a company-issued Mac somewhere along the line, instead of being limited to Windows.
posted by fedward at 9:08 AM on July 14, 2023
I also seem to recall the Palm had some kind of primitive "sharing" mechanism to send the event from one device to another when they were next to each other---though I could be misremembering this.
Yes--infrared. And speaking of early PDAs, another feature of my early years on the job was being the mobile guy, i.e. the librarian who managed our circulating collection of PDAs (for people who hadn't ever had or used them, as most people in healthcare hadn't at that point in time) as well as the apps that we had licenses for. And, being the helpful librarian and avid gadget nerd that I was, I was happy to install apps on the devices of doctors who didn't have the time and/or expertise to do it themselves... until I had more than one who would leave their device and not pick it up for days, sometimes over a week. I mean... why do you even have this thing if you're not going to carry it around everywhere with you? I know that you're busy saving lives and whatnot, but come on. (Not to mention that I've got access to everything on it because I'm syncing it on my computer; I didn't snoop, but the opportunity was certainly there.) I gave up doing it when I had someone ask me to install something, and after trying I told them that they'd have to delete some stuff (photos, I think) to free up room for it... and came back from lunch to find that they'd asked another librarian to install the app, without freeing up any space on their device.
That probably wasn't long before the iPhone came along and changed everything, although even then you had people who needed handholding of various sorts; one doc was upset because he couldn't install something, and after poking around his phone I had to find a delicate way of telling him that the department that had gotten him the phone had locked him out of being able to install anything or make any purchases on his phone, like some kid whose parents had kept him from being able to spend $1000 on Pokemon shit or something.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:21 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
Yes--infrared. And speaking of early PDAs, another feature of my early years on the job was being the mobile guy, i.e. the librarian who managed our circulating collection of PDAs (for people who hadn't ever had or used them, as most people in healthcare hadn't at that point in time) as well as the apps that we had licenses for. And, being the helpful librarian and avid gadget nerd that I was, I was happy to install apps on the devices of doctors who didn't have the time and/or expertise to do it themselves... until I had more than one who would leave their device and not pick it up for days, sometimes over a week. I mean... why do you even have this thing if you're not going to carry it around everywhere with you? I know that you're busy saving lives and whatnot, but come on. (Not to mention that I've got access to everything on it because I'm syncing it on my computer; I didn't snoop, but the opportunity was certainly there.) I gave up doing it when I had someone ask me to install something, and after trying I told them that they'd have to delete some stuff (photos, I think) to free up room for it... and came back from lunch to find that they'd asked another librarian to install the app, without freeing up any space on their device.
That probably wasn't long before the iPhone came along and changed everything, although even then you had people who needed handholding of various sorts; one doc was upset because he couldn't install something, and after poking around his phone I had to find a delicate way of telling him that the department that had gotten him the phone had locked him out of being able to install anything or make any purchases on his phone, like some kid whose parents had kept him from being able to spend $1000 on Pokemon shit or something.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:21 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
This is why I'm glad my office is in my newly converted garage. My work laptop and phone stay out there at the end of the day. My boss and my top level reports have my personal number and they can reach me there, but they know it needs to be important.
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:32 AM on July 14, 2023
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:32 AM on July 14, 2023
Remember trying to coordinate meeting people somewhere, then if plans changed on the fly, you'd have to find a payphone to call your house and see if anyone left you a message on your (tape) answering machine?
And now my kids will probably never leave a voicemail in their lives. They laugh in disbelief when their grandparents leave them one from time to time.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:39 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
And now my kids will probably never leave a voicemail in their lives. They laugh in disbelief when their grandparents leave them one from time to time.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:39 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
It's been a couple years since I had to do this but sometimes I need to do some property history research for a client. And sometimes the records department down at the city will present me with a small folder of microfiche to scan through to see if what I need is in there. The last time I did this, the super awesome woman who ran that department looked at me very seriously and said, "Do you know how to use these?" And I was like stupidly giddy and said, "Oh yes!!!" Flying through the pages with ease - no download time! No clicking! No search functionality! It was wild.
posted by amanda at 9:58 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by amanda at 9:58 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
We also used to SOCIALIZE after work. We would go out to a local bar, sometimes with co-workers. We would discuss things like local or national politics or someone's crazy sibling. But that's all taken care of by phones now. Sigh.
