Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By
I watch enough “vintage” movies and television that I find myself thinking about bygone customs and technology a lot — like how writers will contrive to have characters overhear phone messages not meant for them, now that nobody has an answering machine anymore. I thought about it while writing up Grounded, about soda fountains, about the Woolworth’s every town used to have.
Reading Obsolete gave me a few twinges for things I took for granted as a ten-year-old that a ten-year-old today would have to have explained to her: plaster casts; pop quizzes printed on a mimeo or ditto (the purple ink smelled so official!); cursive writing; lickable stamps, not just postage but Green Stamps too. We evolved past these things for good reason, mostly, but it’s a little sad that, in a generation, we’ll have forgotten them. So it’s nice that we’ll have the book, as the culture gets farther and farther from any firsthand experience with boom boxes and non-microwaved popcorn. The use of the word “encyclopedia” is facetious now, but will have the ring of truth in 25 years’ time.
The concept is fab, but the execution is problematic at times; author Anna Jane Grossman tries too hard with the jokey, faux-anthropological tone. The “Girdles” entry is a good example:
Elasticized undergarments that made the wearer look sexy, eliminating the need to diet, exercise, or marry a surgeon. Those who relied heavily on girdles during the day also relied on very dark rooms at night.
It’s the kind of “humor” that’s shoehorned in during a second edit, and the material doesn’t need it. Grossman has a lighter touch elsewhere, and when she’s playing it straight with the occasional dry aside or quotation from an expert (the “Focus Groups” entry does that very well), the prose is perfectly engaging — but it’s as though she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to examine these obsoletoids in depth, or coast on the gimmick. As gimmicks go, the table of contents is a damn good one, but the book is far better when it explains in depth what a given object was, or did, and why it fell from grace (“High-Diving Boards”), instead of passing the buck with a weak punchline (“Singles Bars”).
It’s a great idea for a book, it’s timely, and it will remain timely; Grossman could do an annotated edition every couple of years and not run out of material. I hope she does come out with an updated version or a sequel, and I hope she reins in the clunky jokes, which don’t add much, and adds more supplementary research, which does.
I’ll give it this without reservation: it’s a great gift book. Secret Santas, take note.
Tags: Anna Jane Grossman books S&H Green Stamps unmourned odors of childhood
What IS the deal with cursive writing? I write in cursive on the whiteboard (also becoming obsolete: chalk) and on my students’ papers, and am no longer sure they can read it–not just because my penmanship is bad. When did schools stop teaching cursive, and why?
like how writers will contrive to have characters overhear phone messages not meant for them, now that nobody has an answering machine anymore.
Or even just the audience. Laura Linney has an answering machine in The Savages so we can hear, among other things, a detailed message from her doctor’s office at the beginning of the film. I thought the movie must be set in an earlier decade — sometime before voice mail and HIPAA laws — until they mentioned 9/11. Writers, you have to update those scripts. No excuses.
I don’t know when the schools stopped teaching cursive, but I do know that most of the girls I went to school with, while they learned it, didn’t use it — they took (and passed) notes in fontishly neat print. I think I was the only person in the class who actually “wrote” instead of printing to take notes (and couldn’t understand why everyone else didn’t; it was so much faster), but to write something to a classmate, I printed, because my handwriting was and is a little grandmotherly, and I was embarrassed by it.
I wrote papers in longhand and typed them “up” until halfway through college, and I wrote a significant portion of the TWoP book that way — longhand uses a different set of mental processes that I often find helpful in organizing my thoughts or breaking a block. But the writing itself has gone from grandmotherly to “physician” in the last ten years because I don’t use it as often. I’m going to have to abandon writing holiday cards this year, I think, because even I can’t read what I’ve written half the time.
