What DON'T you miss about the "good ol' days?"

Telephones were attached to walls.

If you missed a TV show you were shit out of luck.

Cucking stools

How hard it was to get cash. Banks had limited hours. ATMs had not been invented. You had to collect "courtesy cards" from various grocery and drug stores so that you could put together a few hundred dollars in an emergency.

Three television channels.

good mens room sex

No treatment for AIDS/HIV, watching my friends die horrible deaths.

Please you could cash a check anyplace back then- even a bad one.

Walking a long distance to the highway call box if your car broke down in the middle of nowhere. I had a lot of junker cars and frequently drove back and forth from LA to Las Vegas. I paid careful attention to the mile markers, just in case.

The Cold War. Being told over and over again that we were on the verge of WW3.

The vast number of social problems of the 1970s and 80s, like the crack epidemic, homeless crisis, teen pregnancy, the soaring crime rate.

On a lighter note, really ugly fashion trends, like shoulder pads. Every time I got a new shirt in high school, the first thing I'd do was find a pair of scissors and cut the pads out.

How high maintenance hair was, regardless of what race you were.

My father's glass top coffee table, it always smelled funny

AT&T's monopoly on phone service

Defrosting the freezer.

Shitty TVs with corny TV shows.

No internet.

Shoddy sound for music in cars and portable devices.

Everyone in the closet at work.

Jackie Gleason. He was never funny.

More phone drama thankfully long dead: worrying about long distance charges

using a typewriter

You had to go to the library to do any kind of research. Check out books or sit in a booth and scroll through microfilm.

The sense that the entire culture was homophobic. Isolated gays, without gay friends, felt especially isolated. But we sought out pro-gay celebs and made it through.

Having your phone on a party line and wanting to make a call.

How hard it was to get information in a hurry. Wanting to know something as simple as the words to a poem, but not being able to remember the title so you could look it up. It would drive you a little crazy, trying to find somebody who could piece together what you were talking about. Or what kind of tires were best for your car, you had to ask the mechanic and hope that he was right.

"Three television channels."

Actually, I kind of miss that. Now there are hundreds of channels and almost all of them are nothing but junk. More channels, more trash, more junk.

R22, there was Bartletts.

Also the index of anthologies. And concordances.

pay toliets

Trying to find your paper time card at work in slots on the wall so you could clock in.

I remember the pay toilets at Murphy's!

smoking EVERYWHERE

people smoking everywhere !!! church, hospitals, at a funerals

Not knowing if a picture even turned out until you get the prints back days later (before the 1hr photo places), and the cost of film/processing.

Lysol Douches

Busy signals when you really wanted to talk to someone.

Having to use the phone to connect the computer to a BBS or the Internet and then having someone else pick up the extension, which pissed them off because of the shrill modem tones and pissed me off because it usually booted me off whatever I was connected to.

Having lousy radio reception and forced to listen to cassette tapes over and over or crappy cuntry music, limited television channels, having to constantly rewind and ff vcr and cassette tapes.

They were good.

They were old.

They were days.

Most shops were closed on Sunday (in the Midwest).

Agree with r15 and r20. I DON'T miss having to "butch it up" in public, remaining quiet when "fag" jokes were told, worrying about being busted and dismissed for being gay (military members in particular), and having to create fictitious girlfriends to mitigate questions about your private life. I could never return to surviving under such conditions today.

And when you got your prints back, they were probably blurry or too dark or have the red eye, etc, etc.

Recently I wanted to send my mom a photo taken of the family back in 1995 with my “deluxe” 35 mm camera but the photo is so fucking blurry that it’s depressing to look at. If we had digital cameras back in 95, we would have tried again until we got a shot that’s perfect. Taking a perfect photo in 2018 is totally taken for granted.

BTW, my dad died in 1999 so this blurry piece of shit will have to suffice. It sucks.

Dress codes in school...Having to walk a mile and a half every day in freezing Long Island weather in a dress

The road atlas and fold up maps on trips. Stopping for directions.

Nuns , and the rulers they armed themselves with in Catholic School

Polio.

my mother's utter, abject obeisance to the Catholic Church

Having to go to the mall to buy that thing that you desperately need and is only sold at the fucking mall which is always packed full of idiots and is totally overpriced. Half a Saturday ruined.

Having to look up numbers and addresses in the phone book.

The impossibility of working from home.

Church every Sunday. And worse, 2 hours of agony listening to LATIN!

