When you get to be my age, you start prefacing boring things you’re about to say with, “When you get to be my age.” Or, “I remember when I was a kid.” Or, “Put on yer hat, dummy, cuz’ I’m about to start spittin’ on ya.” Luckily for you, this isn’t one of those times.
When you get to be around my age, you become aware that a bunch of stuff that was completely central to your life as a kid is now gone forever. And that hurts, man. Because we all want to be relevant. But when my friend’s grandpa, for instance, told me (as he actually did recently) that he used to climb a telephone pole on the road outside his family farm so that he could listen to the classical music he could hear coming out of the transformer box up there, was the first word that popped into my mind, “relevant?”
No. It was “liar.” Who does that old man think he’s kidding?
A. Nobody likes classical music that much.
B. You can’t put your ear to a box on an electrical line and hear music.
C. Nobody who ended up with legs as skinny as that guy could ever climb anything.
D. Who’s ever heard of a “family farm”?
When I’m telling stories about my past, I hate it when young people look at me as if I’m lying — which they do all the time, especially if I happen to be wearing this:
Stupid kids. No respect.
Anyway, one of the things I have trouble getting young people to believe is what “telephones” were like when I was a kid. I used to have that problem, anyway. But now I just send them the video below! (In it, be sure to catch the little girl’s desperate “Keep smiling! swallow right after she’s done holding the receiver into the camera so you can hear the dial tone. What a trooper.)
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