Oh, the 80s. It was a heady time, with a speeding stock market and more efficient home computing than ever before. But you know what wasn’t fast in the 80s? You. Because you were wasting your time with tons of little chores you don’t even thinkabout now. A look back on all of the tiny tasks that 30 years of technology has saved you from.
1) Winding the magnetic tape back into a cassette with a pencil after it was pulled out—or “eaten”—by your stereo.Your CD’s used to laugh at your tapes, until your MP3’s killed your CD’s. Pop quiz: anyone now remember what “MP3” stands for?
2) Pulling the phone book out when you need to get in contact with a person or business you hadn’t memorized the number for. Fact: Yelp is a portmanteau of “Yellow Pages.” Your mind = blown.
3) Connecting your home camcorder to your TV via endless, confusing cables in order to watch (and record) any footage you shot.Remember when there were no video cameras on your phone? Remember cables?
4) Searching frantically for the headset of your portable phone before it finishes ringing. O.K., O.K. So your mom still has the phone with the super long cord so she can use the kitchen phone in the dining room. It’s fine, it’s vintage.
5) Sitting through multiple commercials when watching your favorite live TV. With VOD, commercials are creeping back into your viewing experience. Just enough time to check Instagram. Again.
6) Blowing on the cartridges of your Atari or Nintendo when they don’t play correctly. Do you remember who taught you to do that? No? That’s because NO ONE TAUGHT YOU. You just knew it, like you knew how to chew food.
7) Finding enough of those oversized D batteries to get your portable boombox to run. It was always the C batteries you had, when you only ever needed D’s. Why was Mom always buying C size?
8) Remembering to rewind VHS tapes before returning them to the video store on time. R.I.P. Blockbuster stores, 1985–2014.
9) Peeling the perforated ends off the paper after using your dot-matrix printer.But this was a good waste of time, right? If you colored them in and folded them together, they became little colorful inchworms! (Please tell us someone else did that.)
10) Trying to leave a message on someone's answering machine and finding out the tape is full.Currently VF.com’s voicemail box is 94 percent full, all with unheard messages from “Mom.” But everyone else knows to text us.
11) Picking up the phone by accident when you’re receiving a fax and hearing that awful screeching noise, thus occasionally interrupting the fax. Though we hope the Valentine Sweetheart candy that says “Fax Me” never dies.
12) Running out of storage room on your 2MB floppy disk and having to find three more. Do you ever wonder if all those dead floppies up in heaven are resentful because they have to share space with the Cloud?
13) Replacing all of your Beta tapes with VHS tapes and then your VHS tapes with Laser discs. Haha. Laser discs.
14) Getting your television antennas—or bunny ears—just right in order to watch your favorite show._Basically we switched to an all-digital signal. Aliens can now no longer watch_Friendsfor free.
15) Writing down an address and figuring out directions with a map before leaving the house.This actually used to take more time than getting lost after Apple Maps told you that you were in the wrong place.
16) Returning to your car to find the battery dead after you left the headlights on all night.Now you can leave the stereo on all night when you’re up at Make-Out Point.
17) Fast forwarding your cassette tapes to the exact right spot in order to hear the song you wanted to hear. First, CD’s let you skip exactly to the song you wanted, and now digital music allows you to only hear the songs you want to hear. In a way, this is a loss. How would we have ever discovered the exquisite joys of the “La Isla Bonita” Instrumental Mix?
18) Forgetting which channel is MTV and having to click each button on your cable box to find out. Hurry! We’re going to miss the world premiere of “Thriller”!
19) Needing to carry your phone, watch, notebook, Walkman, computer, address book, calculator, checkbook, map, newspaper, and video camera separately. Wait, you guys weren’t carrying around calculators?
20) Cranking up your car window as fast as possible when it started to rain.Though available in the 80s, power windows didn’t become standard until the 90s. Lost during the same period: the ability to just cram in the “way back” of the car because your parents didn’t know about seatbelts.
21) Waiting at home all night next to the phone for your date to call. Fact: During the 80s, 38,000,000 hours of preteen time per annum were spent doing this activity.*
*This is not a fact.