Again, this is not remotely extinct, I am literally doing this every week? We just all come from our comfy houses in our comfy regular-life clothes, and go to the GOOD local bar near us, instead of straggling into the world's shittiest downtown bar half-dead in our office clothes to shout at each other over the worst Bon Jovi songs.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:59 AM on July 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
Again, this is not remotely extinct, I am literally doing this every week? We just all come from our comfy houses in our comfy regular-life clothes, and go to the GOOD local bar near us, instead of straggling into the world's shittiest downtown bar half-dead in our office clothes to shout at each other over the worst Bon Jovi songs.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:59 AM on July 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
During and after college my house was The Designated Socializing Area for my friends and coworkers, and all my roommates' friends and coworkers. It was almost impossible to be alone at home and yet we never organized or actively invited people over. They were just... there.
posted by Glibpaxman at 10:06 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Glibpaxman at 10:06 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
My feeling is that we tend both to overrate convenience and forget how convenience shapes expectations. Looking back as a smartphone-haver, you might think that the nineties were a miserable age of missed connections,
Back in the nineties, and earlier the experience of going to Glastonbury (and other) festival(s) was often this. You would turn up with a bunch of people, pitch your camp and then wander off together. At some point you might stop to look at something, or talk to someone, and you would turn around and they would be gone, and there was nothing you could do about it. You might not see them again for days, until it was all over and it was time to go home.
And it was ok. In fact for may people this was the experience you came for. When (more than if) it happened you would just wander along till you bumped into some you vaguely knew, or you could just start talking to the people next to you, if they didn't start talking to you first (which was a common enough reacting if someone saw this happening) and you would hang out with them, and the days would be come a string of bubbles of these encounters, of long lost friends and friendly strangers. It took a certain amount of courage perhaps, surely an embrace of uncertainty, but if you went with you got to experience a whole different way of being, built out of common experience and not available in the outside world.
Fast forward to the mid 2000's. I was at Glastonbury, working. I had a phone, it even had useful work related purposes there, but it wasnt anything that it ever occured to to think about using otherwise, I mean wasn't that entirely the point? Then one night I has jsut knocked off a shift and was getting ready to head into the unknown when my phone rings. What? Is my mum calling me (no), unknown number. I answer it and its someone who knew my partner and they were in floods of tears becuase they had lost the friends they were with.
I had to sit there for half an hour and try to talk them down; though I knew where they were, there was nothing else I could do. They were half an mile away at most, but that was at least an hour of fighting through crowds to get there and even if I had, there was no more chance of finding them in the crowds than there ever had been. The physical world had not changed, just the expectations of it and the promise of convenience had proved to be a fool's paradise. Nothing to do but shake my head and mourn the loss of a world that was slipping away in front of my eyes.
There's always a trade-off, and it might well be worth it, but the seduction of convience is that there isn't one: it's just the same thing but easier. The price is always being paid, especially don't know what it is. Maybe you don't know what you have lost till it too late, maybe someone else is paying the price, or perhaps someones got thier hand in your pocket and you don't know it.
posted by tallus at 10:15 AM on July 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
Back in the nineties, and earlier the experience of going to Glastonbury (and other) festival(s) was often this. You would turn up with a bunch of people, pitch your camp and then wander off together. At some point you might stop to look at something, or talk to someone, and you would turn around and they would be gone, and there was nothing you could do about it. You might not see them again for days, until it was all over and it was time to go home.
And it was ok. In fact for may people this was the experience you came for. When (more than if) it happened you would just wander along till you bumped into some you vaguely knew, or you could just start talking to the people next to you, if they didn't start talking to you first (which was a common enough reacting if someone saw this happening) and you would hang out with them, and the days would be come a string of bubbles of these encounters, of long lost friends and friendly strangers. It took a certain amount of courage perhaps, surely an embrace of uncertainty, but if you went with you got to experience a whole different way of being, built out of common experience and not available in the outside world.
Fast forward to the mid 2000's. I was at Glastonbury, working. I had a phone, it even had useful work related purposes there, but it wasnt anything that it ever occured to to think about using otherwise, I mean wasn't that entirely the point? Then one night I has jsut knocked off a shift and was getting ready to head into the unknown when my phone rings. What? Is my mum calling me (no), unknown number. I answer it and its someone who knew my partner and they were in floods of tears becuase they had lost the friends they were with.
I had to sit there for half an hour and try to talk them down; though I knew where they were, there was nothing else I could do. They were half an mile away at most, but that was at least an hour of fighting through crowds to get there and even if I had, there was no more chance of finding them in the crowds than there ever had been. The physical world had not changed, just the expectations of it and the promise of convenience had proved to be a fool's paradise. Nothing to do but shake my head and mourn the loss of a world that was slipping away in front of my eyes.
There's always a trade-off, and it might well be worth it, but the seduction of convience is that there isn't one: it's just the same thing but easier. The price is always being paid, especially don't know what it is. Maybe you don't know what you have lost till it too late, maybe someone else is paying the price, or perhaps someones got thier hand in your pocket and you don't know it.
posted by tallus at 10:15 AM on July 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
Cellphones made travel dramatically easier. That was a big change. I remember trying to plan all my activities in advance pre-cellphone, like "on Saturday we'll go to the arboretum in the morning, then have a late lunch at Chochke's, then go into town to meet Peter at his place. On Sunday…" Having a cellphone meant you could extemporize.
