As a former teacher, I can tell you that the goal is to always hype up and encourage your students to reach their goals and be their best selves. As a former student, I can also tell you that not every teacher is like this. Unfortunately, there are a handful of teachers out there that use their position of authority to make them feel like they have power. I've seen it happen firsthand, and it's awful.
Sometimes, the people who we depend on for our growth are also the people who hurt our confidence the most. Here are a few examples from former students, who discuss the worst things a teacher could ever say to a growing kid.
U/f1rebird1523 asked: What's the worst thing a teacher has said/done to destroy your self-confidence?
It’s insane how full-grown adults can get away with abusing children while getting paid to do it.
Even the other kids knew this was messed up.
I watched this happen to my friend in 7th grade. It was social studies class and my friend was one of those students where the common core curriculum was horribly suited for the way he learned.
One day he asked me if he could borrow a red pen (the teacher was too lazy to grade the papers herself so she'd have us do it at the start of every class)
The teacher caught on to it and literally yelled to me "don't you dare give him that pen." And proceeded to chew him out saying that he was a sad excuse because he was too lazy to remember a simple pen, called him worthless, and told him that he'll go nowhere in life because he can't keep track of simple things.
She spent the first half of the class continuously belittling him to the point where students were asking her to stop. Despite the fact that half the class reported this terrible treatment, she was not punished.
Way to permanently damage a child.
bad teacher fighting GIFGiphyI had a Dutch teacher that used to pick on me always. Once before a presentation she told me that no matter how good my presentation was she wasnt going to give me a grade higher than a 5. I ended up almost having a panic attack in front of the class, told her to go f*ck herself and stormed out of the classroom. Got a 4 eventually.
This is so unbelievably petty.
I was nominated for a place in the Gifted and Talented program at my school. I was 10 or 11, and had precious little that I was proud of, but I could write like nobody's business. I was nominated for writing and was promised that I would not be tested on mathematics (worst subject then and now).
The teacher giving me the exam had a beef with my mom, and presented me with the mathematics test. I told her that I'd been told I didn't need to take it. She said it wouldn't count, just to do it. I did.
I don't remember much else between that moment and sitting in front of the panel, between my parents, silently crying and trying not to make eye contact as I was told I'd done so wretchedly on the mathematics portion of the test, which I wasn't supposed to take, that they were considering pulling me back a grade, and that the nomination had been a horrible mistake and should never have been made in the first place because the Gifted and Talented program was for "students of an outstanding nature and SkepticLinguist just didn't meet our expectations in mathematics." Did I also mention that the teacher who gave me the test was on the panel?
Saw that teacher later on, and she always gave me the smuggest smile before she flounced away. I was kind to her, as that was really all I had going for me at the time, but that messed me up for years, and still keeps me awake at night some times.
Jokes on her, though, I'm a published author now.
Sometimes these things happen in the high school and college world as well, and can be equally traumatic.
What happened to constructive criticism?
I'm an architecture student and in my design class we'd usually have a panel of guest professors to critique on our projects. In one of them a professor just outright said "your design is boring" and that was it, no other comments or suggestions for improvement. I think another panel member noticed and quickly added in a constructive comment to save it. But that moment still hit me and I've lost a lot of confidence in my designs since then.
Why would you assume that?
mean girls no food in class GIFGiphyWhen I was in high school I had this English teacher that was basically a washed up mean girl in her 50s.
She gave us an assignment about our goals and where we wanted to go after highschool. I wrote about my interest in music. She shot it down and told me that it would never happen, I would be lucky to get a job as a fast food shift worker.
I remember some other time I was casually talking to her and she asked where I lived for some reason. I described it to her and she got all confused, then asked me if if I lived in an actual house. She said she was surprised I lived in a house because she assumed I lived in an apartment or trailer or something.
This is a mess all around.
My mum would not allow a PC in the house, she saw them as the devils devices. (She’s very old fashioned and a bit mad if I'm honest) She was convinced that no high school in the world could demand an essay written on a PC.
