You know you are getting old when:

[kaiser]

You’re getting up there in age when you remember...

Used to spend hours doing just that, those were the days !

 

[MisterCairo]

You know someone who was told to get something out of his father's locked car and given the key and fob, who came back saying he couldn't open the door with the fob - and didn't know the KEY could open the door...

 

[2jakes]

“Those were the Days”

All through junior and senior years in school, I drove a
’55 Chevy Bel-air to school and never thought of locking
the steering wheel or the doors. And not once was anything
stolen.

My uncles were worse.
They never took the keys out of the ignition when they came home.
And never bothered locking the front house door.

Recently I had to change a flat tire on an suv.
I spent more time trying to locate & figure out how to
use the mickey mouse jack and tiny spare tire that
came with it.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

“Those were the Days”

All through junior and senior years in school, I drove a
’55 Chevy Bel-air to school and never thought of locking
the steering wheel or the doors. And not once was anything
stolen.

My uncles were worse.
They never took the keys out of the ignition when they came home.
And never bothered locking the front house door.

Recently I had to change a flat tire on an suv.
I spent more time trying to locate & figure out how to
use the mickey mouse jack and tiny spare tire that
came with it.

My first car was also a '55 red & white 2 door Chevy Bel-air 265 powerglide during 1964--65 while a junior and senior in HS. In my small town I rarely used the key. The '55 would start by just turning the chrome lip surrounding the ignition on the dash (if not turned to lock). Remember..?

 

[p51]

You’re getting up there in age when you remember...

remember when you'd just sit around wondering stuff, knowing you'd never know for sure? I'll never forget one afternoon on a radio station, the DJ asked what kind of car the TV Batmobile was. For 3 hours, they got call after call with "My brother read in a book once..." kinds of answers. Not one, I recall, mentioned the Ford Futura, which was the real car. But then, there wasn't any way to look anything like that up.
Frankly, I don't miss those days as it drove me nuts not knowing something like that, once it came up.

As for the young'un not knowing the key could open a car, that happened to my next-door neighbor recently! They sent their pre-teen kid out to get something out of the truck and the kid kept spinning the keep around, looking for a button. Kid thought I was messing with him when I pointed out where on the door you could use the key.
My wife has a Subaru and the darned car alarm goes off if you try to open it using the key that came with it. You could only open it quietly with the keyless entry. What idiot thought that was a good idea???

 

[tonyb]

remember when you'd just sit around wondering stuff, knowing you'd never know for sure? I'll never forget one afternoon on a radio station, the DJ asked what kind of car the TV Batmobile was. For 3 hours, they got call after call with "My brother read in a book once..." kinds of answers. Not one, I recall, mentioned the Ford Futura, which was the real car. But then, there wasn't any way to look anything like that up.
Frankly, I don't miss those days as it drove me nuts not knowing something like that, once it came up.

As for the young'un not knowing the key could open a car, that happened to my next-door neighbor recently! They sent their pre-teen kid out to get something out of the truck and the kid kept spinning the keep around, looking for a button. Kid thought I was messing with him when I pointed out where on the door you could use the key.
My wife has a Subaru and the darned car alarm goes off if you try to open it using the key that came with it. You could only open it quietly with the keyless entry. What idiot thought that was a good idea???

I think of the barroom debates we had back in the pre-Internet-in-your-pocket days (such as whether a particular player was on a particular team during a particular season), and it occurs to me that while having all this information at our fingertips is a lovely thing in many ways, it has not entirely positive effects on saloon culture. There's something precious in a somewhat intoxicated person passionately arguing a patently false proposition. It can be a thing of real beauty.

 

[p51]

There's something precious in a somewhat intoxicated person passionately arguing a patently false proposition. It can be a thing of real beauty.

Amazingly annoying would be the term I'd use, not 'precious'. I have never suffered fools, even as a kid.

 

[LizzieMaine]

“Those were the Days”

All through junior and senior years in school, I drove a
’55 Chevy Bel-air to school and never thought of locking
the steering wheel or the doors. And not once was anything
stolen

My grandfather's truck *couldn't* be locked. The driver's side door was held closed by a piece of clothesline, and the ignition lock had been replaced with a toggle on the dash.

I routinely leave my keys in the Plodge even today. Nobody's going to steal a 6-volt AM radio, and nobody's going to steal the car because everybody in town knows whose car it is, and even if they did try to steal it, a prospective thief would have a very hard time figuring out how the starter works.

My other car gets robbed a couple times a year. I park it outside in the driveway, and opioid addicts routinely cruise the neighborhood looking for cars with drugs in the glove compartment, or small change to buy drugs. It's better just to leave the car unlocked and let them search, because if it's locked and they're desperate enough they'll smash the glass to get in. Nobody bothers to report these incidents to the police because we all know nothing will be done about them.

 

[tonyb]

Amazingly annoying would be the term I'd use, not 'precious'. I have never suffered fools, even as a kid.

It depends on the matter at hand. There are people who honestly believe things that are demonstrably and unequivocally untrue. Seriously, some people create sincerely held memories of events that never occurred, or leastwise never occurred in a manner substantially resembling those recollections. Elizabeth Loftus has done some fascinating research on this phenomenon and Lawrence Wright has produced compelling writing on it.

I recall an argument of 20 or more years ago wherein a couple of fellows insisted that Slick Watts was on the Seattle Supersonics team during their championship season. "He carried that team on his shoulders!" one of them insisted. They even recalled specific events. And not a word of it can be supported by the historical record. In other words, it was just plain wrong, which doesn't make those guys dishonest. Delusional, maybe, but not dishonest.