Smartphones make it easier still, and you can walk around in an unfamiliar city staring at your phone without automatically branding yourself a tourist.
posted by adamrice at 10:41 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Smartphones make it easier still, and you can walk around in an unfamiliar city staring at your phone without automatically branding yourself a tourist.
posted by adamrice at 10:41 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
When I was a kid I worked way more than I do now as an old adult. I think I may have done just about any job or scam possible. I delivered every paper and catalog there was. I returned shopping carts. I collected bottles from roadside ditches. I caddied at the local golf courses. I put the lines on baseball diamonds. I put the glass in plastic picture frames. I washed and parked golf carts. I shoveled manure into bags. I collected golf balls from a river and sold them back to golfers. I washed dishes at a restaurant. I stocked shelves and ran a cash at Consumers Distributing. I put two spaces after a period.
I had hustle. I wonder where that went?
posted by srboisvert at 11:14 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
I had hustle. I wonder where that went?
posted by srboisvert at 11:14 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
and people would leave 3-4 minute voicemails with detailed instructions and requests you had to play back four times to make sure you got all the nuances
I still do this and everybody hates me.
posted by joannemerriam at 11:20 AM on July 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
I still do this and everybody hates me.
posted by joannemerriam at 11:20 AM on July 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
each other over the worst Bon Jovi songs.
Bon Jovi is awesome if you change his voice for every 'whoa' to Keanu Reeves in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. "whoa! we're half way there! whoa!"
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:21 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
Bon Jovi is awesome if you change his voice for every 'whoa' to Keanu Reeves in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. "whoa! we're half way there! whoa!"
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:21 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
We were just talking about AAA TripTiks recently.
TripTiks were so good! Up-to-date road maps customized to your planned route from A to B. Nothing better.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:28 AM on July 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
TripTiks were so good! Up-to-date road maps customized to your planned route from A to B. Nothing better.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:28 AM on July 14, 2023 [6 favorites]
I once answered a phone call from my boss on a weekend. Someone else on my team had decided to work on the weekend, ran into a problem, and decided the best course of action was to call our manager and get everyone on the team on the phone _right_now_ and resolve the problem, so our manager dutifully called everyone up.
I excused myself from my friends and joined a two hour meeting, where only a few people foolish enough to answer the phone had joined. At the conclusion of the meeting, my manager said, "Well thank you for bringing this up, and we'll investigate it on Monday."
I learned a useful lesson about work that day.
posted by meowzilla at 11:29 AM on July 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
I excused myself from my friends and joined a two hour meeting, where only a few people foolish enough to answer the phone had joined. At the conclusion of the meeting, my manager said, "Well thank you for bringing this up, and we'll investigate it on Monday."
I learned a useful lesson about work that day.
posted by meowzilla at 11:29 AM on July 14, 2023 [15 favorites]
We also used to SOCIALIZE after work.
Again, this is not remotely extinct ... We just all come from our comfy houses in our comfy regular-life clothes, and go to the GOOD local bar near us
To be fair, some of us never bother to leave our comfy houses where the cheaper booze is...but then some of us wouldn't have gone to a shitty bar with our coworkers either.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:53 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
Again, this is not remotely extinct ... We just all come from our comfy houses in our comfy regular-life clothes, and go to the GOOD local bar near us
To be fair, some of us never bother to leave our comfy houses where the cheaper booze is...but then some of us wouldn't have gone to a shitty bar with our coworkers either.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:53 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
I mean, the socializing after work bit seems to be more about "I had more time after work and could really leave work, rather than dragging on finishing things up at my desk at home until the early evening or returning to work a bit more after dinner".
posted by Frowner at 12:22 PM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 12:22 PM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
I have a half baked theory that declining rates of violence can be correlated with smartphone ownership. Pre smart phone, bar arguments over the most random stuff (Which celebrity is richer, which sports player has better stats, whatever random factoid) had no way of being resolved and combined with alcohol could result in violence, now you can look up the answer in a second.