If someone was late, not knowing why and not knowing whether it was worth waiting or not. And the reverse, of course: if I got held up, not being able to let them know.

having to do dishes by hand

No real connection to the outside world. Dependent on local radio, local TV and small town newspaper.

Disgusting frozen foods like pizza. Frozen foods are much better today.

You had to go to an ice cream parlor to get decent ice cream.

R50 Yes. And unless you lived in one of a tiny handful of major US cities, forget about artisanal breads and cheeses, interesting salad greens, good-quality charcuterie...there were so many foods you just could not get.

Coal furnaces

Busy signals?

Do I even want to know?

CRT monitors, DOS, floppy disks, dialup modems, VCRs, giant calculators.

Grape jelly, smooth peanut butter, one flavor seltzer. Few choices at grocery stores. People writing checks at registers. You could pull a good coupon game back then. Did not even buy the product and used coupons. No one checked.

White bread.

Travelling 3 hours one way to get to a doctor.

I haven’t waited on line in a bank since the mid 90s

No microwave oven. You cooked it on the stove or in the regular oven.

Listening to the same music over and over again. I only had 3 records - Sonny and Cher, Petula Clark and Three Dog Night.

PAYING for porn!

I mean, it was ghastly!

The problems we had finding a gas station, restaurant, hotel, and public restroom on the road, particularly in long drives in the Midwest.

Not being able to check a hotel's prices or accommodations without actually stopping to ask.

Writing checks

Having to mail bill payments every month

You needed cash for everything. Even precise number of coins for payphones.

Bad shampoo. Like Breck.

Listening to this group constantly hogging the radio in Canada.

I love R65.

Not being able to hail a taxi to take me to Brooklyn from Manhattan.

Banks closed at 3:30 in the afternoon!

It was very difficult to get your own cash, so having even a part time waitering job was very convenient!

Great point R69. In NYC all the banks used to close between 3 or 4 with no weekend hours. Now, many branches will have one dweekay where they have extended hours ('til 6 or 7pm) and are open on weekends until 1pm.

Powdered toothpaste. Gummy and messy to use.

And 50-100 years from now people will say "Remember when cars couldn't fly?" Or "Can you imagine people actually stared at screens all day and manually typed out words on those weird keyboard things?"

People may also be saying remember when we could outside every day in the summer and not worry about smog, and unbearable heat?

R24, that's what I'm saying. If you were out somewhere with friends and trying to remember something, all you could do was argue and discuss it among yourselves until you got back home and hauled out the giant Bartlett's, or the World Book, or the English lit anthology you still had from school.

That's one thing I like about smartphones. Just type in whatever weird, random fragment that passes through my brain and poof! Mystery solved!

could go....

R70 bank branches here are open til 6PM. While I don't actually need an awful lot of transactions requiring access to a human rather than an ATM, I am still a bit surprised by that as an old geezer since I'm used to three or four myself.

Not long ago I went to Bank of America where I have two credit card accounts, but no actual bank account. I paid one using a $20 bill to get change, including coins back, where I had to show ID in order to process the transaction. When I told the greeter guy who was floating around that I objected to that, he snarled that I should have used the ATM!

Carbon paper and White Out

R65 Don’t forget that bad shampoo came in glass bottles.

Health care providers not wearing gloves. I distinctly remember going to the dentist when young and the hygienist and dentist putting their bare fingers in my mouth.

Pop tops

Typewriters

Making sure you brought enough flash cubes for your instamatic.

I never minded pantyhose. I was on my feet from 8-16 hours a day and support pantyhose was helpful. I even wore it under my pants/jeans every day in winter. I live in NYC and walked a lot so they helped keep my legs warm.

Singing gobbledegook because no one printed lyrics to their songs at all. Then some bands started printing lyrics but only if you bought the album.

Funny, but some of the things mentioned are things that are still part of my life. I still wash my dishes by hand, and have to defrost my freezer (soon). I never wore suits to work, but always wore long-sleeved shirts and ties, and oddly enough, at the time, it didn't bother me at all. Now I'm in agony if I have to wear a tie. I still stand in line at the bank about every other week or so: the ATMs always dispense 20s, so I have a teller break them into smaller bills. At least my bank is open for a half day on Saturday.

For me, it was the lack of air-conditioning at home. My brother and I shared a bedroom on the second floor of our house, and we had to keep our windows open, while a whole-house fan mounted in a window in the next room pulled air in over us. We'd always position our beds right under our window during the summer, and we'd just lie on top of our beds in our underwear, allow the night air to flow over us as we lie there, sweating.

Bad coffee everywhere.

Perms on women.