One of my teachers asked for an essay and said it needed to be written on a PC and printed out. I tried to convince my mum but she was having none of it. She told me to tell him we couldn't afford one. I straight up did not want to say that because it was a lie and I knew the teacher wouldn't buy it and I knew that regardless, I would be bullied for being poor. I was already being bullied pretty bad at the time due to not having expensive trainers and clothes, so I wanted to avoid adding to the list.
I wrote the essay by hand, in the best possible handwriting, stapled the pages in order like a little book and put it in a little plastic thingy. I did my best.
Teacher ripped it up in front of the whole class and threw it in the bin. He refused to beleive there was a household in the world that didn't own a computer and yelled at me for being a lazy little smart a**. He compared the essay (which he did not read) to a dish rag. The class actually went silent and the bullies actually eased up a bit which I did not expect.
I returned home miserable and angry, told mum what happened. She still refused to allow a PC but conned someone else's mum to let me use theirs. The last was so nice to me and I could tell she felt sorry for me. Mum called her up and said "we are too poor for a PC can my daughter use yours?"
IF WE COULDN'T AFFORD IT I would have been ok with it. But we could. We could have got a second hand ancient little thing with just Word on it. It was just lies and that still irritates the f*ck out of me. And I hate to think what that a**hole teacher put other students in not-so-great circumstances through. More than anything I hate that there are people walking around that thought it was ok to make someone's life miserable because they were (as far as they could tell) too poor to have nice things.
But more than anything, middle school seems like the worst spot for kids getting bullied by teachers. Here are some of the worst cases.
That’s the worst attempt at “motivating” I’ve ever seen.
Oof. Okay. Middle school seems to be universally bad for everyone but my older sister died the same year middle school started for me. Dealing with grief and undiagnosed ADHD + dyscalculia meant I was not a good student. People were decent that first year, but by the new school year and approximately 1-2 years after my sister's death I was being told by one of my teachers that I needed to be over it.
12-13 years old by then, struggling immensely and I can't adequately explain why doing things was hard for me so she just took the bad approach: I needed to stop using my sister's death as an excuse and get my grades up or else I was on the path to repeating 8th grade.
Other teachers were bad there too, with many of them using public humiliation against me having bad grades as an attempt to "motivate" me, but all it did instead was lead me to believe I was a failure.
That one teacher though hurt me so bad. I'm almost 31 now and I am realizing still how much shame I carry over my ADHD, the distrust I have for authority figures, and the fractured confidence I have that I'm capable of doing things. I work full time with a stable job, I have a boss I like working with, and I'm loved and married and have friends, but this still follows me.
That’s not only bullying, but also sexist.
sexist laci green GIFGiphyI was doing poorly in school ~2006 because I was horrifically depressed. My 6th grade teacher took a special interest in "helping" since she knew my sisters so one time she made me stay after class and in a roundabout way accused me of being lazy and said "what will you do if your husband dies? how would you support yourself" and I burst into tears because all of my home issues stemmed from my dad dying from an aneurysm very suddenly the year before.
My grades started drifting even more after that so uh. Thanks Dr. Alexander.
That’s gotta be hard to begin with.
I moved to Germany as a pre-teen, and I didn't speak the language at all upon arrival - had to learn it as I went.
In my second year here, my mother decided to put me in an all-German school. My language skills were still quite shaky, so it was quite difficult. German class was the hardest.
I had this teacher who took a disliking to me for being a foreigner. He would constantly pick on me, and make me repeat things, saying he couldn't understand what I was saying due to my accent.
The cherry on top was when we had an exam, and we had to write an essay on a book we had read in class. I had severely struggled with the book, as it was written in a Berlin dialect - at the time I was barely able to read normal German, let alone a book written in a very heavy dialect. My teacher failed me completely on the exam, saying that I had not understood the task and my spelling and grammar were atrocious. At the time, my mother had a colleague who was a German teacher. She looked over my exam after I had gotten it back and was surprised that he had failed me - I had by no means done brilliantly, but it was still worth a passing grade.
Needless to say, I was devastated and was convinced that my German is terrible and I was no good, and I would never be any good and I simply suck.
Even today I am still a little self-conscious when speaking German, especially in public settings. Which is quite unfortunate, considering that I'm an interpreter...
