I was reading through some of my old writings recently and some of the "daily life" irritations I would add to a story to sort of ground a character in realism don't exist anymore. I couldn't decide if I spend time updating my stories, or if I finish it as is as some sort of nostalgia grab.
In one story, the titular character is frustrated with the way the day went. He had corded headphones on and somehow catches the cord on a drawer handle in the kitchen and rips the ear buds out of his ears.
Getting your headphone cord wrapped around a door knob or drawer knob doesn't exist anymore. All the cell phone manufacturers killed dedicated music machines (whether cassette, CD, or MP3) and then killed the 3.5 mm headphone jack. Everything is Bluetooth now.
The new issue is that cordless earbuds fall out of your ears, so you spend a lot of time crawling around on the floor looking for them under furniture.
MP3 killed the CD Player
And of course, the MP3 player solved the problem of portable CD players. They had this anti-skip protection that never worked. They'd have small little memory stashes in the device and give you "Anti-skip Protection" for 3, 5, 10 seconds. This was a big selling point. Basically would spin the CD, buffer about 10 seconds of music in memory, and start playing at that point. Theoretically this would protect you from skipping music for short periods of time, but it mostly just ate your 2 AA batteries very quickly.
And the CD solved the problem of not being able to skip to whatever song you wanted to hear on cassette tapes. (And provided much much better quality of music) No longer did you hear that terrible sound of the tape getting jammed up in the guts of the Walkman and having to spend 10 minutes with a pencil winding the tape back into the cassette.
Writing
I remember learning cursive in second grade as a way to write faster. Average person can write about 8 words per minute (WPM) with cursive.
I remember in 5th grade, having someone come teach us a speed writing style where you essentially eliminated vowels to speed up writing. Your brain was equipped to fill in the missing letters. I can't remember what it was called, but I have to imagine that might have squeeze a couple more words per minute out. I only saw this used once, by a server at Bandanna's when I worked there in 2001.
Other than signing for things, I don't hand write anything. My penmanship was never great to start with, but with 15 years of rust, it's gotten much worse. But why would I? I can type 90 words per minute on a keyboard and something like 30 words per minute on a phone screen.
Phones
The corded phone... or at least the cordless phone you couldn't take more than 50 feet.
I kind of miss it actually. There was something free about not being expected to be on call all the time for anything anyone wanted.
You called someone, you'd have to get the guts up to speak to their parents if they answered. If they didn't answer, you didn't know if they weren't home or just no one heard the phone ring.
And if you really wanted to get ahold of someone, and you were me, you would call their phone every 15 minutes until someone picked up (Sorry Aunt Laura).
I remember when people started getting dedicated phone lines for the internet and cell phones and beepers were becoming popular and there was a real fear that we would run out of numbers in the area code.
And then we used to get two of the thickest books in existence delivered to our house once a year and everyone didn't bat an eye at it. "Yeah, I guess I'll store these 4000 pages worth of phone numbers." The Yellow Pages (businesses) and the White Pages (residential).
You'd flip to the P's for plumbing. Then, instead of getting to read a bunch of ratings and click the phone number to automatically call them, you had to decide based off how large of an ad space the business bought.
Answering Machines and Away Messages
And in the scenarios where you weren't available, you had to leave some message for people.
Answering machines would usually use proprietary small cassette tapes, you'd get something like 45 seconds to record a greeting. You messed up, rewind that tape back and record again.
There was nothing worse than getting your script together for if someone picked up, but then if the answering machine hit, you had 10ish seconds to decide if you duck out or leave a message. And I was the king of leaving terrible, anxious, and unhelpful messages.
Nowadays... sure, there's voicemail. I don't think I've had mine setup for at least five years now. I just let that Google robot talk to you. I hate talking on the phone and I certainly don't want to listen to your voicemail. Just text me.
One of the best things the big tech companies did was create that automatic transcript of the voicemail. I don't have to listen, I can just read, and then text you back.
Similar concept to any Instant Messenger you may have used. You'd just put in your away message where you were going, a little song lyric so people knew you were cool, and you'd come home hours later to messages from a dozen people.
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