Crappy AM radio.

I don't miss resistance to recycling. When I was in college in the 80s, friends and I shared a big, old house. We recycled aluminum, bi-metal cans, glass and newspaper. Sorting and storing all that crap until we had enough to justify driving to the recycling center was a pain. Now we have curbside recycling.

Hell, even 15 years ago, grocery checkers still got flustered when I handed them reusable grocery bags. I don't miss that at all.

Pen pals. Remember pen pals?

Rotary phones - especially those stupid yellow ones stuck to the wall in the kitchen.

Dymo.

(and the tape was so expensive)

Cassettes.

Good Morning America.

Parents, grandparents and even teachers could hit children with impunity.

As a woman, pretty much everything about life prior to the mid-60s (not that I was alive then, but I certainly know better than to be nostalgic about that time).

R91, what have you replaced DYMO with?

P-touch and the like (I think Dymo makes one as well).

I never DYMOed. Thanks, r97.

[quote][R91], what have you replaced DYMO with?

I bought something like @R97, but could never figure out how to use it.

R76 - you're complaining that Bank of America asked for ID to process a transaction? What am I missing?

I don't miss when listening to an album having to get up to turn over the album to listen to the other side.

Can’t imagine driving without gps or studying without wikipedia..

Having to remember phone numbers.

Smoking, people smoked everywhere.

Those ugly computers

[quote]Actually, I kind of miss that. Now there are hundreds of channels and almost all of them are nothing but junk. More channels, more trash, more junk.

Sure, there’s a lot of junk, but there’s a lot of great shows. And movies on demand.

[quote]Those ugly computers

Are you American? I thought Americans say "Ugly ass computers".

Portable music was a Walkman the size of a brick that could play only what music you carried on a cassette or later CD. Making a playlist required hours of work. Now, I can access millions of songs from my watch.

Cutting and pasting text was done with scissors and tape.

I hated 8 tracks. If you liked a song you'd HAVE TO listen to three songs before you could hear it again. We had 8 track players in several of our cars. And you couldn't play your mixtapes in them either. They were a pain.

Being horny all the time.

Sodomy laws

[quote]Having to remember phone numbers.

I quite liked that.

I remember I had to pay the phone company extra, monthly, for a better number....and even that wasn't great.

I'm not on social media. I wash dishes by hand (although I do have a dishwasher). I don't have air conditioning. I don't own a TV. I've never owned a car. I've never owned a microwave. I walk everywhere and take public transportation. I do my own cooking. I buy fruit and vegetables at the farmers market. Cheese at the cheese shop. Bread at the bread shop. Meat and poultry mostly from the butcher. I never ever buy frozen food. I dress nicely everyday and would never think of looking like slob out in public. I have a 6 year old Iphone but mostly use my land line. I do my banking at the bank not on line. I have a debit card but no credit card. I buy my clothes and things in shops in my town...not on line.. I think the last time I set foot in a mall is around 8 years ago just to look around. I haven't eaten at a fast food chain in maybe 10 years.

[quote]Powdered toothpaste. Gummy and messy to use.

That was called "tooth powder." It was not toothpaste.

Taking notes on cuneiform tablets.

I, too, still have to wash dishes by hand. I don't own a microwave (don't see the need and don't have the counter space), but at least my freezer defrosts itself.

I don't miss single-blades razors, styptic pencils and bits of kleenex stuck to your face.

I don't even own a razor. I get my beard trimmed once a week at the barber for 5 euro.

What about the days before direct deposit, when most people were paid by their employers by check. I remember many Saturday mornings standing in line at the credit union with my sister so she could cash her paycheck.

My hometown of Washington DC being a homicide-riddled dump run by addict and criminal Marion Barry.

I love you r113.

Yes, r114. And were you too lazy to click on the image to see what I was referring to?

R119, I don't miss the homicide-riddled dump aspect, but I do miss DC, then.

Couldn't own my favorite movies. Parents always arguing. Boredom.

Dropping pictures off to be developed

Having to go to the Xerox place.

My sister.

The Wizard of Oz was only shown in TV once a year, and we only had a black-and-white TV.

R127 I remember that! It was always around Easter, at least where I lived, that they would show it. To this day I associate Easter with that movie.

The crappy food. Iceberg lettuce, tasteless pink tomatoes, no out of season fruit. Luncheon meat, Wonder bread, mac 'n' cheese, tuna casserole, etc etc etc.

R129 in the 80s >

Funny excercise programs.

R86, you're making me perspire!