@Mollie: I wonder if that might become one of those “only in the movies” things that they just decide is part of the internal logic, and persist with, like the tendency of characters to 1) drop by each other’s domiciles instead of just calling, and 2) leave their domiciles’ doors unlocked to facilitate this. I’m thinking of Felicity, a show that seemed to have decided that the rest of the city and its safety concerns just didn’t exist, everyone had keys to each other’s building’s front door, etc.
Cursive — I now pay people for classes in it, they call it calligraphy. I *always* get compliments on my handwriting now. It may be because it is a rare skill.
Girdles – we call those SPANX now.
Wite-Out – I learned to some horror that this is considered one of the most noxious household chemicals. I used to play with it in my dad’s office supply cabinet as a child. Used to paint with it! he had it in at least 5 colors.
I know that most people don’t have answering machines anymore but my mom does and I’m thinking a lot of older people might. My mom has a cell phone but it’s a crap shoot if she decides to check for messages on it.
We actually just bought a new phone with answering “system” (aka, machine….) – we got sick of paying the cable people for *one more thing* they could charge us for. and hike the price on. i know many people don’t even have landlines any more, but i wonder how people with kids do it. if a family only has cell phones, at what age do you need to get the kid a cell, so his little friends can call?
High diving boards are obsolete? When? Why? I must be missing something here.
My mother and all three of my siblings have answering machines. I had one too until a few months ago when I decided to get rid of my home phone service. I think it is a generational thing. Us old folks who still use our home phones and don’t want to pay every month for the phone company’s answering service still use answering machines.
At work, if we don’t check our voice mail often enough, it expires and we have to call in again and get it reinstated. In the meantime, if someone calls, it’ll just ring forever. I gave up getting it redone again when they were snippy with me last time.
White out: now when filling out forms, I’m torn between using white out on the form to save paper, but looking like a dork (and incapable of filling out the form correctly) or printing out a new sheet and filling it out again.
Aw, my Dad still has an answering machine, he’s only 55 (double nickel, as he puts it).
longhand uses a different set of mental processes that I often find helpful in organizing my thoughts or breaking a block. Oh! I find this to be sooo true. Longhand fires different synapses, for sure. I’m getting better at composing while typing, if only out of constant practice, but there are still lots of times when I can’t think through a problem unless it’s through a pen at the end of my mitt.
My own personal handwriting is an unholy hybrid of cursive and print. The upside of this is that it’s hard to forge!
And I still have an answering machine. And that’s not including the voice mail on my work phone (never listened to except on speaker). I never check my cell phone’s messages; People who need to leave me a message only ever call the land line. So: not dead yet, that ‘overhearing messages’ trope.
We’re not yet in the generation beyond cursive writing. I give essay tests to undergraduates, and I see longhand on those — not all of them, but more than just one or two (out of 20 each year). I myself have evolved my own halfway point between cursive and printing for my handwritten items; I flatter myself that it looks stylish but it’s probably just sloppy.
In my experience answering machines (or “systems”) really aren’t obsolete. I suppose I’m one of @avis’s “older people,” but as I look around I see ’em among my colleagues and friends too. Plenty of folks still find a landline the most useful solution (even if they have a cell in addition, perhaps for special situations), and for many of us “look at the device as you walk in and see if it’s flashing” is still a whole lot more convenient than “pull out the cell, open it, check for messages, then put it back if there aren’t any.”
I still have and use an answering machine, and I’m (only) 40. I am just old enough that I didn’t have a cell phone until I was well established in my communications methods. My cell phone is little and in my purse and I only think to check it two or three times a day (unless I’m out of town or expecting a call). The answering machine, on the other hand, sits on the kitchen counter and blinks at me when there’s a message. It requires zero extra effort on my part to see it.
As for handwriting. I was dismayed to hear how many people think that it is an obsolete skill to be able to write quickly and legibly. I’m a geologist, and I have to take notes outside, in all sorts of weather conditions. These note have to be legible enough that I can read them when I get back to the office and may even be part of a collection of legal documents. And I have to write fast enough that I can record a whole range of transient phenomena. There are a lot of outdoor professions that require legible, fluent handwriting. There may be a toughbook or a netbook one day that is as easy to use and reliable as a notebook and pen, but that day is not now.