Separate anecdote - I graduated high school in 2001, we had the internet at home (AOL) for all of high school, I got a flip phone halfway through college (no texts, limited minutes) and a smartphone in the early 2010s. Me and my friends were all in bands and some of the more "popular" ones would go on tour all through the 00s. In the early 00s you booked dates over email or phone, there were mapquest printouts for directions, and usually somebody in the van would have a cell phone for emergencies. If you missed a turn or there was a detour or confusing signage you were screwed but you'd probably make the gig eventually. Now, obviously there's waze/google maps and unlimited cell coverage, much better and easier and more efficient. I can't IMAGINE touring pre 2000s - booking tours by LETTER!?, paying for long distance calls, navigating to weird random clubs/elks lodges via road atlas, if you get lost having to find a payphone and hope somebody will answer on the other end, no good cheap way to stay in touch with people at home. Total insanity. I remember reading Get In the Van by Henry Rollins and he mentions something about feeling like he's an invading army or in enemy territory or something like that while on tour which makes a ton of sense thinking about being an independent, mostly unsupported punk band touring in the 70s and 80s.
posted by youthenrage at 12:23 PM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
Separate anecdote - I graduated high school in 2001, we had the internet at home (AOL) for all of high school, I got a flip phone halfway through college (no texts, limited minutes) and a smartphone in the early 2010s. Me and my friends were all in bands and some of the more "popular" ones would go on tour all through the 00s. In the early 00s you booked dates over email or phone, there were mapquest printouts for directions, and usually somebody in the van would have a cell phone for emergencies. If you missed a turn or there was a detour or confusing signage you were screwed but you'd probably make the gig eventually. Now, obviously there's waze/google maps and unlimited cell coverage, much better and easier and more efficient. I can't IMAGINE touring pre 2000s - booking tours by LETTER!?, paying for long distance calls, navigating to weird random clubs/elks lodges via road atlas, if you get lost having to find a payphone and hope somebody will answer on the other end, no good cheap way to stay in touch with people at home. Total insanity. I remember reading Get In the Van by Henry Rollins and he mentions something about feeling like he's an invading army or in enemy territory or something like that while on tour which makes a ton of sense thinking about being an independent, mostly unsupported punk band touring in the 70s and 80s.
posted by youthenrage at 12:23 PM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
When? I got my first cellphone in 1996, a brick in a bag, and you only paid for making calls, not ones incoming, just like today.
It's a US thing. You're billed airtime for both incoming and outgoing as a matter of course. That's how it was when my dad got his car phone in 1986 and is still the same today if you don't have unlimited calling (which is pretty rare now that carriers pretty much all have a $100-$200 a year unlimited talk and text with a small amount of data prepaid option).
I remember it was almost as big of a deal when Sprint PCS started doing first incoming minute free as when AT&T (the old one) started offering OneRate, which had no roaming or long distance charges anywhere in the US. OneRate is what spurred me to finally get my own cell phone in 1998. I traveled enough and there were still enough pay phones around that I didn't see the point of having one if I was going to pay somewhere north of a dollar a minute every time I left town.
Speaking of roaming, I remember when automatic roaming wasn't yet a thing, so if you went to another city nobody could call you unless they knew where you were and you had given them the roaming access number for whatever carrier you were using in that city. (Or they looked it up in one of the several roaming guides that were published at the time and guessed successfully) If you got lots of calls of questionable importance and paid for roaming and long distance, turning off automatic roaming was essential to avoid unreasonably high bills. You see, it didn't matter whether you answered the call or not, you still got billed because it was really just call forwarding behind the scenes and it would blindly forward the call to the system your phone had most recently registered with. Come to think of it, in the early days they'd always charge you a minute of airtime for the privilege of attempting to ring your phone even when you weren't roaming.
Cell phones were a much different experience back then since few people had them. You couldn't call someone you were meeting to tell them you'd be a few minutes late unless you did it well in advance, before they left home/the office.
It's also weird to think that I wouldn't have my job if it weren't for the venerable answering machine. I was brought on to help with a specific project with no real expectation of it being any long term thing. He already employed one of my friends to help out with the day to day and didn't really need anyone else. Then boss man went out of town, instructing my friend to check his office answering machine daily in case any clients had problems that needed to be dealt with. Friend went on a bender instead and never got messages about things having blown up. Boss man comes back to a full message machine, fires friend, tells me I now have a full time job if I want it. Twenty five years later, I've still got the same job, though the power of the Internet has long since meant I can work remotely and it's been over a decade since I last saw my boss in person.
If it weren't for the old ways of doing things, I might actually have had to do real work for a living at some point.
posted by wierdo at 12:24 PM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
It's a US thing. You're billed airtime for both incoming and outgoing as a matter of course. That's how it was when my dad got his car phone in 1986 and is still the same today if you don't have unlimited calling (which is pretty rare now that carriers pretty much all have a $100-$200 a year unlimited talk and text with a small amount of data prepaid option).
I remember it was almost as big of a deal when Sprint PCS started doing first incoming minute free as when AT&T (the old one) started offering OneRate, which had no roaming or long distance charges anywhere in the US. OneRate is what spurred me to finally get my own cell phone in 1998. I traveled enough and there were still enough pay phones around that I didn't see the point of having one if I was going to pay somewhere north of a dollar a minute every time I left town.
