My dad told me recently, when he started practicing medicine the old people with heart failures he was treating were often born in the late 1800s, but now those are all dead, and the people he’s treating are more likely to have a birth years that are around 1940-1950. Which is also starting to become uncomfortably close to his own, 1960.
Pro Tip for GenXer’s: There is a point in life when you need to pick a Doctor that you like enough to die on. That will be the doctor that will take you through the last years of your life. And treat all those little miserable ailments like high blood pressure or urinary issues. Long term medical care, while it’s often something that might not kill you outright, It will demand a lot of monitoring and medication to treat.
A few years ago, I started a sentence in my class with “When I was born”. A student instantly chimed in and said “What in the 19’s?” And I thought in my head, of course you idiot, everybody is born in the 19’s. It still haunts me.
I mean, tbf that was admittedly last millennium.
Over a quarter century ago!
God I feel old.
I have a backpack that’s over a quarter of a century old. Which I got new, and have been using actively for that time. Great fucking backpack.
Omg. You just made me realize MY backpack is a quarter of a century old. Just out of curiosity, is it a jansport? I wonder if they still “make 'em like they used to” or if they’ve fallen prey to enshittification like everything else…
It’s a Hedgren, a Belgian brand, but my mom got it for me in the '90s here in Finland. She said she had asked for something which wouldn’t need replacing the following year.
Cost like 500 marks then, which would be roughly 140€ in 2024, accounting for inflation.
So all in all pretty good value. Like a fiver per year. Well, discounting some small repairs I had done on it in the recent years, as there was finally a bit of wear, so I got ahead of it and patched it. I also changed the straps some years ago, when the backpack was like 25. (Now it’s ~30, I don’t recall the exact year I got it.)
I checked out Hedgren store, but no idea if their products are quality anymore either, what with the late stage capitalism and all.
edit 90’s -> '90s
in the ’90s* here in Finland
I can see this is important to you from your username. I’ll edit the comment.
I’m Gen-X, 51, and this doesn’t sting too much…so like whatever. I do feel for Millenials and the elder Gen-Z though.
Imagine being Gen-Z out to buy some beer, you pull out your ID, the cashier barely glances at it and runs your credit card. You smugly say, “I guess you don’t really check ID since you didn’t really look at the date.” The cashier responds, “I did. I saw the nineteen.” Ooooff.
What a strange and dumb question.
Or, you know, not real.
This is a perfectly acceptable question in a science course. Just because you don’t have the experience, knowledge, or, barring those two, even just the imagination to understand how a question might apply doesn’t make it strange or dumb. It does speak volumes about you, though.
Someone left me a reply just yesterday with that date format. At first I was going to reply back that they must have made a typo, but then realized they weren’t wrong. Ouch.
I started a sentence in my class with “When I was born”. A student instantly chimed in and said “What in the 19’s?” And I thought in my head, of course you idiot, everybody is born in the 19’s. It still haunts me
It still feels wrong to me, to see it written out, but spoken its different.
I feel like it works to go with say, the 1600’s, which I read naturally as the 16 hundreds. But when I see 1900 I read that as the nineteen naughts, (aughts?) because so often when people are referring to periods in the 19 hundreds, its down to the decade because so much changed between each one. Or maybe I just felt that way because I’m so old now.
Maybe in another 25 years, it’ll be far enough away that 1900’s becomes 19 hundreds in my head.
I’ve heard the nineteen naughts before, but more often that point of history was described as the turn of the century, or at least it was in the late 19s. Now turn of the century could mean 20 some years ago too. I wonder if people living in the early 1900s had this problem when discussing the early 1800s?
I suddenly feel like the crypt keeper
We can’t possibly be that old! I feel you’ve made a grave mistake
This is just intentionally phrased poorly to create a rise out of people. It’s like referring to water as “dihydrogen monoxide”.
How so? I would certainly call something from 1894 to be from the "late 1800s’ or late 19th century. I mean, we’re a quarter of the way through this century, at some point it turns into history.
late 1800s*
I put this on an unlabeled squirt bottle once at work. It was wrong to do because technically it’s an OSHA violation for being improperly labeled because it was just in sharpie and not a standard label. But it was night shift I was bored and the bottle was already unlabeled so it was already out of compliance. Why not write on it?
A week or so later I heard people talking about this squirt bottle that said dihydrogen monoxide. Two safety guys were there so I didn’t take credit for my shenanigans based on the reception not being great.
I said I think it’s just water, but the chemical name. Ya know? Nope, they didn’t get it. The kind of doubled down and started talking about things in that link because they “researched the name” and it was actually harmful.
It was a strange experience.
I’m going to start saying that when asked about my birth year. “The late 1900s”
I come from a time when our telephones were teathered to the wall and had no screens or apps at all. Later on, there were machines that would answer the phone and let someone record a message if no one was home.
If you wanted to watch something that wasn’t a movie or recording, you had to pick one of the options someone else had picked, and if you missed the time, you just missed it until someone decided it was time to play it again (at a different specific time you could miss).
And if you did record something, you’d have to seek through the recording to find the start of it.
Movie rentals involved going to a physical store and grabbing physical media with the content on it. If too many people wanted to rent it at a time, there just wouldn’t be enough and the later ones would have to pick something else to watch. Just going to one of these rental places was a borderline magical experience full of wonder and possibility. Oh and it was considered very rude if you rented a movie but didn’t seek it back to the beginning for the next person (which you’d have to physically return to the place with the physical media or you’d get charged late fees).
And even though everyone’s name, address, and phone number were published in regional “phone books”, the closest thing to phone scams you’d (normally) see were prank phone calls, which were done for laughs rather than profit (albeit sometimes maliciously).
Christians actually cared about being good people rather than thinking they can somehow be victims of an apocalypse they are trying to make happen and teleport to heaven because they’ve said the required amount of hail Marys and took advantage of the “just confess the horrible shit before it die and you’re forgiven” loophole (and probably not thinking about what happens if the rapture ends up happening too quickly for them to confess their latest batch of sins). Actually, the crazy ones might have been around then, too, they just weren’t so fucking loud back then.
That second millennium was something else, I tell you what. You third millennium kids won’t ever understand.
