Do you remember the pain of having to rewind the video tape before returning it to the rental shop?
My mum got a new dvd player recently. She’s very technology savvy, not like me so! But as we were setting it up my mind travelled back to the days of video player and video cassettes. It was like a fleeting moment of “god do you remember ….” That got me thinking about how my little girl would never know what a video player looked like or what videos were. There is so much old technology gone in the space of only a couple of years combined with other everyday things we took for granted but which are now gone completely. Here’s a quick list of things that our children will never know
- Video Cassette players and videos. These were the coolest thing on the planet for years and remember when you could record your programme from the tv and watch it back later! We all thought it was great, taping corrie and watch it later on, but the rows if someone taped over your favourite programme or even more annoying the tape ran out before your programme was finished taping!! That leads on to the mean lazy people who never rewinded the video you might have rented from the video store, I mean the hassle of having to wait for it all to rewind!! Kids nowadays press one button on the remote and it’s recorded for them.
- House phones – Few and far between these days. And those houses that do still have a phone don’t have the classic ones that you can lift up and slam down if the person is annoying you! How great was it having teenage tiffs with your friends and slamming down the phone!? The bigger bang the better. I still miss that.
- Cassette tapes – I found a box last year in my wardrobe at home, and the sad thing was I couldn’t even play them! They were neatly labeled summer 1995 or college 2001 and I have no idea what songs were on there. I was obsessed with taping of the radio; I was the house D.J for my friends before we would head out. I had everything from old Madonna to Bonnie Tyler! The worst part of recording of the radio was when the D.J decided to talk his way into the song intro; it was like a shouting match at the radio to tell him to zip it! These were fun times though and our children will have no ideas of the struggles to listen to her cassettes especially if the tape got caught or broke…insert major tears! IPods, CDS they have it lucky.
- I miss this next little memory – the old camera. Do you remember the excitement of having to wait a full week in order to get the photos developed? Wonderful if they all came out perfect, but when a lot were blank it was criminal.I still wonder why so many ended up blank and I wasn’t even drinking back the.Do our children even know that big cameras existed, I know my wee lady thinks my phone is my camera! We do have a camera but it lives in the drawer in the kitchen.
- This was is not technology related but deserves a mention. The chimney sweep man – aww! I was thinking about these guys the other day, when I seen my sister had started to lit her stove after the summer. I couldn’t even remember when I seen their dirty little faces and big black sack filled with a million brushes! I remember though you knew Santa Claus would be arriving soon if mammy said the chimney sweep man is coming to clean the chimney for Santa coming. The simple memories!
Thanks to Caroline for writing this. Check out Caroline's Instagram page @eire_mummy