I’m also confused about the whole high-dive boards going away.
@attica: My handwriting is also a cross between cursive and print.
I was a dorky little kids whose teachers always complimented my on my penmanship. (And I’m not very old!)
re: high-dives — it’s a legal issue, evidently.
I’m pretty sure high-dives went away due to liability issues … insurance, lawsuits, etc.
My fiance and I only have cell phones and our kids’ friends (or their parents, since they are 7 and 8 ) call us. I like it because I have all of their friends’ numbers and I know all of their friends’ parents’ names. It might get more annoying as they get older, but we each have a work cell too. We’re planning to wait to get them their own until they are in high school. (Although, as a middle school/high school teacher, I wish teenagers were banned from them!)
My handwriting has always been awful. I look back on elementary school compositions and it really doesn’t look any different now, so in high school when I was sure I was going to become an engineer, I decided that I’d start printing in engineering print (i.e., all caps, basically). As a junior in high school (so….93-ish), I wrote out one of my English assignments that way and was penalized for it and made to re-write it because it was apparently not legible – which I’m still totally confused about because it was _WAY_ more legible than my normal “cursive,” but it was also a slightly…um…crazy (and not in a good/fun way)…teacher, so maybe she was just weird.
I think it’s silly not to _teach_ kids how to write in cursive though, even if we don’t use it much anymore!
I love my answering machine for call screening. Sure, I have caller ID, but that requires lifting my happy ass off the couch to go look at the phone receiver. With caller ID, I just sit and listen and if it’s someone I want to talk to, I sprint to pick it up. I think the sprint is better for me cardiovascularly too. ;-)
High dives are going the way of the dodo? Oh, I feel like I’ve just been sucker punched. Conquering the high-dive was a childhood milestone for me…
Climbing the stairs while my brother’s taunts echoed in my ears… I can still feel the wet, pebbly concrete under my feet, smell the overly-chlorinated water of the officer’s club pool…
And when I reached the top, the seemingly endless walk to edge … of nothing. The sounds, the smells fading away till all I could hear was my heart steadily beating out “jump, jump, jump”. The walk to the edge. The look allllllll the way down to the water where my swimming instructor bobbed up and down, waving encouragingly. The deep breath in… and the 80 years it took to make the 5 second plunge into the deep end. The rush of kicking up, up, up and triumphantly breaking through the surface. That first, sweet gasp of breath.
And then racing up the steps to do it again.
I’m 32 & have an answering machine on my landline. The only people who ever call that number (rather than my cell phone) are telemarketers and my mother, so an answering machine lets me screen calls and means I don’t have to pay for voicemail OR caller ID. Win-win, really.
And, re: high dives: Yes, it’s a legal/liability/insurance issue. I’m kind of surprised any public pools have diving boards at all anymore, really. (And I remember the pool where I learned to swim as a kid had a (non-high) diving board, and a deep end that was only 7 or 8 feet deep. How I managed not to kill–or paralyze–myself is a mystery. They took the board out probably 25 years ago, because it was so dangerous.)
I’m 27, and I still have an answering machine. I know this makes me odd amongst my peers seeing that I still have a landline, but I just don’t trust cell phones to work all the time (and my building has crappy reception.) And I hate voicemail. It’s just so much easier to press play than to have to log in to some annoying system to hear one’s messages.
I also have a regular corded phone on hand just in case the power goes out and the battery on my cell phone dies. Everyone thought I was weird in college for doing this, until the night we had a black out lasting six hours and I was the only one capable of ordering pizza.
I’m gonna be 38 next Wendsday and I have an answering machine–it’s built into the base for my cordless phone. I’m also the last person in the Western Hemisphere who doesn’t have a cell phone. I did for a while but never used it, so why hand over thirty dollars to Sprint every month?
