And with every call you knew someone else could be listening in from another phone in the house. What a nightmare
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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My conversations were short though. "Is Austin home?".
Parents - He went over to Bryan's a few hours ago
"Alright, thank you Sir"
Parent - Make sure he's home for dinner and tell him he has to mow the lawn tomorrow or he's gonna get it
"Yes Sir"
-End call
Imagine making a phone call and knowing it might not be completely private!
Wait until you learn about party lines!
So take the horror of a sibling or parent picking up, and add all the neighbors in your area!
And yes, people absolutely did used to just sit and listen. So just like today!!
that's literally not any different from now, It's just that different people are listening. and they are guaranteed to be listening nowadays.
Thank you for explaining the joke.
gotta ensure that anybody reading truly does understand that they do not have privacy
Yes but ruining the joke that also makes anyone who doesn't understand a part of the joke for the rest of us to point and laugh at.
It was so elegant and you killed it!
You could usually tell though. There would be a tiny click when the other phone was picked up, or the voice on the other end sounded kinda hollow or distant. Mom's bedroom phone had a mute button. You could hold that down, pick up like a ninja.
Well it usually went like this:
Beeep (that's the sound you'd get in the handset, while the other phone would 'Riiing').
Parent picks up phone:
"Hello?"
You:
"Is Lady Butterfly there?"
"Just a sec."
Patent screaming: LADY BUTTERFLY!! PHONE!! (Possible: 'Coming!')
And then everyone waited in total silence until your friend got, panting after a short sprint, to the phone.
Or:
"She's sick/at club/coming home at 18/.."
"Okaythankyougoodbye" hang up.
Thank you for attending my Ted-Pre-War talk.
I can hear this comment.
This is how I remember it. You didn't small talk unless you both had a good relationship with the person and the person wasn't there to come to the phone.
You used to answer the landline just in case it was for you. Very exciting to have a friend call.
I used to excitedly answer in case it was a telemarketer
They would often ask to speak to "the man of the house" and then I would get to say, "Excuse me?? You're speaking with the woman of the house!" After letting them do their pitch I would say some variation of, "Well I'm a child so I'm not allowed to [buy windows, etc]- goodbye."
Something to be said for being in our own worlds at home. The always connected kills the novelty. Now we're just depleted IRL and dread the phone ringing.
I was thinking the other day about playdates. They could show up anywhere in a window of hours and you run to look out the door at every passing car.
Now I text my friends, "running late. You guys doing dinner there or should I plan on feeding him when I get home?" Everything sounds more taxing and manual but you did less, valued what you did, and the pace was slower. I love my instant gratification, ordering products from the couch instead of Saturdays being spent going from retailer to retailer. But it's empty.
Hot take:
Talking to other people’s parents was always easy, they usually judged you for things you could control, whereas your peers (or sometimes your own parents) judged you for things you can’t control.
Sometimes I'd talk to a girl's dad, who was in hindsight just trying to make me uncomfortable for fun. Now that I'm a dad myself, I feel like this was extremely small dick energy that I'm going to avoid. Teenagers are already uncomfortable enough.
The worst was calling to a house you hadn't before. Either new friend or possible new love interest.
"Hi is Amanda there?"
"Whos this?"
"Blah from school"
"Who? Why do you want to talk to Amanda?"
Followed by an interview of sorts to see if you're worthy to talk to Amanda.
“Whos this?”
"Ken Shabby."
Now people don't talk to other people and everyone has social anxiety. Total win.
It was, in fact, not terrifying. What's with the memes, that people are afraid to make phone calls? I'm calling people all the time.
People with social anxiety have won too much ground with self-effacingly relatable memes. It's time we started leaving them voice mails about it 💪🏻
We are trying to reach you about your social anxiety, we’ll call again at a random time.
I'm pretty sure this is detailed in the geneva convention as a crime against humanity.