R82 - We still have one at work and you'd be surprised how much we use it for forms. It takes half the time on a typewriter than on a computer. Believe me.

Yeah, R72. We were expressly told 50 YEARS AGO, that everyone would have a flying car. I am here to collect. WHERE"S MY FLYING CAR BITCH?!!?

"Cheese at the cheese shop. Bread at the bread shop."

There are shops that sell only cheese? Shops that sell only bread? Where are they? Because I've never heard of such a thing.

"Grape jelly, smooth peanut butter."

What's so bad about grape jelly and smooth peanut butter?

non self cleaning ovens

Relatives who would "go visiting" an Sundays showing up unexpectedly and staying for hours. Of course we always had other plans of our own but still had to politely stay home and entertain them for as long as they stayed.

R135 Wouldn't Bread be from a Bakery and Cheese be from a Cheesemonger?

Otherwise you would call a Butchers ' A Meat Shop '

Masseur sandals.

[quote]There are shops that sell only cheese? Shops that sell only bread? Where are they? Because I've never heard of such a thing.

I couldn't resist!!!!

Being dragged into the bathroom and force-given a 2-quart enema whenever I was the slightest bit sick. This occurred 3 or 4 times a year until I went away to college at age 18. It hurt and was embarrassing. God I hated that!

In addition to bad shampoo (R65) , the lack of hair products.

R142 is Sybil. Keep the buttonhooks far, far away from her!

R129, where did you grow up? Pink, tasteless tomatoes are far more prevalent now than in the "ol' days."

[quote]There are shops that sell only cheese? Shops that sell only bread? Where are they? Because I've never heard of such a thing.

Not only that, but I buy fish from the fish monger. And wine from a wine shop. Pastry from the pastry shop. Fresh pasta from the pasta shop. None of them are chains... all privately owned.

My town also has specialized butchers: in beef, in poultry, in pork.

I'm in Italy of course.

Good Friday in Canada. Only one tv station on a black and white set - the Passion Play and documentaries on Trappist monks and similar edifying subjects.

Also, depending on the men's underwear and swimwear pages in the Eaton's Catalogue to serve my needs.

The childhood ritual of being forced to take a spoon of castor oil.

R147 could always mix it up with the Simpsons-Sears catalog.

(Fast-forward 40 years and it’s Undergear or International Male lol).

Another Canadian vignette that I recall from public school no less -the mandatory verse reading from the King James Version of the Bible at the start of each day. Each kid in the class had to stand up and deliver it over the course of the school year and it just sounded like gibberish to me. We also sang O Canada at the beginning of the school day and God Save the Queen at the end. One of my teachers used to put on her coat to make a quick exit while we were singing.

Needing 50 floppy disks to back up the work computer and having to sit there and change disks one at a time, then getting an error message on the 49th one or discovering it hadn't been pre-formatted.

[quote]There are shops that sell only cheese? Shops that sell only bread? Where are they? Because I've never heard of such a thing.

Ottawa, Canada - Byward market

Cheesemongers of Sherman Oaks. They only sell cheese.

For those of us with grown up jobs, we wear SUITS

Agree, bad food and coffee. People are more sophisticated now.

Making my bed when we had maids who could do it. As an adult I cannot afford a maid to make my bed!

Omg R151 is gonna give me nightmares tonight.

Negro Day for otherwise White-only establishments.

r61 [QUOTE] PAYING for porn!

I mean, it was ghastly!

—Gloria Upson

I've told this one before..with the advent of the home VCR, and mail order services, acquiring pron became a LITTLE easier, but there were plenty of pitfalls (and crooks) out there waiting to catch you out. I found some outfit advertising in Penthouse, they offered three films for $30.00 on one Beta or VHS cassette. So I mail my order, wait it out-you youngins have NO Idea how slow most mail-order businesses were then. Three weeks later and it's here. Or so I thought...my hot all-male porn consisted of three shorts of' ten miutes per..each was of a topless woman eating a banana seductively while a large Dobermann Pinscher looked on... streams of of semen splashed everyw...hehe, more like I scaled the cassette into the bin and put it down to experience. it's funny NOW.

I love it that Dave Hafler was so right..he predicted back in 1980 that in several decades all media would be stored on completely solid-state devices, market forces having rendered such then-nascent technology affordable. I'll croak with several terabytes of ripped CDs and DVDs (the originals selling briskly on eBay), and my priceless LPs-the wonderland that changed the world and has outlasted all challengers to it's throne. How many angels can boogie on the tip of a Shure stylus?

