Apparently I'm Officially Old

[Warped9]

I once worked with a younger guy who had an interest in learning about things he understood were from before his time. He'd ply me with questions like, "What are they talking about?" "What does that mean?" "How did that work?" and more. He was quite unlike a lot of younger ones who seem to not give a shit about you might know that they don't or if you're lucky they're barely tolerant of you.

 

[Greg Cox]

I actually got "What's DARK SHADOWS?" from a college-age neighbor last week.

"Peyton Place" and "Fu Manchu" have also drawn blank stares from the younger generation.

Oh, and a young, twentysomething editor once explained to me that I couldn't describe a robot as a "walking erector set" because nobody knew what an "erector set" was anymore. (She'd had to look it up.)

I still don't know what Dark Shadows is. I just know my mom used to love it.

I have no idea what Peyton Place is, and as far as I know a "fu manchu" is a style of goatee.!

For the record, just in case you're interested:

Dark Shadows was a supernatural soap opera involving vampires, witches, and werewolves that was hugely popular back in the late sixties. A remake with Johnny Depp is currently in production.

Peyton Place was a famously scandalous bestseller about small-town sex and secrets that beget a popular movie and tv series (with Mia Farrow!) back in the sixties.

Fu Manchu was an evil Chinese mastermind who first appeared in a series of novels by Sax Rohmer, then starred in umpteen B-movies and serials starring Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, and others. He wore a goatee and mustache in the movies, which is why that's called a "Fu Manchu."

This concludes today's lesson in yesterday's pop culture.

 

[scotpens]

. . . Oh, and a young, twentysomething editor once explained to me that I couldn't describe a robot as a “walking erector set” because nobody knew what an “erector set” was anymore. (She'd had to look it up.)

She probably thought it was a male sexual aid.

. . . I still don't know what Dark Shadows is. I just know my mom used to love it.

I have no idea what Peyton Place is, and as far as I know a “fu manchu” is a style of goatee.

Dark Shadows: Popular daytime soap opera with lots of supernatural stuff.

Peyton Place: Popular prime-time soap opera (the first nighttime soap, in fact) loosely based on the movie and the original novel by Grace Metalious. The first starring vehicle for then-unknown actors Ryan O’Neal and Mia Farrow.

Fu Manchu: Diabolical Oriental — excuse me, Asian — criminal mastermind created by pulp author Sax Rohmer.

EDIT: Oops, Greg Cox beat me to the punch.

I wonder if younger folks today know what we mean when we use expressions like “Hang up the phone” or “You sound like a broken record.”

 

[Greg Cox]

My grandmother, having grown up in the days of radio, always talked about "listening" to the tv. As in, "What are you kids listening to on the tv?"

And, to be honest, I still refer to the computerized indexes at our library as "the card catalog" even though I don't think I've seen an actual card catalog in ages. (A youngish assistant at the library once stared at me blankly when I asked her where "the card catalog" was.)

 

[RoJoHen]

Dark Shadows was a supernatural soap opera involving vampires, witches, and werewolves that was hugely popular back in the late sixties. A remake with Johnny Depp is currently in production.

Yeah, I knew a remake was being produced, but I am so tired of Johnny Depp that I actively avoid learning about his new projects.

This concludes today's lesson in yesterday's pop culture.

Thank you.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Next Greg will instruct you how to dance the Charleston and put on a pair of spats.

 

[RoJoHen]

I actually know the Charleston! And while I don't know what spats are, I have some pretty sweet alligator wingtips!

 

[Anji]

I love it! This has to be the best thread I've read in years! You guys are hysterical.

Okay, the moment I felt old. Getting my first gray hairs shook me a little but when I couldn't remember a name of a TOS episode, that really rocked my world.

It happened on this BBS when I was responding to a question about an episode and I couldn't remember its name. No kidding. Ever since I could remember I could remember TOS episodes by name and season and most of the major guest characters...but then three years ago came the day I couldn't. It was freakin' scary.

And for those of you who watched TOS in it's original run, you're not an Old Timer, you a member of the First Fandom. Someone on the BBS coined the phrase and I use it as my signature. I kinda like it. You guys should use it too. It's something to be proud of.

 

[Greg Cox]

Next Greg will instruct you how to dance the Charleston and put on a pair of spats.

Twenty-three skiddoo!

 

[MikeH92467]

Bill Cosby said he didn't feel old until he noticed a gray pubic hair. I'm another original who saw Star Trek in it's original run, but I didn't see it in color until I went off to college and watched it in reruns.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

My grandmother, having grown up in the days of radio, always talked about "listening" to the tv. As in, "What are you kids listening to on the tv?"

And, to be honest, I still refer to the computerized indexes at our library as "the card catalog" even though I don't think I've seen an actual card catalog in ages. (A youngish assistant at the library once stared at me blankly when I asked her where "the card catalog" was.)