Welcome to your application for ADHD testing. Watch this video of paint drying for thirty minutes. Your eyes must not leave the screen. If they do, the application starts over. Once you have finished, answer sixty-eight questions that are deeply personal, including several about traumatic memories from childhood. You must submit your application in seven days. Afterward approval, call the office to schedule an appointment. You may not call for 30 days, and the appointment must be made within sixty days. Expect to navigate a complex phone tree that tells you to "listen carefully, as our menu options have changed", and then be on hold for thirty minutes to an hour. The scheduler will then connect, say they can't hear you, and hang up. There are no physical offices to go to in person. Good night and good luck
I know you skipped that paragraph. Go back and read it
I don't think I have anxiety about it, but I do hate the chore of listening to voicemail. The process of cycling through messages one by one is like pulling teeth out with a spoon. Painful, slow, and inefficient. Visual voicemail with text conversion is a real gift, and if the text conversation is crap I can always hit the play button directly and listen to my sister say "umm" forty times in thirty seconds
Voice mail is a lost art, somewhat. I got experience with them from work, and I leave pretty good ones.
I read article, where I learned that kids who grew up when smart phones were a thing, almost never make calls on them.
Because of that, calling or picking up the phone brings a lot of anxiety.
Grew up before smart phones were a thing, and didn't have one until well into adulthood, still have deep-seated anxiety about phone calls.
Same, and I used to call my best friend every evening when I was a kid on our awesome black rotary phone. And worked at a call center at one point...
Hypothesis: people with social anxiety are more likely to be posting online. People without are more likely to be socializing elsewhere.
There seem to be a lot of memes online about how it's so scary to talk to someone or go outside and for me it's not relatable. It's just sad.
That's the thing, you weren't calling to a person, you were calling to a house.
That's why I rather came to their appartment building, shouted my friends name at their window and waited until he appeared in the window.
The drawback was that he might not be home or was sick or something, and I would just return home. But for my brain this was a better alternative than making a phone call
Or you made strict plans if calling outside of allowed hours. My gf and I acted like we were planning D Day.
"What time does your watch say?"
"OK, calling at exactly 10:45. Be there!"
We could snatch that phone off the hook within 1/10th of a ring.
Hmmm. I wonder if part of why we could run around with our friends unsupervised was because our parents had basically done a vibe check on the kids when they'd call us.
I know my parents a couple of times told me I couldn't hang out with someone from school that I know they never met in person (unless they knocked on the door and I didn't know), but they had called me at home before. Of the ones I can remember that I was told not to play with, they all got in some sort of serious trouble later on. One guy wound up with severe burns from huffing gas and smoking a cigarette at the same time. He…was not bright
My sister won't let my nephew hang out with hardly anyone, because she doesn't know the kids or their parents will enough to trust them. She's not alone either. A lot of parents tend to do this. My poor nephew is gonna be super weird because of it (well, that and the 'tism)
My dad tried to prevent me from hanging out with my best friend after he picked me up at the friend's house and happened to see a "disturbing" video playing on MTV. It was "Cuts Like a Knife" by Bryan Adams. It's possible my father was the only human being on earth to ever be disturbed by a fucking Bryan Adams song.
Unless your friend's sister picked up and you were like "hey Jenny!" But then the voice on the other end said "this is Josh", the little brother that still had a high pitched voice and who was now sad about being confused with a girl.
Also, you can't use the dial up AOL because other people in your family want to use the one land line.
asl?
AOL was how we xennials first got on the Internet. AOLIM was a hoot! Stands for America Online. You’d get free internet on a CD in the mail every so often.
Terrifying? No, that's not how I remember it. Mildly awkward at times, though.
Smartphones. Now those I'd describe as terrifying.
Sometimes you dialed the wrong number and somebody totally unexpected would answer.
You just apologized for dialing the wrong number.
I still have several of my childhood friend's numbers stuck in my head.
I use them as passwords sometimes, because they’re taking up mental real estate anyway
I flirted with a waitress once and asked her for her phone number in a rare spasm of ballsiness and she gave it to me. I called and got her dad who said "I don't know who this is but my daughter is 16" -- apparently she gave out her home phone a lot. I was in my mid-30s at the time. I figured she was in her mid-20s but I was way off. I never went back to that restaurant, which was a shame because they had the best sushi in town.
Yeah, now imagine the parents being scared of talking to you! xD
I miss it. I was also one of those weird kids that actually enjoyed/didn't mind talking to the parents so 🤷. I also wish it was socially acceptable to have a phone as a portable PC and not as something that makes me available 24/7... but one should take care of their social links (BABYBABYBABY, inside joke for those who know), I'm just a bit of a hermit/grump, lol.
Or your friend's prepubescent brother answers, and you start talking to him like he's your friend because they sound similar. Then when you realise, you have to awkwardly explain your way out of it and now you've forgotten why you even called your friend in the first place.