Why would a child lie about that?
I had a teacher in middle school who would pick on me constantly. One time in the sixth grade there was this math problem and it had this banking term I wasn't familiar with cause you know I was 11 and didn't go to the bank. So I tried to do the problem on context clues and got it wrong.
The next day when she collects the homework she told me how could I get such a simple problem wrong. I tell her I didn't know the meaning of one of the words. She says I'm lying and even if I didn't I should have asked my parents. I told her my parents are immigrants and only my dad can speak English fluently and that he was at work when I wading doing my homework. She says I'm lying again about my mom not knowing too. She berates me some more until I have tears in my eyes.
Overall, as a former elementary school teacher I am getting so angry reading about all of these stories. However, I am of firm belief that if teachers were paid a better wage, we wouldn't end up hiring these kinds of teachers, and see this kind of behavior happening.
Teachers, treat your kids better. They're just small people that don't understand everything yet.
When getting together for dinner with friends, there isn't a more convenient, economical, or (hopefully) fun way to do it than having a potluck.
That way, one person isn't responsible for cooking everything, not to mention cleaning all the dishes afterward.
And everyone can contribute something they love, be it handmade or store-bought.
Of course, the ongoing risk with potluck meals is that one dish proves to be much less popular than others, possibly even going completely untouched all night. Perhaps the only thing worse than a dish going completely untouched is only one person touching it and then warning others to avoid it.
Redditor aquamarinetangerines was eager to hear about the most disgusting dishes people have ever seen or tasted at a potluck, leading them to ask:
"What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever seen someone bring to a potluck?"
Disgusting AND Lazy...
"Has a guy bring in his 'specialty corn'.”
"It was legit canned corn in a crockpot with spices."
"Thing is, he tells us 'ya, my wife took it to her pot luck on Tuesday, they didn’t eat it so I saved it on low in the crockpot and brought it here'.”
"It was Friday."
"Corn was brown."
"Nobody ate it."
"He kept eating it saying it was so good."
"The following Monday his new name at work was Corn Cob Rob."- ComparisonHonest
"She opened a can of tiny shrimp and poured it out, liquid and all, on top of a block of cream cheese."
"That was it. I guess we were supposed to eat it with crackers."- cherrybounce
Happy Fun GIF by Chopt Creative Salad Co.GiphyCheck The Dates...
"My grandmother-in-law."
"Everything she brings."
"The first time was stale cake in a bowl of syrup(?)."
"It was both cake and soup, while also being neither."
"She has meat in her deep freezer older than some of her grandchildren."
"She’s a depression-era cook, so expiration dates don’t apply to medicine, cupboards, or freezers."
"Once she tried to give my daughter (2yo at the time), cough medicine that expire 9 years before she was even born."- dirtandstarsinmyeyes
"We had a potluck today and someone brought some Doritos."
"People started eating them and complaining that they tasted like dirt."
"We looked at the bag and it had a promo for 'Mockingjay part 1'."
"The chips expired in 2014!"
"This was a mixed department pot luck and we haven’t found the person that brought the 9 year old chips."- Chicken_Scented_Fart
Beef In Place Of Walnuts? Makes Perfect Sense...
"Someone made brownies with ground meat in them to a church potluck."
"My vegetarian friend discovered this when she bit into one."
"She was more confused and horrified about their existence than she was upset about eating meat-."
"It was the concept of this abomination itself that was disturbing and baffling."
"I thought she had to be wrong."
"'You haven't had ground beef in years, you don't know what it tastes like anymore, it's probably something else'."
"I tried them."
"It was beef."
"I was disgusted and really, really, really confused."
"Years later, I found out that apparently this was a thing."
"Someone came up with this-- putting beef in brownies-- as a substitute for walnuts for people with nut allergies."
"While this explains it a little, in theory, I'm still confused about why someone would assume that people who can't eat walnuts would prefer to eat ground beef brownies over just regular nut-free brownies."
"My sister reminded me that she was also there for this and she had tried the brownies first, and that they were actually the reason she stopped wanting to come to church."