I'm 24; those catalogs were being replaced a couple of years into elementary school for me. I remember being taught all about them in kindergarten. I skipped first grade due to health problems and alleged intelligence levels (they claimed I'm smart but I'd like to see them prove it!) and when I showed up for second grade suddenly we were being shown computers instead.

 

[Vanyel]

I've still got the old Moxy.

 

[Greg Cox]

and when I showed up for second grade suddenly we were being shown computers instead.

Okay, now I really feel old . . . .

When I was in junior high, we spent about a week learning about "computers" by cutting out paper punchcards. And that was as close as I came to a computer during my grade school years.

 

[Vanyel]

I learned computers on a TRS-80. had a printer that was just a glorified typewriter, the kind with the ball and ribbon. A good portion of my life I had to get up from my seat to change the channel, and this was my cable box:

 

[T'Bonz]

Never saw my first "computer" until junior high. We had a terminal and one would type and the results came out on one-inch tape. I wrote a very basic program for extra credit for math class once using that thing.

In my first year of college, they were still using punch cards. One had a big pile of cards, each with one command and God forbid you mix them up.

 

[CaptainStoner]

I learned computers on a TRS-80. had a printer that was just a glorified typewriter, the kind with the ball and ribbon.

That would be a daisy wheel printer. We had a Tandy one also, hooked up to a 1000. I loved the sound of it. It would always end up out of alignment after a few pages.
When I got to middle school, they had Apple II's. I first messed with BASIC before that on a Bally Arcade machine with no way to save programs.
Officially old? I don't think so. I'm in prime time, I guess. But it seems the older we get, the gentler things become. I'm definitely younger than I was in my 20's.

 

[Noname Given]

I teach undergrad college IT courses for a living, now. This has been a change from my previous line of work, which was IT systems administration at damned near every level at some point or other. I'm even teaching C, amazingly.

Now, I know I've been in the game a while. My father got his first business computer in 1979, and I've been touching every piece of hardware and running every piece of software imaginable in the last 32 years.

So it comes out in class that not only am I 3/5 of the cast of Big Bang Theory, I'm an old-school Star Trek fan who thought the 2009 movie was cool.

Now, I'll admit that I'd started thinking about this career shift in part because I started to identify with Captain Pike in the 2009 film. I've commanded the starship -- quite a few, in fact. I've been around a lot of blocks and seen a lot of stuff.

I can't go into management, I'm not temperamentally suited to it. And to be honest, I'm old enough that 24x7x365 availability combined with long, unpredictable hours is tiring. If you really care about your work, after a couple of decades you start to dislike the 2am phone calls and working 48 hours straight during Christmas. You never get rewarded financially, and there's 0.00% recognition. In fact, if you do it well, you find yourself suddenly becoming the go-to guy.

For the first time in over twenty years, there is functionally 0.00% chance that I will get a 2am phone call requiring me to instantly bring my mind full alertness because I must immediately work on The Problem. It's rather hard to wrap my head around the idea that I can sleep a full eight hours every night with no fear that it could be instantly interrupted at any time.

So in part, when the opportunity to teach came around, I sort said to myself, "Captain Pike, it's time for you to go to Starfleet Academy and see if you can turn out some James Kirks."

Now I'm working 45 hours a week, teaching six classes -- every weekday evening and one Saturday morning. I lecture for 1:40, then we break and have lab for 2.5 hours. It's a different class every day. It ranges from Intro to PCs to Linux Systems Administration II. In any given quarter, I teach some kind of Intro to Programming, and I could easily be given Cisco courses. I have as few as seven students and as many as 27.

So it's a butt-load of work, don't get me wrong. I like it and I seem to be good at it. It's actually easier work: still extremely intellectually challenging, though in a different way. There's no stress associated with the brain sweat because there's no one breathing down my neck that the people who sign my paycheck are potentially losing hundreds of thousands of dollars the longer I fail to solve The Problem.

Plus, I know that I get to sleep all night.

As I say, I'm still really adjusting to that whole concept. I've been on-call for literally two decades for whomever I worked. No special occasion nor holiday was spared. I didn't work every Christmas in 20 years, but I worked enough to not remember how many times I did it.

I haven't mentioned it in class, but I think I'm actually going to give the "Captain Pike Explanation" the next time students ask why I went into teaching. I'm starting to get that question a lot.

Anyhow, they're talking Star Trek during lab. These are IT geeks -- lots of SF cross-over there. Star Trek and Doctor Who seem to be the natural entertainment choices of IT wonks. And Star Wars -- with the unanimous opinion that the Prequel Trilogy sucks and that George Lucas has clearly become a hack.

