Comment by jjulius
1 day ago
>And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
1 day ago
>And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
Pick-ups and drop-offs? You walked yourself home, used your bike, or took the bus. This getting driven around is most ridiculous.
So many areas in the US are much less walkable and bikeable than they used to be. I say that as someone who bicycle commuted for years. When I rode my bike to school as a kid I dealt with 25-35 mph traffic. The traffic was much lighter, the vehicles were much smaller, the drivers weren't perfect but they were way less distracted, and the shoulders were in better shape.
We can try to raise our kids with values that are consistent with the ones we grew up with. But trying to give them the same conditions because "it's what we did" doesn't always match up with reality.
Is it true that pickup truck drivers often threaten to run over bikes to assert dominance or is that just one of those myths about how crazy America is?
4 replies →
True, but the solution isn't to put another car on the road. Show that it's still possible, be the change and all that.
> How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
With a lot more difficulty.
"I'll be done with marching band practice at 6:30"
"Ok, I'll come get you then"
Works great until your kid's the one that can't join their friends on, say, grabbing dinner after band practice, because they have no way of telling you "hey, change of plans".
If your kid can only participate in things that are planned well in advance, your kid is going to be missing out on ~80% of gatherings. Because everyone else is in the habit of making spontaneous plans, made possible by interconnectivity.
Are we talking about 8 year olds, or 15 year olds?
I think it's fine to give your 8th grader a flip phone. A third grader isn't "grabbing dinner after band practice".
For sports practice, I'd just take the sports bus home; the 30-60 minutes between the end of practice and the time the bus left was perfect for a little quiet reading or homework.
For band practice, I'd call my parents from the office phone, or plan to get a ride home from an older student who lived nearby, or just accept that I might miss out on something when mom picked me up at 6:30 and that's ok.
You can just borrow a phone
Pre-arranged times. Be there or else.
Payphones.
Time still exists. Payphones not so much.
And: payphones were ubiquitous. Car parks, bus stops, restaurants, bars, other businesses, random street corners, airports, bus depots, train stations. Probably several at a given high school at different locations. So long as you had loose change they were a reliable option. These started to disappear in the late 1990s, though support continued generally through the late aughts, and in certain locales (e.g., NYC) through the late 2010s.
There's some interesting technological anthropology in The Paper Chase, a film set at Harvard Law School in the early 1970s (released 1973), there is a payphone on the dorm floor, and it is the only phone available. That and a number of other elements date the film in ways that other set-dressing (costumes, architecture, cars) don't convey as emphatically.
We used to use payphones and call collect, then say a quick message when the collect service asked for your name.
"Who is calling?" "Hi mom practice is over come pick me up!"
Ah, beautiful times. I remember that me and my friend abused Orange's feature to send voicemail messages directly to the voicemail inbox, without calling the other person at all. Since it was billed by the second, if you spoke very fast, it became much cheaper than SMS.
The issue isn't that it couldn't be done without technology. The problem is when everyone else has moved on to the technology based solution (mobile phones) if you don't you're just out of luck.
We used landlines of course, and it was an utter pain in the behind.
There was no way of letting anyone know that you were running late once they were already underway to pick you up.