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In my day ...

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I remember when the pay phone went from a nickle to a dime for a local call. Not that it mattered to me. I had neither to waste on a phone call.

If you got a penny pretty soaked in spit... put it in the nickle slot and hit the coin release as it was falling... sometimes you could get a dial tone. If not, it was in the tray to try again.
 
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I remember when the pay phone went from a nickle to a dime for a local call. Not that it mattered to me. I had neither to waste on a phone call.

If you got a penny pretty soaked in spit... put it in the nickle slot and hit the coin release as it was falling... sometimes you could get a dial tone. If not, it was in the tray to try again.
lol...did you also try the nonsense from "War Games" by using a pull tab conveniently discarded near the phone booth (really any piece of metal) to short something in the receiver to the phone in order to get a dial tone? ;)
 
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lol...did you also try the nonsense from "War Games" by using a pull tab conveniently discarded near the phone booth (really any piece of metal) to short something in the receiver to the phone in order to get a dial tone? ;)
I never tried anything beyond the soaked penny. It worked more often than not. :) As a kid, there wasn't much use for the phone.
Either my buds were with me or out playing somewhere else. The chances of catching them home and in the house was zero. A phone wasn't important until I reached dating age. It then was a great tool to coordinate my social life.

A side story from back in the day. A car load of us wolfs were dragging the main drag in search for sweet sheep. We were cut off from the car we were cruising beside by another car of wolfs. Up onto the sidewalk we bounced and then we reduced one of those glass phone booths to a zillion shards. Good times!
 
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In my day sprung was not a question. As in "Are you sprung?".
I'm not sure I've heard that word used much at all in my life. Way back when you'd occasionally hear it as part of someone being "sprung" from prison (like an escapee). There was also this stuff called "spring steel" that could lose it's "springy" feature which was then referred to as being "sprung."

And of course, the one usage that has remained, albeit sparingly, is the reference to "Spring" (as in the season) having "sprung" out all over. ;)
 
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lol...did you also try the nonsense from "War Games" by using a pull tab conveniently discarded near the phone booth (really any piece of metal) to short something in the receiver to the phone in order to get a dial tone? ;)

This trick actually DID work. We used a paperclip but otherwise what you saw was genuine. Worked on jailhouse phones too.... from what I hear :rolleyes:
 
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Judging by the cars it was the mid to late 60's. That's all I got
Thanks for playing; apparently no one else was interested. ;)
As an aside, I grew up in Phoenix and "in my day" I remember that "Penneys" logo from that era as well.

In any event, you're right on the date range, it was very late sixties, 1969 in fact, and it was warm as you can tell even by the blurred pictures of what the folks are wearing. The exact date was July 16, and that was one of the myriad viewing sites for the launch of Apollo 11. ;)
 
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Oh, you mean that was outside the studio where they faked it? ;)
No, no, you got it all wrong.

The launches were real. They just let them orbit the earth for the requisite days while they filmed all the other stuff in a sound stage outside Hoboken, New Jersey. ;)
*****
In the broader scope, it's actually kind of funny. I think Michael Collins was the astronaut who laughingly referenced the hoax theories and said something like, 'It's hard enough to keep a small secret, but this would have been a huge secret and thousands of people would have been involved, no way would it have remained a secret." I'm also reminded of Benjamin Franklin's quote: "Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." And of course, Einstein's observation: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
 
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Scene: Elementary School classroom.
Time: Beginning of class.
Teacher present: No, not yet.....

Back in my day, you could take a bread twist tie, strip the paper off of it leaving a small wire, wrap it around a pencil and fashion it into a prong-like device. Proceed to stick it into the outlet in you classroom thereby tripping the breaker shutting off the lights. Teacher walks in and flips the light switch to see they don't work.
Teacher walks out to figure out what's up. Lights come on again because teacher flipped the breaker.
Repeat process with pencil/bread twist tie.

Pencil: free (parents bought it)
Bread twist tie: free
The look of chagrin on the teachers face: priceless.

:D
 
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I went to a voke school, and in my freshman year during exploratory (where you spend a week in each of your top seven choices for shop) I was in the electrical related (bookwork side of any trade). The teacher let us know that the handbook said they could throw a pink eraser at anyone that feel asleep in class. You know, those little ones your parents put in your bag. Then he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out an eraser the size of an encyclopedia and slammed it down on the desk. No one slept in class. :p
 
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In my day you had to first enter the trade and technical side of the engineering industry and only then would you be considered good enough to enter engineering at university level.

This is why Germany still to this day has the undisputed best engineers on the planet as they believe you must have the best of both worlds in order to be truly seen as a real engineer of any great / real value.

I have met "engineers" before that don't even know the different metals for certain applications and their strengths and weaknesses under different loads and it's very scary and an area of serious concern.

And I have seen some of my fellow engineers treat some of the guys in their trade as if they are beneath them yet they know more than 10 times what they do! And more than likely could never get the incredible results that they can easily obtain!

Not to sound like a jerk or to make people sad but also respect for new comers in the industry used to be much much better - it is terrible how some new comers are treated at times - it's just bad ethics.

I know as I used to be one and how much it sucked as we all started out that way learning to walk before we cpuld run and it's important to remember that and not treat each other like animals in a zoo that think they are better than one another.

None of us are born knowing everything.

Treating each other badly will never bode well :)

Now time for me to get off my soap box before I get shot off it! XD :D

Sometimes I gotta learn to laugh or I will be just known as the sour grape that nobody wants to be around. :)
 
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Scene: Elementary School classroom.
Time: Beginning of class.
Teacher present: No, not yet.....

Back in my day, you could take a bread twist tie, strip the paper off of it leaving a small wire, wrap it around a pencil and fashion it into a prong-like device. Proceed to stick it into the outlet in you classroom thereby tripping the breaker shutting off the lights. Teacher walks in and flips the light switch to see they don't work.
Teacher walks out to figure out what's up. Lights come on again because teacher flipped the breaker.
Repeat process with pencil/bread twist tie.

Pencil: free (parents bought it)
Bread twist tie: free
The look of chagrin on the teachers face: priceless.

:D

You rebel.

I went to a voke school, and in my freshman year during exploratory (where you spend a week in each of your top seven choices for shop) I was in the electrical related (bookwork side of any trade). The teacher let us know that the handbook said they could throw a pink eraser at anyone that feel asleep in class. You know, those little ones your parents put in your bag. Then he reached into a desk drawer and pulled out an eraser the size of an encyclopedia and slammed it down on the desk. No one slept in class. :p

Our Geography teacher did throw a substantial blackboard eraser at someone's head. He had a good aim too :D You've got to say that's dangerous though.
Plus, the school (a state run secondary school) did have a policy of corporal punishment. That meant caning by the headmaster.
 
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Sometimes I gotta learn to laugh or I will be just known as the sour grape that nobody wants to be around. :)

I like grapes :)

In my day you had to first enter the trade and technical side of the engineering industry and only then would you be considered good enough to enter engineering at university level.

I like that. There's a lot to be said for getting some real world experience of working, before settling on a career to study. To start with, you might not actually like the working environment or culture. I think we tend to railroad kids into a path of study, before they're even mature enough, or have the knowledge to know what they want to do. After all, your working career will span over 40 years, and getting longer as time goes on!
 
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