Speaking of roaming, I remember when automatic roaming wasn't yet a thing, so if you went to another city nobody could call you unless they knew where you were and you had given them the roaming access number for whatever carrier you were using in that city. (Or they looked it up in one of the several roaming guides that were published at the time and guessed successfully) If you got lots of calls of questionable importance and paid for roaming and long distance, turning off automatic roaming was essential to avoid unreasonably high bills. You see, it didn't matter whether you answered the call or not, you still got billed because it was really just call forwarding behind the scenes and it would blindly forward the call to the system your phone had most recently registered with. Come to think of it, in the early days they'd always charge you a minute of airtime for the privilege of attempting to ring your phone even when you weren't roaming.
Cell phones were a much different experience back then since few people had them. You couldn't call someone you were meeting to tell them you'd be a few minutes late unless you did it well in advance, before they left home/the office.
It's also weird to think that I wouldn't have my job if it weren't for the venerable answering machine. I was brought on to help with a specific project with no real expectation of it being any long term thing. He already employed one of my friends to help out with the day to day and didn't really need anyone else. Then boss man went out of town, instructing my friend to check his office answering machine daily in case any clients had problems that needed to be dealt with. Friend went on a bender instead and never got messages about things having blown up. Boss man comes back to a full message machine, fires friend, tells me I now have a full time job if I want it. Twenty five years later, I've still got the same job, though the power of the Internet has long since meant I can work remotely and it's been over a decade since I last saw my boss in person.
If it weren't for the old ways of doing things, I might actually have had to do real work for a living at some point.
posted by wierdo at 12:24 PM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Oh also thinking about it, I would like to pour one out for the good old email list. As I mentioned earlier, my social circle tended to be organized around a few lists that were maintained by folks who just wanted an easy way to keep in touch.
Managing who was in the list was a communal affair and some were free for alls where anyone can add anyone else, and others had elitist policies about nominating and voting in additions. While it was clique-y it did mean that you were in a community that you individually couldn't fully control. You had to deal with loudmouths with too much time filling up your inbox with chatter. If you posted a party invite or a bar outing, you kind of had to be ok with anyone on the list saying yes to it. If you dated someone and broke up with them, you'd have to deal with the fact that they're still on this list.
You didn't have the algorithmically driven echo chambers that exist now or as much freedom to just surgically delete a person from your life. But also you had a certain safety and intimacy with knowing that discussions here were limited to set of knowable people. you didn't have the excessively trollish behavior that comes with being anonymous on the internet.
The closest equivalent to it today, I suppose, are public Discords and Slack rooms or various group chats but the spirit of those have all been different from a mailing list in their heyday if only because those platforms have to exist in the gravitational attention wells of Facebook and Twitter.
posted by bl1nk at 12:25 PM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
Managing who was in the list was a communal affair and some were free for alls where anyone can add anyone else, and others had elitist policies about nominating and voting in additions. While it was clique-y it did mean that you were in a community that you individually couldn't fully control. You had to deal with loudmouths with too much time filling up your inbox with chatter. If you posted a party invite or a bar outing, you kind of had to be ok with anyone on the list saying yes to it. If you dated someone and broke up with them, you'd have to deal with the fact that they're still on this list.
You didn't have the algorithmically driven echo chambers that exist now or as much freedom to just surgically delete a person from your life. But also you had a certain safety and intimacy with knowing that discussions here were limited to set of knowable people. you didn't have the excessively trollish behavior that comes with being anonymous on the internet.
The closest equivalent to it today, I suppose, are public Discords and Slack rooms or various group chats but the spirit of those have all been different from a mailing list in their heyday if only because those platforms have to exist in the gravitational attention wells of Facebook and Twitter.
posted by bl1nk at 12:25 PM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]
To be fair, some of us never bother to leave our comfy houses where the cheaper booze is...but then some of us wouldn't have gone to a shitty bar with our coworkers either.
Fair! I'm just saying, some of this stuff hasn't actually disappeared or been warped beyond recognition by tech. Last weekend my boyfriend and I were kind of bored and didn't have any specific plans so we wandered over to the local. A friend of ours came by after her weekly after-work happy hour at a (good) bar near her office (she still works at one!). After awhile a third friend stopped in after her theater date. None of this is especially rare, though granted it's more common when the weather is nice.
No smartphones were used in the coordinating of this evening (except to operate the jukebox which, I must admit, sucks to do, and I miss old jukeboxes). We didn't meet any of these people thanks to social media, we met them at school or at work or because they dated someone we knew.
