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Comment by lacampbell | Hacker News Reader

“I walked past this phone booth every day with my kid when he was three years old,” Ackerman said. “And at a certain point, he said to me, ‘Why is that phone in a box?’ And I realized that he didn’t know what a phone booth was, which is so bizarre!”

I am constantly amazed at peoples lack of awareness of time. Of course a 3 year old in 2017 wouldn't know what the hell a phone booth was. How could that possibly surprise you. I bet this person also sees a celebrity they haven't seen for twenty years and then says something insightful like "wow, he looks so old!".

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It's easy to be dismissive until it happens to you. A friend was playing with her sister's kid and went "brrring! brrring!" to imitate a telephone call. The kid put her hand up to her ear, completely flat, and said "Hello?"

(The old way to play telephone is to answer it by putting your pinkie to your mouth and your thumb to your ear. But of course, phones haven't been shaped like that in a long time.)

Anecdotally, in addition, kids don't really understand the meaning of "hanging up" a phone anymore, they just hit the red button.

I had to explain to a ~16 year old why it was called "dialing".

My parents didn't get rid of their rotary phone until the late 90s. Growing up, I always found it funny when my friends didn't know how to use it

My friend's parents were the same -- they did it on principle because the telco charged for touch tone. Never mind that it cost the telco substantially more to continue supporting the "rotary" infrastructure, I'm sure it was a cash cow.

I remember being awed by their new PC with its amazingly fast 9600 baud modem. And then it dialed out. ATDP. Tick. Tick tick tick. ....

I remember how it felt so high tech when putting in the number using beeppy buttons instead of the rotary dial !

My parents didn't get rid of theirs until about 5 or so years ago - I can't remember if it was because of the switch to a cell phone or their smaller house as they happened around the same time. I got to the point as a teenager that I tried to avoid using the phone to dial because it seemed so inconvenient.

People are surprised because we don't go around constantly thinking through the consequences of every change around us, because most of the time they are not important. Of course it is not that suprising once we've thought about it.

The point is that this is one of those little things most people won't have thought about, not least because most adults are still blind to phone booths: It's part of the landscape to us, and not something we're likely to think much about when we pass them.

People gloss over details all the time. As a case in point: it wasn't the author of the linked article written in 2017 that walked past the phone booth with his 3 year old, it was author Peter Ackerman who used it as inspiration for his childrens book. The book was published in 2010, but it's not clear when he wrote it or when he received the inspiration to do so.

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