"'I started doubting the entire establishment', she says."- Unfey
Hungry Pizza GIF by Papa JohnsGiphyHonest Mistake? Or Adventurous Experiment?
"Someone brought Deviled eggs and instead of sprinkling paprika on them they used cinnamon."- TinyWifeKiki
Veering From The Recipe Doesn't Always Pay Off...
“'Homemade fried chicken'.”
"Which translated to ‘chicken that I covered in pancake batter and breadcrumbs and dropped into a frypan until the outside looked cooked'."
"It wasn’t even seasoned."- Tying_pyrope
Not Everyone Likes Things Spicy...
"An apple pie, but they didn't have apple pie spices, like clove, cinnamon, or nutmeg, and said they used taco seasoning by accident and expected people to eat it."
"I, a dumb b*tch who likes to torture themselves tried it, and promptly tossed it into the trash when they looked away."- jirohen
Hot GIF by GIPHY Studios 2018GiphyAt A Restaurant No Less!
"A Korean-American coworker brought homemade kimchi, but she admittedly didn't know how to make it and just 'winged it'."
"It was fermented wrong and was covered in mold, which she didn't seem to understand was bad."
"The vegetables were basically half liquified and it smelled like dumpster juice."
"The thing is...half of the chefs at work had learned to make kimchi correctly and safely since various different kimchis used to be on the menu before she was hired."
"So we all instantly knew it was wrong and unsafe, but no one wanted to tell her."- No_Pear_2326
Cross Contamination...
"At my previous job, I had a coworker that would frequently cook food because it was his 'passion' and he would bring it in to share with everyone."
"On a few occasions, someone would get ill after, but infrequently enough that people wrote it off as a coincidence."
"This coworker goes out on PTO and asks another coworker to feed his 12 cats while he is gone/scoop the litter boxes."
"Unfortunately, it was discovered the coworker was cooking/serving us food in the same pans he was also sometimes using as litter boxes for his bushel of cats."
"When confronted, he stated he thought this was fine because he washed them after."
"We never ate his food again."- Kitten_spawn
Surprise Ingredients Rarely Pay Off...
"Casserole with a side of roaches."
"Not even kidding."
"They crawled out of the bag she brought her dish in."
"I stopped participating in potlucks after that."- CanUFeelItMrKrabs
new york cockroach GIFGiphyYesterday's Delicacies/Today's Atrocities...
"Grandma's Jello salad, made with cottage cheese and celery."- GoatEatingTroll
No two people share the same taste in food, hence why we shouldn't always be hurt or offended if our contribution to a potluck doesn't prove popular.
There's also nothing wrong with choosing to pop by a supermarket instead of preparing something yourself.
As a store-bought lasagna will always go over better than homemade kimchi covered with mold or ground beef brownies...
The way people spend money has always fascinated me.
For many years I waited tables.
I worked in high-end, low-end, and all of the in-betweens.
And what would shock me most (besides all of y'all's BAD behavior) was the waste.
The waste of food, but more importantly the waste of money.
How does someone order a $50 steak, only eat half and toss out the rest?
No doggie bag. No leftover.
It must be nice to have that much coin to toss away.
Redditor StalkSmash wanted to discuss everyone's shopping habits, so they asked:
"What is one thing that you flat out just don’t know how people afford?"
Premium liquor choices always stun me.
When a certain friend can just casually order a $30 martini because of the vodka choice, without blinking, I'm stunned.
Jealous first, then stunned.
Stay Home
Hungry Night Court GIF by LaffGiphy"People who eat exclusively by ordering takeaways or delivery from restaurants. It's mind-bogglingly expensive."
woke_agenda
Secrets
"Secret hidden families. I can barely afford 1."
judgeeveryonesbiznes
"At my last job, a woman told me her (ex)husband had a secret family. She found out when I guess the mortgage company called to ask about some documents for the new house. No idea what he did for work. Wife, two kids, a house, and whatever the bonus family consisted of."
Tomacxo
"My dad did this. He had started a company in another city within the state, as that was where the industry prospects were better. Aaaaaaaand time rolled on past and I guess he missed having family around, just not ours."
luckycaller13
Bad Upkeep
"Eyelash extensions and the upkeep of them."