Yeah yeah work is hell and capitalism is hell and everyone is getting chewed up and spat out, sure fine, not like we don't know this. But I do feel it is important every now and again to examine one's nostalgia to see whether it is indeed for an era lost, or whether it's just for a time when you weren't old and piled high with responsibility and bullshit.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:56 PM on July 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
Fair! I'm just saying, some of this stuff hasn't actually disappeared or been warped beyond recognition by tech. Last weekend my boyfriend and I were kind of bored and didn't have any specific plans so we wandered over to the local. A friend of ours came by after her weekly after-work happy hour at a (good) bar near her office (she still works at one!). After awhile a third friend stopped in after her theater date. None of this is especially rare, though granted it's more common when the weather is nice.
No smartphones were used in the coordinating of this evening (except to operate the jukebox which, I must admit, sucks to do, and I miss old jukeboxes). We didn't meet any of these people thanks to social media, we met them at school or at work or because they dated someone we knew.
Yeah yeah work is hell and capitalism is hell and everyone is getting chewed up and spat out, sure fine, not like we don't know this. But I do feel it is important every now and again to examine one's nostalgia to see whether it is indeed for an era lost, or whether it's just for a time when you weren't old and piled high with responsibility and bullshit.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:56 PM on July 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
Anyone who has ever been an on-staff journalist, camera operator, etc. was accustomed to being wakened by a phone call and get out there to cover a breaking story.
posted by Ideefixe at 1:28 PM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Ideefixe at 1:28 PM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
This is one of my favorite tales of ye olden days...In the early 80s, we lived in Indianapolis. My brother-in-law and his wife lived in the town of Greenwood, which abutted Indy on the south side. My father-in-law, while living on the northern edge of Indianapolis, had a phone number which was an exchange in Carmel, a town abutting Indy to the north.
Back in those days, calling from your location to a town abutting your area was considered a local call. But, calling anywhere else that did not abut your area was a long-distance call. Thus, for my brother-in-law to call my father-in-law would mean making a long-distance call, which was not cheap in those days.
So, my in-laws decided that, if Greenwood wanted to talk to Carmel, they would call us in Indy (a local call), give us the message, and we would call Carmel (a local call) and convey the message. And vice-versa. All that to avoid long-distance charges.
We were literally playing a short game of Telephone.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:57 PM on July 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
Back in those days, calling from your location to a town abutting your area was considered a local call. But, calling anywhere else that did not abut your area was a long-distance call. Thus, for my brother-in-law to call my father-in-law would mean making a long-distance call, which was not cheap in those days.
So, my in-laws decided that, if Greenwood wanted to talk to Carmel, they would call us in Indy (a local call), give us the message, and we would call Carmel (a local call) and convey the message. And vice-versa. All that to avoid long-distance charges.
We were literally playing a short game of Telephone.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:57 PM on July 14, 2023 [8 favorites]
No, really. No one would send you an email at night.
Yeah, your boss would just make you work late. Does no one remember that???
posted by Toddles at 4:12 PM on July 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
Yeah, your boss would just make you work late. Does no one remember that???
posted by Toddles at 4:12 PM on July 14, 2023 [7 favorites]
I remember needing a phone card to call my parents from my dorm room. First you had to dial an 800-number then there was a pin and then you dialed the phone number you wanted to call. I think calls got billed to my parents.
posted by bendy at 4:59 PM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by bendy at 4:59 PM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]
Yeah, your boss would just make you work late. Does no one remember that???
I came to talk about this. I work in a field that is famous for running from crisis to crisis, and some of them are even legitimate. Just the other day I tried to explain to a young colleague that it was actually better when you sometimes had to stay until 9pm on a Friday night, but when you were done, it was up to the boss to track you down if they needed you over the weekend. Now, it feels like the onus is on you to constantly check e-mail to see if you're supposed to be doing anything.
Then again, I also remember missing lunch or being stuck in the office waiting for a single e-mail, phone call, or even fax to come in so that I could spend five minutes answering it... so may be the good old days were not always that great.
posted by rpfields at 4:59 PM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
I came to talk about this. I work in a field that is famous for running from crisis to crisis, and some of them are even legitimate. Just the other day I tried to explain to a young colleague that it was actually better when you sometimes had to stay until 9pm on a Friday night, but when you were done, it was up to the boss to track you down if they needed you over the weekend. Now, it feels like the onus is on you to constantly check e-mail to see if you're supposed to be doing anything.
Then again, I also remember missing lunch or being stuck in the office waiting for a single e-mail, phone call, or even fax to come in so that I could spend five minutes answering it... so may be the good old days were not always that great.
posted by rpfields at 4:59 PM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]
on work-life balance, I will say that an interesting aspect of remote work and having a team that spans time zones is that it forces the question of work-life balance and what counts as "after hours work".
Present job: Team Germany sets very firm boundaries. Meetings have to be in the morning so they're done before 5PM (sorry: 17:00) their time. Team USA is, um, conflicted, and also not all in Eastern. Part of the conflict is that complaining about hours within earshot of anyone from Team India just... feels... wrong. Especially during a heatwave in India when they all start living in Eastern time without any comment.
