Kids React to Rotary Phones

(YouTube link)

Warning: this will make you feel ancient. Dial phones were replaced by push-button phones when these kids’ parents were children (although that wasn’t universal -remember when we had to pay an extra fee for touchtone service?), so it’s no surprise they don’t know how to use them. But when you hear them try to figure out how to send a text on a rotary phone, it strikes home how different the world they are growing up in really is.

My older daughter found a rotary phone in vendor's mall a few years ago and asked me to show her how it was used. Every step was totally new to her. Then she wanted to buy it and use it! I said no, because we'd then have to get landline service. Would that even work these days? -via Metafilter


Comments (7)

Newest 5
Newest 5 Comments

Landlines are still the right choice in certain areas. We have to have a landline in our neighborhood because the cell service is really bad. It's a well known problem here, not something that's specific to us. We had VOIP for about a month: couldn't make or receive phone calls for hours at a time.
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I have the old ring as my ringtone. Otherwise, I'd never wake up if someone called while I am asleep. Well, my husband takes my phone when I nap, but in the middle of the night, I need to know if there's a family emergency. Any other sound would not pierce my slumber.
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In case anybody is wondering, you don't really need to be able to figure out or understand all the timelines to enjoy the movie. This charting the timelines is just geek timewasting.
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I wouldn't call it 100% timewasting (especially if it was done by one's double while in the period when two versions of that person are in the same timeline oh god I'm a huge geek); it's actually kind of nice to see that someone puzzled it out and found that the whole thing makes sense within the milieu of the film. It could easy have just been mad randomness for the last 20 minutes or so, and it strengthens the film to know it's more rigorous than that.
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Never heard of the movie. Is this like that Inception explanation thing (that I didn't read) that made me think Inception was complicated until I sat down and watched it, and then wondered how anybody could be confused by the plotline?
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