 

[Zombie_61]

...Recently I had to change a flat tire on an suv.
I spent more time trying to locate & figure out how to
use the mickey mouse jack and tiny spare tire that
came with it.

Space saver spare tires, space saver jacks. Are people really carrying so much junk around in their trunks that a few square inches are going to make a difference?

 

[Trenchfriend]

I routinely leave my keys in the Plodge even today. Nobody's going to steal a 6-volt AM radio, and nobody's going to steal the car because everybody in town knows whose car it is, and even if they did try to steal it, a prospective thief would have a very hard time figuring out how the starter works.

And probably less want a car, constructed for yesterdays defensive/relaxed driving. A good thing to avoid stealing!

 

[Fading Fast]

“Those were the Days”

All through junior and senior years in school, I drove a
’55 Chevy Bel-air to school and never thought of locking
the steering wheel or the doors. And not once was anything
stolen.

My uncles were worse.
They never took the keys out of the ignition when they came home.
And never bothered locking the front house door.

Recently I had to change a flat tire on an suv.
I spent more time trying to locate & figure out how to
use the mickey mouse jack and tiny spare tire that
came with it.

My dad used to tell the story of a friend (and this story was confirmed by several others) who bought a car in the '50s that had one of those ignitions where you could turn it to "off" or "lock" and take the key out. If in "lock," you needed the key turn it on again, but in "off" you didn't need the key. His friend lost his key shortly after buying the car and never replaced it as he simply used the "off" position. In the several years he owned it, he never locked the doors or ignition and never once had a problem.

What's crazy is the town where this took place - Newbrunswick NJ - was super safe and had almost no crime when my Dad grew up in the '20s and '30s - no one locked their cars or homes - and even through the '40s up until the second half of the '60s, but for that entire time it was poor / working class / with a small middle class / and even smaller wealthy class and was ethnically and racially mixed. People worked and shopped together and then went home to their, mainly and by-natural-occurance (no laws, etc.), segregated neighborhoods.

The poverty and the racial and ethnic mix that, after the '60s, we associate with violent, crime-ridden towns existed in Newbrunswick, but without those problems (it had others), for decades before the late '60s. While it seems to be making a bit of a comeback, Newbrunswick became a crime-ridden, degraded town from the early '70s on. As a young kid, only knowing the broken-down Newbrunswick, I struggled to believe that it was this safe, clean and reasonably prosperous town my dad and grandmother said it had been.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have friends who grew up in Mercer County in the 70s -- lived in Cranbury and New Brunswick, and worked in Trenton -- and they'll sum that period up with one word: drugs. The drug culture destroys everything it touches.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ Maybe that's it. There always was as drug subculture (my dad did charity work for decades and told me there were always drugs and drug addicts in New Brunswick - and elsewhere - well before the sixties, but it was kept hushed up), but I assume you are referencing the incredible increase and, kinda, mainstream acceptance of drugs by, at minimum, the youth cultural from the late sixties on?

 

[Lean'n'mean]

You know you're not getting old when you don't understand half the things mentioned in this thread.

 

[LizzieMaine]

⇧ Maybe that's it. There always was as drug subculture (my dad did charity work for decades and told me there were always drugs and drug addicts in New Brunswick - and elsewhere - well before the sixties, but it was kept hushed up), but I assume you are referencing the incredible increase and, kinda, mainstream acceptance of drugs by, at minimum, the youth cultural from the late sixties on?

Yep.

 

[tonyb]

My experience with drugs (legal and otherwise) and drug users differs from y'all's.

I'm not arguing for drug use, but drug users (former and active) are among the finest people I've had the pleasure of knowing. They are not to be universally demonized. I am confident that if drug use were to end this afternoon we would still be faced with the social ills we attribute to drugs.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've known some drug users who were good and decent people. But they were that way in spite of the drugs, not because of them, just as I've known some drunks who were good people in spite of the fact that their lives were utterly consumed by their habit. I've known -- and, alas, worked for -- people who were total bastards made even more so by their drug use. And I've worked with people who I've seen turned from reliable, efficient workers to thieves by drugs. Even with them, I don't hold the users guilty of anything except falling into a culture that will in the end take more out of them than it will ever give back. I'd like to see the day when all the effort and energy society puts into various forms of intoxication might be channeled into something more constructive.

As I've mentioned before, someone I care about very deeply was very nearly destroyed by an drug considered "innocent" and "mainstream" by modern culture. She survived and recovered, but will carry the emotional scars for the rest of her life. Where before this, I was "yeah, whatever, Mezz Mezzrow was a pretty cool character" on the subject of drug culture, since this happened my views on the topic have become very very, shall we say, Maoist.

 

[Trenchfriend]

 

[tonyb]

Okay, Comrade. I can dig that. I wish for some people I've known for decades on end that they would leave their drug (legal and otherwise) habits behind. A woman I've known for 40 years or more has been a habitual meth user all that time. I suspect she's still with us largely because she snorts rather than shoots. But her illicit drug habit has had a no more deleterious effect on her life than has alcohol on any number of lushes of my acquaintance.

Needles scare me. There is not an irrational fear. Too many old friends -- good friends, people with whom I had real human connection -- are no longer on the other end of the phone on account of overdoses. And too many others have Hep C on account of sharing needles, maybe only once or twice, decades ago.