It happened twice in twenty-four hours. In IT we called that "reproducible."
Saturday night we're playing Codenames, which if you haven't played it is a game where two people try to read each other's minds using one-word clues, and mostly discover they shouldn't. My cousin's wife is in her thirties. Sharp. Competitive. The kind of person who wins at things.
Clue comes up. I say "modem."
She says, "Like… a router?"
I say, "No. 56k. The screaming."
And she looks at me the way you'd look at a man describing the mating call of an animal that no longer exists.
Let me explain to the youth. A 56k modem was a small beige box whose entire job was to shriek like a fax machine being mugged, then connect you to a version of the internet that loaded one photograph in the time it now takes to watch a movie. Fifty-six kilobits per second. Not megabits. Kilobits. You didn't stream anything. You aspired to a JPEG.
And it shared the phone line. If your mother picked up the handset to call your aunt, your download died at 94%. You didn't get an error message. You got a busy signal and a grudge.
So that was Saturday. I was already feeling geologic.
Then Sunday, my ten-year-old granddaughter and I are watching Stranger Things, which for her is a period piece and for me is a home movie. Kid's on the couch, fully invested, and a scene comes up with a VCR in it.
She points and asks what it is.
I said, "That's a VCR. It played movies on tape."
"Tape?"
"Videotape. Big plastic brick. You put it in the machine, and when the movie ended you had to rewind it."
"Rewind it?"
And that's the moment I felt my bones turn to sediment. Because I realized I was going to have to explain Be Kind, Rewind. I was going to have to explain the video store. The late fee. The pencil you stuck in the cassette hole when the tape got loose, like a tiny mechanical dentist. The tracking button, which never fixed anything but gave you something to do while the picture wobbled.
She listened politely. Then she asked if the tape had Wi-Fi.
No, sweetheart. The tape had hope.
Here's the thing about being the oldest object in the room: you don't notice the transition. There's no ceremony. Nobody hands you a certificate that says Congratulations, you are now context. You just say a normal word from your actual life — modem, VCR, rotary, dial-up, mixtape — and the room goes quiet, and somebody young and kind explains the modern equivalent to you slower, in case you've also lost the plot.
I'm not bitter. I'm fossilized, which is different. Bitter is a mood. Fossilized is an achievement. It takes millions of years and considerable pressure, and frankly I've had both.
And I'd like the record to show a few things in my defense. I can start a fire. I can read a paper map, fold it wrong, and still arrive. I have memorized a phone number, which is apparently now a party trick. I once configured an IRQ setting by hand and lived.
So yes. I am a dinosaur. But I'd point out that dinosaurs ran this planet for a hundred and sixty-five million years, which is a significantly better retention rate than most streaming services.
Bruce has no comment. Bruce is, technically, further along in the fossil record than I am, and he knows better than to gloat.
There’s Amazon links above to fund my Geritol, if you happen to want to impulse buy the things I mentioned. Costs you nothing, just me using the internet in another old-fashioned way.