So, here I am, late in the day – yet again – for today’s letter, which happens to be O. My co-conspirator in this here madness, Chad Clark, wrote about a Okuri-inu monster. If you want to know what that is, you’ll just have to go read his post. I certainly have no idea.

The #AtoZchallenge2014 people wrote about obsession, aka our need to complete this quest.

An aside: I’m quite proud of both Chad and I for keeping up with the challenge, despite the odds: life, liberty, and the pursuit thereof. Plus the need to eat and sleep sometimes.

So, I’ll shaddup and tell you today’s topic:

O is for Obsolete

Yeah, yeah, I’m going there. In my day, I had to walk uphill both ways, in the snow, carrying a brick. You kids have no idea how easy you got it…

Yours truly in 1987. Working at United Way. Typing pledge cards on a typewriter. With a scrunchy in my feathered hair.

Actually, you kids do not know how easy you got it! Things sure have changed since I was a youngster… A ton of stuff considered super-important back then doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s obsolete!

My very first real job, outside of babysitting, involved using a typewriter. It was electric, but still… a typewriter! When’s the last time you saw one of those? And I had to take a typing class in high school. The only thing I remember from it was that our typing teacher wore such high heels, she actually had to have foot surgery.

When I was that age, only the geekiest of the geekiest worked on computers. I served as managing editor of my HS newspaper, and I was the best typist, so I had to type our articles on a typesetting machine, then go into the darkroom to develop it.

The first computer I used was in college, and the screen was not much bigger than an iPhone screen, and we created the layouts for the newspaper on it.  Then printed it out and used glue and stuff to actually, physically lay out each week’s edition.

Before my time, it was even more difficult to create a newspaper: a typesetter would literally put pieces of type together and then that would hit the paper.

This here is a box of printing press type I bought on ebay. I don’t know how old it is, but on the cover is written “William Dart, Box 23, {something that I can’t read}, KY”.

My ex-father-in-law told me that when he was a kid in the 50s, he was a newspaper boy and they still had people using the printing press type like this to put the paper together.

Heck, my hubby said he was a newspaper boy when he was eight. We don’t have newspaper boys anymore… that would be against child labor laws, or something.

Typesetters? Obsolete. Typewriters? Obsolete. Newspaper boys? Obsolete. Gas station attendants? Obsolete. Milk delivery drivers? Obsolete.

Hubs and I were listening to the radio the other day and the DJ said something like “caller 25 will win tickets” to something or other, and we started laughing about how when we were kids we’d sit by the phone and literally have to dial and hang up and dial and hang up and if the phone actually rang, it would ring for about 10,000 times. And we’d never win.

And then there was sitting next to the radio just praying they would play your favorite song, and then pressing record on the cassette tape and hoping you didn’t get too much of the DJ’s voice.

And speaking of phones, I got my first cell phone in 1994 after I had a wreck on the lovely interstates here in Atlanta. It was such a big deal that the sales man came to my office to bring me the phone and show me how it worked. That phone was as big as a shoe box, and in a bag. With its own pull-up antenna.  (I sure wish I still had that thing.)

Rotary dial phones? Obsolete. Radio DJs? Practically obsolete. I personally listen to my iTunes. Mixtapes? Obsolete. Landlines? Obsolete. Customer service? Obsolete.

For a cute, more detailed take on this topic, see the book Obsolete by Anna Jane Grossman. The title served as the inspiration, but not the content, of this post.