Now I have to show up in the office every two months. Which means hopping on the Acela or Regional from New England, sleeping on board overnight, doing the morning meetings, and flying back. (Makes more sense than trying to show up at Logan at 4AM. )
posted by ocschwar at 5:21 PM on July 14, 2023
Present job: Team Germany sets very firm boundaries. Meetings have to be in the morning so they're done before 5PM (sorry: 17:00) their time. Team USA is, um, conflicted, and also not all in Eastern. Part of the conflict is that complaining about hours within earshot of anyone from Team India just... feels... wrong. Especially during a heatwave in India when they all start living in Eastern time without any comment.
Now I have to show up in the office every two months. Which means hopping on the Acela or Regional from New England, sleeping on board overnight, doing the morning meetings, and flying back. (Makes more sense than trying to show up at Logan at 4AM. )
posted by ocschwar at 5:21 PM on July 14, 2023
As opposed to back when transnational asynchronous work was a rare thing (even telexes were expensive if sent overseas), and synchronous work halfway around the world was completely unthinkable outside of satellite tracking stations.
posted by ocschwar at 5:23 PM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by ocschwar at 5:23 PM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
My employer is very good at work/life balance. We have an on-call rotation, but even that has several people available. Since I'm by far the oldest in my department, and take sleeping pills besides, I've been told specifically to ignore calls after midnight. That's why we have two other people available, and the sysops should be talking to our people in India overnight anyway. If we're on rotation we're required to allow a certain group of phone numbers to get through at any time, but we're not required to have email/Zoom on our phones.
posted by lhauser at 5:50 PM on July 14, 2023
posted by lhauser at 5:50 PM on July 14, 2023
I absolutely refuse to put my work email or Teams on my phone. Some coworkers have my number and can text me if they want but I make it clear I'm probably not going to respond until I start work the next day. The only time I've had to deal with someone from work when I wasn't working was when during work hours I wasn't actually working because the power company was redoing the lines and I had no electricity. I had told my immediate boss about it and he had no problem. But apparently the head of the legal department didn't know. He called when I was out eating a burger and since he was the type to call over and over I went ahead and called him back when I was done. I told him I couldn't look into it cause I had no power. He asked if I had seen his email. I said no cause I have no power. But what about on your phone? Nope, not doing that I replied as he sounded baffled that such a concept could exist. I work the hours they pay me for and not a minute more. My grandfather was the head of the local Teamsters union. I know not to put up with that.
posted by downtohisturtles at 6:48 PM on July 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by downtohisturtles at 6:48 PM on July 14, 2023 [5 favorites]
I remember needing a phone card to call my parents from my dorm room. First you had to dial an 800-number then there was a pin and then you dialed the phone number you wanted to call. I think calls got billed to my parents.
In the early nineties I went overseas for the better part of a year, backpacking around Europe and North Africa. My mom had given me a phone card with this sort of arrangement, with which I called home every week or two. I also called my then-sweetie on a similar schedule.
When I returned home, my mom said, “Next time I will send her with you. It’ll be cheaper.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:54 PM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
In the early nineties I went overseas for the better part of a year, backpacking around Europe and North Africa. My mom had given me a phone card with this sort of arrangement, with which I called home every week or two. I also called my then-sweetie on a similar schedule.
When I returned home, my mom said, “Next time I will send her with you. It’ll be cheaper.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:54 PM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]
I remember needing a phone card to call my parents from my dorm room. First you had to dial an 800-number then there was a pin and then you dialed the phone number you wanted to call. I think calls got billed to my parents.
I had a SPRINT account. I like to think that because of the Grateful Dead shows, it's burned into my muscle memory still, over 40 years later. 454 855 3267 1778. I paid the bill myself, because it was just so damn convenient to be able to roll up to ANY payphone, and without needing to shoot a coke machine or anything, call anyone else.
(I was a phone phreak in high school, so I was very familiar with the technology before going legit.)
posted by mikelieman at 12:03 AM on July 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
I had a SPRINT account. I like to think that because of the Grateful Dead shows, it's burned into my muscle memory still, over 40 years later. 454 855 3267 1778. I paid the bill myself, because it was just so damn convenient to be able to roll up to ANY payphone, and without needing to shoot a coke machine or anything, call anyone else.
(I was a phone phreak in high school, so I was very familiar with the technology before going legit.)
posted by mikelieman at 12:03 AM on July 15, 2023 [4 favorites]
Well, I was a college kid when the iPhone came out, and didn't get my own smartphone until 2012. By then I was working for a company designing mobile games, and that was sort of the beginning of the end for my ability to just exist without being mentally on call all the time. As soon as Facebook took hold of the world, my friends and I sort of stopped getting together because we could go home and hang out online.
