“Insert or swipe?” I ask the cashier.
“Insert,” he answers, and I obediently shove my American Express into the slot. I could have swiped, signed, and returned to my car in the time it takes for the machine to release my chipped credit card, but the system is new and secure and excruciatingly slow.
As we wait for the card to be read, I reminisce about how, in the olden days, credit cards used to be swiped manually. I turn to Gwen and tell her about the carbon copies, imprinting the numbers onto the paper with a satisfying click-swoosh of the machine. The cashier chimes in, lending credibility to another one of Mom’s “when I was your age” stories.
I have many of those stories, and every time I tell one, I feel like it is my generation’s equivalent of “I walked barefoot, twenty miles to and from school every day, uphill. Both ways.”
While they may be cliché, they are true. I am a child of the eighties, and the rate at which technology has advanced since then is astounding. When I tell my kids about the way things used to be, it probably sounds as alien to them as the uphill barefoot scenario sounded to me.
Their generation has never known:
Styrofoam fast food containers
Ashtrays – I used to have a pretty glass bowl that was actually an ashtray. One of the kids asked what the little notches were on the rim of the bowl; they had no idea such items existed.
Perforated edges of printer paper, with all the holes in it
Car windows that roll down manually – Gwen vaguely remembers my old Nissan Sentra, with the odd levers that she had to crank to move the window up and down.
Cassette and VCR tapes – For Mother’s Day 2003 or 2004, Matt had a CD player installed in my minivan. Gwen remembers the old Barney tapes, but James has no recollection of this ancient form of media.
Riding backwards in the back of a station wagon with no seatbelt
Twisting a spiral phone cord around their fingers – I still have the telephone my grandmother gave me when I graduated high school. I used it for three years in college, until the school installed a fancy voicemail system and we had to use university-issued phones.
A roll of film
Signing their name in cursive – Gwen learned it; James didn’t. Sometime between her third grade year and his, Someone Important decided that teaching cursive was not necessary.
*****
The four of us like to play a board game called Wits and Wagers. Each answer is a number, and players wager a guess on that number. Everyone’s answer is shown in numerical order, and then players bet on where the correct answer falls. Some questions are tough for all of us (In feet, how long was the largest whale ever recorded?) and some give Matt and me the advantage (What year did MTV debut?).
1981 is the answer, and we both got it. When it came time to bet on the right year, both kids wisely put their chips on our answers.
We know MTV. Our kids know You Tube.
We know Reagan’s assassination attempt. Our kids know the Paris bombings.
We know Blockbuster’s. Our kids know Netflix.
As Gwen prepares to head to college in the fall, I wonder how different her experience will be from mine. The admissions process has changed, even from when I was an admissions counselor eighteen years ago. Everything is online, from the application to roommate selection to placement exams. But many things will be the same.
She will have a roommate or two, and those young women could becomes friends for life.
She will take notes in class, although she will use a laptop instead of a spiral notebook.
She will do her own laundry, although she can use a flex card to pay instead of scrounging for quarters.
She will explore new interests, and hopefully remember that the legal drinking age is still 21.
She will meet friends in the dining hall for lunch. And when she does, she’ll use her student ID card to pay for the meal. Whether she will insert it or swipe it remains to be seen.
Linking up with Kristi and Corinne for Finish the Sentence Friday. The prompt is “The day I was born,” although I didn’t really use it. I wrote about how things were before my kids were born though, does that count? I’m counting it.
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