Things your children may never know about

on Sunday, February 27, 2011

Excerpted from Wired Magazine:

Having to manually unlock a car door.

Remembering someone’s phone number.

Getting lost.

Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.

Using a road atlas to get from A to B.

Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.

Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo.

Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations.

Watching TV when the networks say you should.

The scream of a modem connecting.

The buzz of a dot-matrix printer

Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.

Phone books and Yellow Pages.

Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.

Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.

Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.

Privacy.

Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.

Answering machines.

Pay phones.

Fax machines.

Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.

Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.

Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
Neat handwriting.

Swimming pools with diving boards.

Writing a check.

Looking out the window during a long drive.

Cash.

A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.

Manual car windows.