21st Century Kids Try To Figure Out What A Walkman Is

Watch this, and prepare to feel very old:

On the bright side, these kids will be able to keep in shape getting off of everyone’s lawn.

FILED UNDER: Humor, Science & Technology
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. Ben says:

    Another thing that made me feel old … I was doing an alphabet puzzle with my son, and the picture for N was a newspaper. He asked me what a newspaper was and I actually found it hard to explain it to him. He asked me if I had one, and I had to admit that I hadn’t bought a physical newspaper in about 10 years.

  2. Franklin says:

    I don’t know what my kid was reading but he just asked me two days ago in the car what a cassette deck was. So this is relevant.

    Also recently, I had to explain why a symbol for a phone looked like it did.

  3. Bennett says:

    I am only 30 but I still do the motion for cranking a window down manually. i wonder what the motion will be when there are only power windows left in this world.

  4. DrDaveT says:

    My wife recently tried to explain to a kid why you ‘dial’ a telephone. She was met with stark disbelief that phones could ever have worked that way.

  5. Scott says:

    This made me laugh. My 16 year old son wants to get one of those car cassette adaptor inserts that he can plug his iphone into the car’s speaker system. He drives a 98 Civic (only one year younger than he is as he points out often) and it really seems so primitive these days. I thought was the perfect analogy on how technology has changed.

  6. rudderpedals says:

    @Scott: Might suggest your 16 y/o purchase the adapter from somewhere with a good return policy. When they work they’re OK but when they don’t the cable from the cassette stub comes out out an angle that tends to jam the stub in the player…

  7. PJ says:

    The kids are overacting quite a bit.

  8. Nikki says:

    @PJ: They’ve been doing these segments for a long time and the kids are kind of jaded now.

    One of my favorites, where I literally shook my cane at those younguns, is the rotary phone one:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkuirEweZvM

  9. rudderpedals says:

    I think this means it’s time to take the image of the circa-1930 telephone off the panel on my web site that says “Questions? Call me at”. If you’re under 30 and see an image of an old rotary phone on a site do you think old person/can’t handle my issues??