Yes, I reaize that my copies may become unlawful once the originals are sold. I don't share them off-site, so...go bitch someone else out.

My mom still complains about touch-tone cordless phones. Forty years a receptionist and having dealt with plugs and jacks to didgtal PBX machines, and she still trats each new set as a torture device that's got it in for her. The other day, after a lengthly tutorial on the latest Panasonic cordless I installed for her, .."Oh, for the days when I could open the Rolodex, pick up the handset..." 'And a pencil? ', I got in before she could go further. We both had a good laugh. Thank goodness-I'm a good and patient teacher, most people however are cranky and unnapreciative students.

I miss rolodexes, too.

My father worked in a very competitive, client-based business, and he used to tell me how everyone carried their rolodex to the bathroom so that none of their co-workers would have a quick gander and then steal a client from them. The image of a bunch of grown men, in expensive suits, carrying these things to the executive bathroom (they had one!) used to make me laugh.

Not having fire. Our clan was thrilled when we finally got fire in our cave.

r158=Velma Von Tussle

R158 You will never understand this, but it just seemed so normal and appropriate at that time.

I shall compare it to women wearing miserably tight corsets, hoops, boning and painful girdles under their dresses in order to present a lovely figure. When you know no different, how can you long for comfort and practicality that you have never experienced? Today 300 LB women go to Wal-Mart in booty shorts with a crop tube top. They can't imagine another way of life.

There were no social activists in the mainstream of America. Both parties spoke as though "Negroes" were somewhere between six year old children and ponies. No one hated them because they "knew their place." Trust me, there were no black folks walking around cursing whitey in 1965---unless you happened to live in NYC or SFO.

When I asked my mother why they could not swim in the town pool at least once a week, she said that they don't bathe or shower, so all the week's dirt and grime would end up in the pool. And I'm sure that is what her mother told her. Speaking of Granny, who was born in 1897, she actually used the words "darkies" and for the kids "pickaninnies" and not in a nasty way---rather like that was the official accepted name.

But no one, and I mean NO ONE ever said the n word where I lived in the south. I suppose that came later when they "no longer knew their place," after the marches with Dr King and the Birmingham church burnings.

Was it decent or humane? No, it was neither. But, and I realize anyone reading this will hate me, but everyone seemed to get along so well back then. There wasn't the hostility bubbling just under the surface that is ever present today.

I don’t miss all of the rusty and junky cars on the road. Up until the 90s it was common to see a bunch of rust buckets with broken muffler pipes puttering around. I guess emissions standards helped put an end to all that.

[quote]everyone seemed to get along so well back then. There wasn't the hostility bubbling just under the surface that is ever present today.

So, the civil rights movement and To Kill A Mockingbird were just flukes, then?

R163, I'm not disputing the rest of your post, but this analogy (as follows) is not an apt one--

[quote] I shall compare it to women wearing miserably tight corsets, hoops, boning and painful girdles under their dresses in order to present a lovely figure. When you know no different, how can you long for comfort and practicality that you have never experienced? Today 300 LB women go to Wal-Mart in booty shorts with a crop tube top. They can't imagine another way of life.

The kind of women who could afford the corsets, the hoops, the boning, the girdles--most importantly--the maids to help them get into this stuff everyday, the seamstresses and special fabrics and milliners and corsetmakers--had money and some kind of education. They knew that in the preceding generation--because they had newspapers with cartoons of the olden days, illustrations of Jane Austen novels--that the "empire" style was un-corseted (the so-called "Grecian style"). I'll post a photo below.

They knew there were other ways; they thought they were being chic and revolutionary.

Having to get up and walk across the room to turn the record over.

People under 40 probably won't get this, but I actually missed having to watch TV shows when they aired. I love netflix and DVDs, but there was something exciting about anticipating a big TV event, whether it was the Moon Landing, the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan", the final "Mary Tyler Moore Show", the annual "Wizard of Oz" airing, looking forward to it, and knowing that everyone else was also watching the same thing at that exact same moment, and the next day, everyone would be discussing it. Yes, Netflix is much more convenient, but there was a certain magic to watching things live when they aired.

R168, those of us who are under 40 (some, at least), also watched TV in the 1980s and 1990s and remember that.

Aren't there still some shows that you have to wait until next week to see?

No R170. There are not.

Those bygone days when you had to be at home if you were expecting a call. For instance, if you were waiting to hear back from a potential employee, you worried that if you stepped out for a quick bite to eat, you'd miss the call and blow your chances of getting hired.

But the keyboards were fantastic, R104!