Things where you look back and think "that really was a different world"

[StealthPolarBear]

I am only in my early 40s so young and sprightly.
When I was even younger I had a job in a dentists office. Basically sending reminder letters out, printjng the letters, and addressing the envelopes. The dental records didn't have title on them so I asked what I should do. The response was i a woman's husband is also registered at the practice, she's a Mrs.
So I did that. Mrs for those respectable married women, and using my teenage innovation I decided any where I was unsure would be 'Ms'.
I got such a telling off. Apparently people complained as it looked like they were divorced.
There are times when the 90s seem only yesterday, and times like remembering that when they seem to have more in common with the victorian era than the present day!

And people got visibly older.

Plastic (not called cosmetic) surgery was for a few Hollywood stars and was remarkable.

No pillowy, unnaturally smooth faces everywhere and no pressure to look like that for ordinary women.

I mean how on earth are you supposed to pronounce it and what is it short for?

You pronounce it as mizz. Very easy. I’m surprised you’ve never heard it…

@Tippexy

Well to be fair, Ms was used for divorced people, and still is to this day! It’s just that it’s become a little more popular for non-divorced women now too.

I've never heard that. I've always used it to mean a female.

I remember as a child flying unaccompanied home from boarding school with the tail end of a case of bronchitis. The bloke seated next to me got out a pack of cigarettes and I my heart sank because I knew I'd have to spend the flight desperately suppressing coughs because it was terribly rude to cough if the person next to you was smoking, especially if you were a child and he was an adult.

I remember a girl at work in the late 90s telling us she’d discovered something better than Ask Jeeves. Of course we didn’t believe this was possible but she wrote it down for us all so we didn’t forget. I found that post it note with Google written on it not long ago.

I also remember several disastrous situations when people got lost or didn't understand where they were meant to be meeting up which would have been fixed in ten seconds if the participants had had mobiles.

I was at science museum over the summer and seeing some of the exhibits made me realise it was my generation who was the first to have access to home computer and game technology. We had an atari and a sinclair. My children were amused at the games etc I first had as a child (I'm 45). Amazing how far it has come in my lifetime.

Talking to people on trains when you went on a journey.

Going on a train journey and it being really, really exciting as you could just leave your everyday life behind and totally immerse yourself in something new for a while.

Nowadays on trains people don't talk to each other unless they are in a group..

My brother sleeping on the parcel shelf of the car on long trips in his Moses basket
When dvds came out
Smoking in the office
No computers
No mobile phones
Sitting on my friends knee in the back of the car on our way to a football event

Gosh, so many things, and I'm only in my 50s.

I remember when if you needed a cash on a Saturday, when the banks were closed, people used to go into M&S, buy something and pay by cheque. Then take the item for a refund and get the refund paid in cash.....

I was a civil servant in the eighties in the benefits office. If I needed to send a letter it involved me drafting one, having it signed off by my line manager and then taking it upstairs to be typed by the only secretary. It could be three days before it made it downstairs for me to put in the post tray to be franked. Post was taken to the post office once a day so it was highly likely that even a simple letter could take a week to leave the office.

I learned about 9/11 at work as we all had desktops with the internet, I remember walking across the office to a colleague's desk to see what everyone was huddled around looking at.

First email account was in 1989, big tech company, internal use only but it was amazing.

As for Ms, I've been using it since the late 80s and never been divorced. Glad it's more widely used now, hoping that Miss/Mrs will gradually die out.

@Oblomov21

One fountain at school and no one used it. No one was permanently thirsty and sipping from water bottles all the time.

I went to primary school in the 80s and one of my overwhelming memories is being thirsty all the time! The cups of drink with the school lunch were tiny and there was always a queue for the water fountain. I remember my best friend and I walking home and we'd always talk about what drink we were going to have when we got in!

When I was about 20 around 2002 I shared a mobile phone with my boyfriend at the time. We would decide who would have it each day, depending what we were doing. It was only for text messages and calls.

I remember a customers sending their logo by fax when I worked in graphic design and having to try explain to them it wasn’t print quality. This was about 2000 and many didn’t have an email so had to post to me for scanning.

I trained as a mental health nurse in the early 90s. This was when nurse training was apprentice style rather than diploma or degree level.

I trained in one of the old Victorian asylums, where there were nurses homes and staff social clubs!

Student nurses were counted in the staff numbers, we were properly part of the team. Essays and assignments were done by hand and research done with books in the library.

There was a scaring amount of alcohol misuse, people would nip to the social club during their break. On a night shift many would bring a litre of spirits in rather than soft drinks or water.

@Soupsseason

This one makes me feel a little shame faced. You could pay for something on your credit card even if you were upto the limit. They would just swipe it on the doofer with the carbon paper ro take a copy of the card. Saved me many times when my kids were babies & we were skint.

I used to do the same with cheques - as long as you used a cheque guarantee card it wouldn’t bounce when it went through.

I remember about 1980/81 my parents deciding we needed a vhs recorder. This was majorly exciting as nobody we knew had one. There wasn’t a single shop in our medium size city which sold one so we had to take the train to the nearest large city. My dad was a teacher and he said the recorder was a whole months wages!

My sixth form in the late eighties - girls grammar school. Very focussed on getting girls into uni but particularly STEM careers . Totally on board with being able to do any job we pleased . And yet , insisted that the sixth form ( who wore their own clothes) had to wear skirts , no trousers allowed .

Until we got there and campaigned about the ridiculousness of it all . You could have any career you wanted - and most did - just as long as you did it in a skirt . Ludicrous . Possibly where it sowed my hated of skirts , because I've barely worn one since

The internet was advertised as the ‘information superhighway’ in the 90’s I remember seeing billboards at train stations in the late 90’s
And was dial up
College work in the 90’s was all handwritten with the notes up on the overhead projector slides in the class
Females were not allowed to wear trousers either

Mind you my workplace only became computerised in 2015! Before that we were making paper notes and using the paper diary for appointments

Rewatching The Wire at the moment. The first episodes are filmed and set in 2002. All the files in the office are paper files in cardboard dividers, and McNulty is typing up his report on an actual typewriter.

The smoking room at work. Also you were allowed to smoke at your desk after 5pm. Ladies were not allowed to wear trousers to work and tights were compulsory.

Smoking upstairs on buses and in pubs.

My first job was in a video rental shop. I was 14. I’m 35 now. My DC were baffled when I told them

To fit us all in the car my dad made a wooden ledge above the gear stick for me to sit on.