CollegeFabulous3535
"I got them. They took 2 hours to put on initially and then you have to go back every two weeks to get them filled or you look like you have mange."
"You also have to brush them every single morning or they will point in every direction, and God help you if you have a cold or allergies where your eyes get even slight build-up. You can't just pick any crusty s**t from your eyelashes because the fake ones are glued on and this acts as a stopper so you can't just slide it off your lash."
"I spent so many mornings standing in front of the mirror cleaning and arranging one f**king eyelash at a time. I couldn't deal."
Purple_Chipmunk_
Overpaying
"I still don't know how we afforded daycare. At one point had two kids in daycare for a year before oldest went to kindergarten."
PJ_lyrics
"We have two kids in full-time daycare, the daycare that we go to is slightly below market rate for the area, we're going to pay around 25k this year. Thank God my oldest goes to kindergarten next fall."
"We overpay on our mortgage because we're trying to pay it off quicker, but if we paid the actual loan amount daycare would cost more than our house."
"And let me be clear, my wife and I are the lucky ones. We waited to have a kid until our late 30s, and I was 40 when kid 2 was born. We both have good careers and make good incomes and it's a serious, serious financial stretch for us to be able to afford it, I honestly don't know how other people do it and there's no way I would have been able to afford two kids even 7 or 8 years ago."
topcide
For Fun
Shark Week Ocean GIF by Pudgy PenguinsGiphy"A boat or RV (or both)?! I can barely afford to exist much less spend all this money on recreation."
Korashime
Boats have always been an issue.
Just remember the Titanic.
Upkeep
Face Botox GIF by Montreux ComedyGiphy"Women who keep up with nails, lash extensions, Botox etc. That crap is expensive as f**k!"
GingerMeTimberMate
Up in the Air
Flying Music Video GIFGiphy"First-class airfare... it’s just so overwhelmingly expensive in comparison to regular seats I can’t imagine anyone ever having that amount to spare unless you’re incredibly wealthy."
Fit-Vanilla-3405
International Worth
"International First Class tickets. I'm going to Japan in a month and was thinking of going in style. I got a nice raise and a bit of vacation time saved and wanted to treat myself. Forget it all. $17k was the cheapest I found. Absolutely insane!"
trapNsagan
"Buy economy than wait. They will send emails out to bid on the business and first-class seats that are not sold. Or you can check on the airline's app for seat upgrades closer to the departure date and upgrade cheaper."
brosiedon7
Special Days
"Multiple-family foreign holidays per year. To be clear, I'm not criticizing anyone on this, and I appreciate that if you leave in mainland Europe, it's easier than here (Scotland)."
"I am just genuinely amused/bemused when I see people on their 2/3/4 foreign holiday of the year on social media."
"We went to Portugal last year (Fantastic country, btw). 2 adults 2 kids (the eldest boy was playing in a football tournament), and it was probably £3.5k and that was done cheaply. We don't go into debt for a holiday ever, though."
MelmanCourt
Getting on in Years
"Eldercare. $300 a day is about typical for most states, and it goes up if they need special care (dementia, etc)."
"3/4 of Americans who live to 21 live to 65, of which 2/3 will need long-term care for an average of 3 years. Maybe not all long-term care is nursing level, but some of it is even more expensive -- memory care, etc. Comes out to roughly $150k per person-- and almost double that if you limit it to those who need any at all. Somewhere between a generous down payment and a new house. Who can afford that -- especially after decades not working?"
Opening_Cellist_1093
First-class has always been an intriguing aspect of mine.
But that extra coin can get crazy.
I'll stick to coach.
Reddit user WeirdJawn asked:
"Older Redditors, what do young people get completely wrong about past decades?"
As a young person, I was fascinated with the idea my maternal Grandmother lived through the transition from horses to combustion engine vehicles, the inception of commercial air travel, the creation of the motion picture industry and the invention of television.
But I've lived through vinyl LPs and 45s, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs and digital music players.
If I wanted to see a movie as a kid, I went to a theater—or drive-in—or waited for an often heavily edited version to air on TV. Then cable movie channels were introduced, followed by LP size video disc players, then Betamax and VHS, DVDs, HD and Blu-ray and now?