One kid mentioned he'd just watched the entire MacGyver series on Netfix. I told my story about being outside the Paramount lot watching a scene from MacGyver being shot. They were shooting some scene where Richard Dean Anderson walked over to his car and got into it. No lines -- he just walked over to his car and got in. They shot it from a couple of angles, then tore it down and went back to the studio lot.

I mentioned that I lucked into seeing it by virtue of being at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood when a Paramount van pulled up. Staffers were shoving tickets for the taping of an episode of Wings into the hands of anyone who would take them. This was early in the show's first season -- as the show went on, they started selling the tickets.

In point of fact (and much to my daughters' chagrin), you can quite clearly recognize my laughter in the episode. What happened was that the taping of a half-hour sit-com actually takes six to eight hours. This one started at 6pm and didn't finish until after midnight. Multiple takes, flubbed lines, just the usual -- but after a while the studio audience got bored. They started to drift out. As they did so, I moved so as to position myself under one of the studio microphones.

By the end of the taping, the only real audience laughter is mine -- occasionally forced, but genuine-sounding. There is a well-done laugh track dubbed in behind it, but if you know my laugh, it's unmistakable. It apparently jarred the hell out of my daughters when they saw the episode.

If you're really interested, there's this. At this point in the episode, mine is the only real laughter.

So I wound up with a ticket to a taping at Paramount. Naturally I showed up at Paramount several hours early. I hoped to identify things like where the Star Trek offices would have been ... and to be honest, I had in mind attempting to sneak onto the lot.

Much admiration was expressed for my having seen Richard Dean Anderson while wandering the edges of the lot. I didn't realize he was such a big deal to anyone.

Then it starts to hit me: if these kids ever saw MacGyver during its original run, the oldest one would have at best been a pre-teen. Some of them wouldn't even have been born.

My being a fan of original Trek having come up, one kid piped up:

"Oh, that was the one where the ship never moved -- but they'd move the camera to make it seem like it was!"

Now understand: he wasn't dissing the show. He was actually expressing his admiration for the technique of moving a camera around a model to simulate movement.

But this kid had no idea that this was a routine, pre-CGI, pre-motion-control, model-work technique. He'd read somewhere that they did it in Star Trek. He thought it was really cool and innovative of Star Trek.

I had to let that sink in a bit. That's when it really hit me. This kid had not even been alive when non-CGI SF movies were made!

He literally had no idea that this is exactly how all model special effects in every space movie since Forbidden Planet at least had done it.

So I guess I'm officially just that old, now. It's going to take some getting used to ...

Welcome to the club. (And beklieve me when I say, you made the right choice as to getting out of the 'on call IT Guru' situation, as I'm one who knows that life too; and I've been using computers ince my junior high days in 1975 - just before TRS-80's the Apple's hit the scene. my first compuyter access was an HP 2000 mainframe via 110 baud aucustic modem and teletype (CRT monitors were rare and expensive in those days; and limited to computer centers in the next room over from the actual mainframe.)

But yes, rwealize most of your student were actually born about the time TNG hit the syndicated airwaves first run; and TOS is pre-historic; (and I was watching TOS first run in 1969 myself at the age of 6. )

 

[Therin of Andor]

It always hits me when I mention the excitement of the first moon landing and get blank stares from work colleagues whose ages I've never really thought about until that moment.

 

[A beaker full of death]

It's not the age I mind. It's the ignorance of the young. Don't they know they should not only be cognizant of every cultural touchstone that occurred in my heyday, but they should understand that pop culture of my day were better than that of today???

I had a heyday. WTF?
Seemed like when I was a kid life was geared toward those in their 40s. Sometime before I got there a shift happened, and life was suddenly geared at the young 20s. I got skipped somehow.

On-topic, I fully remember writing out programs on punch cards. Seems absurd today.
I think I officially got old when I stopped caring about keeping up, and just started focusing on what works for me.

As a comic book fan, it bugs me when many writers don't understand the earlier characterizations of certain characters, because they were certain types that are no longer seen in the popular culture. For instance, if you don't know what it is to come up poor and Jewish on the lower East side (a la the Bowery Boys), and you've never heard someone refer to "Thoidy-thoid and thoid", how can you possibly write Ben Grimm? Not long ago he called someone "dude." Ugh.

 

[A beaker full of death]

My grandmother, having grown up in the days of radio, always talked about "listening" to the tv. As in, "What are you kids listening to on the tv?"

On 9/11, I was lucky enough to get through to my dad by phone, before the lines all got tied up. After ascertaining that he and my mom hadn't gone downtown that day, I asked if he was watching the event unfold on tv. His response: "I'm hearing it on the radio!"
It was still his first instinct (he was born in 1919).
"Dad," I said. "Go turn on the tv!"