My handwriting is also horrible, but I can write cursive. No one can read it, because of the aforementioned horribleness and the fact that, as a lefty, my hand drags through the ink, but I can do it.
Psh. Wite-Out will be obsolete when we live in a fully paperless society… which we STILL don’t. I’m a public librarian; we’ve got about 5 bottles of the stuff at the reference desk, and ppl are always asking to borrow them.
I still have an answering machine (and a land line, for that matter).
As for cursive, there are more than a dozen Donor’s Choose projects *right now* asking for funds for cursive workbooks. If they’re still teaching it to little kids, I’d argue it’s still in use. (Hey, the Oct. drive may be over, but it’s not too late to vote with your purse to save a skill from obsolescence! ;) )
The passing skills that make me kinda sad are the cool, arcane ones: astronomical navigation (the Naval Academy no longer teaches it), and Morse code. Except… the other day, I noticed a cellphone beeping out the Morse code for SMS when receiving a text. Was some it programmer’s inside joke, or am I just overeducated?
The kids at my pool used to do all these crazy flips and tricks off the board, too — and the boys had a game involving this very complicated system of throwing a hacky-sack while someone else was jumping, and then everyone else ran around…I didn’t understand it, really, but it looked like a diving-board non-drinking variant of beer friz.
Nobody ever got hurt; I tried to do a back dive while I had a brutal sunburn, and when I didn’t arch enough and landed flat on my back in the water, it sucked, but the kinds of Darwin-Award injuries that got the diving boards taken out, no.
Man, I feel OLD now. I just turned 30, and my husband & I have an answering machine. Like MB above, we mostly use it to screen telemarketing calls (and our parents) on the landline. We would happily stop paying for the line, but the way our apartment building is wired, we need it for the DSL. (A day without internet would be our last.)
I remember my first (and last) childhood jump off the high dive vividly… and not in a good way. Even at 8 or 9, I remember thinking, “Don’t people get killed on these things?”
What Rinaldo said, about it being easy to check for the flashing light on the answering machine. Mine also lets out a pretty loud Beep! every few minutes, which drives the Bad Barn Cats crazy. And I don’t think WiteOut will be truly obsolete until all offices are paperless and all writers are perfect: we still go through buckets of the stuff where I work. Now, girdles, there’s an archaelogical item – I haven’t used one since the introduction of pantyhose in the 1960’s. Funny enough, my Mom kept on using the individual stockings on a girdle or garter belt, because if one leg got a runner, she could still mix and match the good stocking with a good survivor from another pair.
My sister and I are both victims of a 3 or 4 year period in which our grade school decided to teach students “Italics” instead of cursive, so we both now have handwriting that looks like very childish. On the other hand, it is very legible even when I’m in a hurry…
A graduate intern here just gave me a music CD to pass on to someone that’s not here today, by the band Belle and Sebastian. I said, “Oh, like the cartoon! I loved that dog!” and she had no idea what I was talking about. Not cool when someone you think of as not that much younger than you makes you feel so old.
I just turned 40, and have the following:
Cordless phone with an answering machine and caller ID in the main room
Corded phone with caller ID in the bedroom
Voicemail on the land line
56K dial-up modem on my circa 1999 desktop computer
2005 Nokia brick cell phone (Tracphone, with the cards instead of a plan, very nice)
I got the answering machine in extemely poor days when I couldn’t afford a phone package with voicemail, and got voicemail when I was less poor in order to get messages while on the computer.
I really should upgrade – a laptop with wifi and no land line at all – but the costs are just intimidating. I also know lots of my contemporaries with broadband and cable and fancy computers, etc., who have answering machines. I think it goes back to college, and getting an answering machine for the dorm room phone, which just felt so adult and modern (and allowed for creative messages to show how terribly clever we were) – I had an answering machine well before my parents did, and in fact they were somewhat disapproving of my having all this frivolous newfangled technology, until they got one themselves.