Digital downloads and streaming services—I haven't been to a theater in years.
GiphyTV
"Up until video rental stores in the early 80's, at school the next day every kid was talking about what was on TV the night before, as every single family was watching tv together every single night."
"With some exceptions, most people watched the same thing as their schoolmates or co-workers, just to be a part of the conversation."
~ Grimjack2
"There's something very isolating about modern media.
"You can be into a TV show, or YouTube series, and nobody else you know has heard of it."
"I'm a fan of aYouTube series—RedLetterMedia—that's pretty popular and very well regarded amongst its fans, and only one of my friends has heard about it.
~ SlashThingy
GiphyUnanswered Questions
"Probably just how often you had to accept that you couldn't find out the answer to something."
"If you had a question you could ask your family, maybe your friends, maybe your teachers, and your last chance was the check the library."
"But if the library didn't have the answer, then you just had to accept that you weren't going to get an answer (or you'd have to hope to come across that answer someday in the future)."
"Now you just ask Google and get 10 answers in just seconds."
~ john_jdm
GiphyOne & Done
"How on-time you had to be for your favorite shows because there was little to no chance you’d see that same episode again until they (hopefully) did re-runs during summer."
"I remember waiting anxiously for the nightly news to be over so I could watch my favorite TV shows."
"Commercial breaks were just mad rushes for the bathroom, or to the kitchen to get something quick to drink."
~ ladyeclectic79
"Once it was done, it was gone."
"The happy tears I cried when they finally released The Stand miniseries on DVD about a decade after airing."
~ Barrys_Fic
"I feel I was in the last generation of this, even though channels were much more prevalent and reruns of everything was the norm."
"I remember rushing off the bus with all my friends because we were absolutely SURE Goku was gonna defeat Frieza this episode. And it was a crap shoot whether or not the driver would be fast enough for us to make it."
"Years later when DVDs started becoming more prevalent, they STILL didn't put shows on collectable media regularly. You couldn't just get an entire season of a show and binge it."
"At most you could find a 'best-of' compilation of five or six of the most popular episodes, and that was only if the show was incredibly popular."
"And what I am describing here was considered 'having it good' compared to older people."
~ McFlyyouBojo
GiphySay Cheese!
"That it was incredibly common to just not have pictures of events or other things we see as important now."
"Not only did we have entire vacations where no pictures were taken, we could go months without a single picture being taken of any member of our family unless it was particularly notable."
"A trip to St Louis? No pictures. A trip to Disneyland? Maybe a picture at the entry gate or one of the souvenir pictures of us with a character."
"A trip to zoo? No pictures. An average day? Forget about it!"
"Frequently, the only pictures taken were at major holidays like Christmas or on someone's birthday."
~ bbbbbthatsfivebees
"I explained that to my kids the other day."
"What if every picture you took cost a dollar?
"And you don’t know if it’s even good until probably weeks later, as long as the photo lab doesn’t f*ck up processing."
"Or your film or pictures don't get lost in the mail going to or from the developer or they don't send you someone else's photos by mistake."
~ beebsaleebs
"You had to plan ahead to take a photo."
"'Did you remember the camera? Did you remember to buy film or flashbulbs?”
~ brazilliandanny
GiphySo Few Options
"It's an exceptional AMOUNT of media to consume now. In the 90s, you had 3-4 super popular channels, and 4-5 low rated channels. They all showed one show at a time."
"Now we have a dozen streaming services with infinite media options."
"It's becoming increasingly difficult to engage in office conversation because so much content is available, people do not have to stray as far from their interest to consume content they want to consume."
~ MemeTeamMarine
Smoking Or Non?
"They understand restaurants had 'smoking sections' and that bars & clubs were filled with cigarette smoke. But I don't think many understood how pervasive smoking was."
"Non-smoking areas or sections didn’t exist before the 1980s. There were ashtrays and people smoking literally EVERYWHERE."
"Jury boxes had ashtrays in front of every juror. Judge smoked, lawyers smoked, the gallery smoked."
"You smoked on planes, trains, busses, taxicabs, and in all transportation centers."