Now I'm tethered to work and communicating with other on demand without pause. I mean, hell, I just set aside my laptop (big internet) with the intent to go to bed, and here I am on my phone (little internet) adding my thoughts to this convo because work conditioned to check my email at 1am just in case. I am unemployed at present.
I'd go back if I could. I would love a dumb phone. I'd love it if notification dots no longer existed. I'd gladly go back to a lot of analog stuff for everyday interactions, leaving smart tech for emergencies only.
I've sort of been online since birth ('88). Never thought I'd turn into a bit of a Luddite.
posted by The Adventure Begins at 1:24 AM on July 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
Now I'm tethered to work and communicating with other on demand without pause. I mean, hell, I just set aside my laptop (big internet) with the intent to go to bed, and here I am on my phone (little internet) adding my thoughts to this convo because work conditioned to check my email at 1am just in case. I am unemployed at present.
I'd go back if I could. I would love a dumb phone. I'd love it if notification dots no longer existed. I'd gladly go back to a lot of analog stuff for everyday interactions, leaving smart tech for emergencies only.
I've sort of been online since birth ('88). Never thought I'd turn into a bit of a Luddite.
posted by The Adventure Begins at 1:24 AM on July 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'd go back if I could. I would love a dumb phone.
Then get one - I did, and I've never looked back. You'd still have your laptop for any online communication that's truly essential (less than you'd think), and no longer be at the constant beck & call of a nagging, tyrannical spy in your pocket.
Assuming you couldn't possibly live without your smartphone is a self-fulfilling prophesy, true only because you've chosen to believe it's true. Yes, you'd have to do without a few petty conveniences, and there'd the same period of withdrawal people suffer when shucking any addiction. But impossible? No.
posted by Paul Slade at 5:01 AM on July 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
Then get one - I did, and I've never looked back. You'd still have your laptop for any online communication that's truly essential (less than you'd think), and no longer be at the constant beck & call of a nagging, tyrannical spy in your pocket.
Assuming you couldn't possibly live without your smartphone is a self-fulfilling prophesy, true only because you've chosen to believe it's true. Yes, you'd have to do without a few petty conveniences, and there'd the same period of withdrawal people suffer when shucking any addiction. But impossible? No.
posted by Paul Slade at 5:01 AM on July 15, 2023 [2 favorites]
Oh yeah phone cards. One weird year I was at a college that had OAN Smartphones for pay phones. I found out by accident (totally accidental misdial) that OAN would accept ANY 10-digit number as a valid calling card. I told everyone and we made free calls all year.
posted by toodleydoodley at 8:51 AM on July 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by toodleydoodley at 8:51 AM on July 15, 2023 [1 favorite]
I remember needing a phone card to call my parents from my dorm room
A lot of international calling was still largely done this way until very recently; I had to use like three layers of phone card to call the US from China in the early aughts.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:23 AM on July 15, 2023
A lot of international calling was still largely done this way until very recently; I had to use like three layers of phone card to call the US from China in the early aughts.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:23 AM on July 15, 2023
I'd go back if I could. I would love a dumb phone.I have a couple of friends who steadfastly choose not to have smart phones or cell phones. They stay in touch with people just fine. They're still active in Facebook using their computers. They still use a lot of email. Even though I still own and use a smartphone they inspired me to just uninstall all social media from my phones and just interact with it through my web browser. I've been pretty happy with the boundaries that I have with my phone since making that change.
Then get one - I did, and I've never looked back.
posted by bl1nk at 11:59 AM on July 15, 2023 [3 favorites]
/every public school teacher in America laughs at the idea of work-life balance 😂
If you count my actual working time, it’s about $11 -12 / hour. Smaller class sizes make a big difference on that account. Support our brave educators!
(And for the love, please don’t listen to Betsy DeVos. Like, ever. K thx bye.)
posted by beckybakeroo at 4:46 PM on July 16, 2023 [4 favorites]
If you count my actual working time, it’s about $11 -12 / hour. Smaller class sizes make a big difference on that account. Support our brave educators!
(And for the love, please don’t listen to Betsy DeVos. Like, ever. K thx bye.)
posted by beckybakeroo at 4:46 PM on July 16, 2023 [4 favorites]
Even though I still own and use a smartphone they inspired me to just uninstall all social media from my phones and just interact with it through my web browser. I've been pretty happy with the boundaries that I have with my phone since making that change.
Same.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:42 PM on July 19, 2023
Same.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:42 PM on July 19, 2023
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I'm like five years younger than these people but my young adulthood was pretty different.
posted by potrzebie at 11:53 PM on July 13, 2023 [2 favorites]