Also, I always forget to check the voicemail on the land line. I seldom make calls from home, so the beeping dial tone thing is of little use. The blinking lights on the answering machine, however, get noted and dealt with promptly, as do messages on the cell phone. Of course, the cell phone lives in my purse and half the time I can’t get at it in time to answer it, and I’m a musician and have to turn it off frequently during rehearsals and lessons and things and then forget to turn it back on, but general ineptitude is independent of technology.
And hey, who remembers before answering machines were prevalent, and you just accepted that you might not get the person you were calling, and that you might just miss some calls yourself? And that was OK?
Definitely the insurance issues on the diving board question…along the same lines, you will never see a motel pool any deeper than 5′, 5 1/2′ at the most, anymore. My 6’3″ partner complains about it every time we go on vacation.
But nowadays everybody is so safety conscious, especially with kids…I’m not going to get into whether that’s good or bad but it definitely is different from the 80s. Another example that springs to mind…bicycle helmets. When I was a kid you would have been mocked mercilessly for wearing a helmet, now I think they are mandatory.
@Gris, but now they have those cool pens that have the wite out on a strip of plastic, so there’s no reason to use the liquid stuff and get it all over your hands. Do they still make the liquid crap?
Not only do I, at 33, still have and use an answering machine, but I also have, and use, an air popper for popcorn. And my father uses the old “oil in a saucepan” method to make his.
I use the air popper mainly when I am making caramel popcorn. The recipe wouldn’t work with the greasy butter-like substance with which most microwave popcorn is coated. I assume. I haven’t tried it though.
I had NO idea that cursive was in any danger of obsolescence. I can’t imagine being able only to print – although my own handwriting is a fairly mangled-looking print-cursive hybrid. It’s still faster than block-lettering everything.
I keep thinking of the episode of The Simpsons where Bart’s new teacher can’t believe he never learned cursive, and Bart responds with “Well, I do know ‘Hell,’ and ‘Damn,’ and ‘Shi –‘” and then the teacher moves on quickly to something else. Does this mean that future generations won’t get that joke?
My nephew goes to a school that requires all writing (that’s being turned in) to be cursive by second grade. The teacher even writes assignments in cursive on the board. Given that he transferred into that school in the second grade it’s been a bit of an adjustment.
My older sons are in 4th and 5th grade and are expected to use cursive. It’s introduced at the end of 2nd grade with the transition from print (D’Nealian manuscript) to cursive complete around the middle of 3rd grade. Youngest son is in preK and was sad he wouldn’t yet learn “squiggles and loops”. (SE VA public schools)
We have an answering machine, too! MIL was bad for leaving voicemail after voicemail of, “…helloooooo, it’s me….pickup! Are you there? Pickup the phone, please….” and could NOT understand why we were ignoring her. AND dropping VM and caller ID was a money saver–$20 per month or $15 one time for a machine. Of course, now our phone/tv/DSL bundle has added caller ID that displays ON THE TV SCREEN, ~1 second before the phone rings. Crazy.
Middle son asked why it’s called “dial”ing a phone where there are only buttons. THAT made me feel old.
Is this also a US/UK thing? Most people I know in the UK have landlines with answering machines, or some equivalent.
We have a landline, but no machine. We don’t have caller ID or call waiting either. We only have the landline for our home’s security system. We never answer it. We only use our cell phones.
@JenS. I’m a fellow lefty! My hand drags through the ink too. I was never tought any different. But, 1 boy I went to school with who was also a lefty used to write in the strangest way. I bet he has Carpal Tunnel now, from holding his hand so weird all those year.
My handwriting is also a combo of cursive and print.
We have an answering machine, too (though I don’t know anyone else among my peers who does–I’m 37.) I like it because it gives me a way to screen, plus, if I miss it and it goes to the machine, I can still pick it up while they’re recording. I hate voicemail.