"You smoked at the library, the PTO meetings at schools, the town hall and all city offices. Hell, you could smoke at the courtyard at my High School as a student."
"You smoked in the elevator and on the escalator. The mall. The grocery store. Sports venues. Doctor's offices. Hospitals. Sitting at your desk at work even if you were in a cubicle or open area."
"The movies. The plays, opera, concerts and every other public performance, people smoked."
"A non-smoker would come home often smelling like smoke. One was constantly surrounded by smoke. It was insane."
~ parkerjh
"You literally made ash trays as a grade school art project, that’s how common it was."
~ _Poffertje_
GiphyWhat Choices?
"Probably under estimating how few choices there were."
"Today, it seems like everything imaginable is available in a variety of sizes, delivered to your door over night."
"Catalogs and mail order had 4-6 week delivery."
"Malls were the best thing ever—all the stores in one place, a wide variety of products and sizes and not downtown."
~ 2Loves2loves
"And also just how little people knew they were missing out. If it wasn't on network evening television (Channels 2, 4, 7, 9, and 11), or on a store shelf in your town, or in the Sunday newspaper... it simply didn't exist for you."
"If you had an inkling something existed—say, tin foil that comes in sheets instead of one giant roll—you could go around asking people, if you wanted. But you were more than likely to just get a shrug and, 'Why would you want such a thing?'."
"Let's say you were particularly enterprising, so you dial '0' and ask the operator for the number for corporate headquarters of Reynolds Aluminum Foil, if you knew the city it was in. Because there was no internet, and the only way to find a number was by dialing '0' and speaking to a telephone operator."
"But even if you spoke to someone at Reynolds, they had no way to exchange money for goods at that level, and they probably would just tell you they sell it in the Ohio area, and that would be that."
"You went to the market. They have one brand of pancake mix, and no one had ever heard of anything different, and why would you want a different brand, anyway?"
"Then you go to the hardware store, and they carry one brand of paint, and no one had ever heard of any other brand of paint."
"And it was that way for a long, long time."
~ nOwsL-ACEna-pe2323
GiphyOne For the Road
"How common drinking & driving was."
"Until MADD came along, people did this routinely."
"It's where 'one for the road' originated."
~ HailRoma
"Yes! When my friends and I had our 18th birthdays in late 1979, the thing to do was to celebrate by driving through Beer Barn, where you could literally drive-through to get beer, wine, wine coolers, whatever."
"Then open them up and drive while drinking. At 18. This was in Texas."
"It also was not uncommon for my dad to drive while drinking when he was taking us wherever at night."
"Zero education on why you should not do that."
~ emeraldcity4341
Good & Bad
"I am definitely older (born in 1949 so Baby Boomer)."
"What today's young people don't appreciate is how, growing up, we had to invent our own sources of fun."
"There were no video games (which I enjoy playing), just 3 channels on a black-and-white tv (we didn't get color until 1967), and no real entertainment aimed at kids."
"All we could do is interact with each other and play established games like marbles or maybe an organized sport like Little League baseball."
"There was a baseball diamond, overgrown with weeds, across the street from us, but mostly we played in the woods that surrounded us, climbing trees pretending to be pirates or some such.
"I loved the bookmobiles that would visit my street, and I must have read every biography (all bound in blue covers) in my elementary school library."
"It was a different era with many fewer distractions and much more time for sustained imagination."
"Being a different place and time, we developed different skills for interacting with the world and each other than young people do today."
"Was it better? That's hard to say. We tended to have an insular view of our own little world, while today it is hard to escape what it happening everywhere on Earth."
"We had to wait days for a letter to arrive, and we shared a party phone line with our neighbor's phone. That is a far slower pace than today's instantaneous texting culture. (Yes, I do text.)"
"Some things have been lost while others have been gained. That's the way it always will be. Just wait."
~ BOBauthor
GiphyIn Chilton's article—referenced at the beginning—he stated:
"We [Gen X] will be the last generation to know the world without...
- Cable TV
- Cell Phones
- The internet
- Seat belt laws
- Remote controls for the TV"
What would you add to the list?