I inherited from my husband his family tradition of making popcorn on the stove, and I’ll never go back to microwave. SO delicious.
Think I’m going to win this “youngest with answering machine” contest, at 25.
I haven’t written in cursive in probably 15 years, ever since they quit making us do it in elementary school. To me, print is easier to read, although like many others above I connect the letters. At this point I haven’t written in cursive for so long that I literally can’t, not without thinking about it at least. This was fine except when I got married and changed my name, and couldn’t develop a “new” signature. So now I have a really awful print-cursive one.
But part of the reason I don’t write cursive is that I don’t write much. I type. A lot. And that’s why it really bothers me when a colleague told me that her kid is learning cursive but not keyboarding (yet). I don’t have anything against cursive per se, but surely we can agree that it’s less important than typing these days.
@Jen S and @Tisha_ – Another smudgy lefty here. My printing and cursive are neat (“fontishly neat” as Sars put it, in both cases) and cursive is faster for me, but by writing faster, I smudge more. So any time I save is negated by the fact I can’t read what I’ve written!
What @p jane’s sons are doing in school for writing sounds like what I did at that age (I started kindergarten in 1992 and I’m 22 now), so it’s nice to hear it hasn’t been phased out since I went through it.
My family had an answering machine and then kind of a fakey call-waiting while my grandfather was sick. This was when we had dial-up; the call-waiting only kicked in if we were using the modem, not the telephone. The landline now has its own call-waiting, but no voicemail or answering machine. If a message is that urgent, anyone important knows to call someone’s cell phone.
The only value the answering machine had, really, was whenever my grandfather would call. “Pick up! You know I hate this damn thing!” My grandmother was the “why aren’t you picking up” type. She’s still like that with voicemail, even though I’ve explained to her that I can’t hear the message she’s leaving me until after she’s left it.
Man, that picture of the Wite-Out triggered some serious memories. Rubber cement, specifically. Oh, elementary-school art projects. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.
I’m 30 and still have an old fashioned answering machine. But then I like to keep my home phone around for some reason.
I don’t think I ever really used cursive unless I had to. I used to sign my name in cursive, but I thought Jennifer S. B…… looked pretty bad. So now it is kind of half printed and half cursive. But I can totally tell with my hybrid version of writing why cursive was formed. My sloppy printed letters often look like their cursive counterpart (r, g, s, etc)
I also watch a lot of “vintage” movies and my most missed obsolete custom in film is: actual conversations. Modern movies are all soundbites and one-liners. It’s like the characters aren’t even really talking to each other, they’re just competing for who gets to say the “Show Me the Money!” line in the preview. Most old movies were based off of plays so naturally there was more talk and less action, but it’s shocking sometimes to go from watching She Done Him Wrong where Mae is overwhelming talky (and sharp as a tack while doing so!) or Key Largo where everything out of Edward G. Robinson’s mouth is so unexpected as to almost feeling like a foreign language… to then watch the new Star Trek, for example, in which I anticipated every line of the dialogue before it was said. Action movie scripts are written on mad libs now, I swear. I miss words and conversations and being surprised and challenged in movies.
Also: I miss foolscap sometimes. The pages were so long! The word so funny! We used to do all our spelling tests in elementary school on it because there were just enough lines, if you folded the paper in half lengthwise, to fit all the words. I wonder if it’s still around.
Lefties rule! Raise those inky fists!
My handwriting is the cursive/printy combo. I like it, and it’s pretty readable most of the time. Lucky for me, I’m ambidexterous and can use my mouse with my right hand and take notes with my left. I get A LOT of procrastinating done that way.
Film developing is something that comes to mind as being almost gone. Every pharmacy/drug store in the universe did it, but lately it seems like film processing is becoming a niche industry again thanks to digital cameras. Just recently I cleaned out a box of junk and found a couple rolls of film that I was curious about but couldn’t find a place nearby to develop them [cheaply enough] so I could see what they were. And judging from the rest of the contents of that box, this is probably the best thing.
I’m pretty sure almost NOTHING on this list is completely obsolete…except ditto machines. Ah, ditto machines.
But there’s certainly a high dive (several, actually) at our university, I use white-out all the time (although the tape kind usually–I hate the liquid. But it’s in my drawer!) I still own and use a boom box (for outside, etc.) and non-microwaved popcorn, seriously? SERIOUSLY? I exclusively make real popcorn (and it’s at every store, not a specialty item)…and yes, I write in cursive, although mostly only when I’m writing checks (are those in there too??)
Not to be a jerk, I certainly get the point of how weird obsolescence is, but…really? I think many of these might be obsolete only in a certain tiny subsection of the world.
There’s still a high dive at the pool where I was a lifeguard for many years, and that was a major right of passage. I still remember getting to the top and my older brother yelling up to me “You have to DIVE, it’s a diving board not a jumping board…” and I fell for it. Foolish, foolish 7 year old me.
@Jeanne, I’m all about the back up corded phone. The one I’ve had for many years is a combo corded base/digital answering machine with a secondary cordless handset you plug in anywhere in the house. I bought it about a week before the 2003 blackout, oddly enough, and in the many times I’ve been without power during big storms I’ve always been grateful that I could at least make/get phone calls.
A university with a diving team will have a high dive; we’re talking about recreational pools, I think.
I didn’t write the book, and I don’t have an opinion on most of the items included — if you have a working answering machine, great, enjoy. I own a typewriter; it’s slow as fuck and even louder than that, so I don’t use it much, but sometimes, it’s fun. But I don’t think Grossman’s overarching whatever is that these things have vanished from the face of the earth as of 2009. (“Milkmen,” you could make the argument, but the locavore movement has actually rejuvenated home dairy delivery, or so I read.) I think it’s more that we used to take these technologies for granted as a part of life, or even as cutting-edge, and now many of them are either gone; will be gone in five years; or will only still exist as a minority “preference,” like vinyl, or as vintage decor.
It’s not a value judgment; it just is. I haven’t seen a popcorn-maker since the ’90s, and that was when my mother was boxing hers up to give it to Goodwill.
Ok, I admit that I use a cell phone exclusively as my personal line, although I’d love to get a landline.
@bottomofthe9th: I think you might win for being the youngest CURRENTLY using an answering machine, but I might squeak past you in the youngest to use category. I went to boarding school for high school and at 16, LURVED my answering machine. Especially when the boys tried prank calling. Or when I was mad at my mom.
…So you’re saying you won’t be offering me popcorn when I pop by later for no reason?
I’m 41, and I can write in cursive fairly well, but I usually print neatly when I have to write notes by hand. However, when I have to write essays under a time constraint (such as in law school, and taking the bar exam), I can write in cursive much faster than I can print. I became very interested in calligraphy when I was about 13 or 14, and used a fountain pen during most of my high school years – I think that cemented by cursive skills in my brain pretty solidly.
I have an answering machine, but that’s mainly because it came as part of the base of my cordless phone. Paying the phone company for voice mail seemed pretty stupid, particularly after I moved to using my cell phone for 95% of my calls. I have a corded phone as a backup, but I almost never use it. It’s mainly around as a backup when the power goes out.
@Sars – they’re still “threatening” to dismantle the 3-meter springboard at the municipal pool where I worked because of the insurance issue. When I was young, there were also GIANT metal waterslides that either burned the crap out of you while you were sliding down because they were so hot OR you stubbed your toes on the concrete stability standards. How we managed to not hurt ourselves is beyond me….
Our elementary school teaches D’Nealian handwriting, which is all about cursive–even the print letters are tweaked a little to prepare to connect them all together (the “k” in particular is a real pain).
@my fellow lefties: do any of you remember how awful it was to write with those erasable pens that PaperMate put out in the late ’80’s? The whole side of my hand would be blue, and the homework completely illegible!