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Life before cellphones: The after-work activities of young people in 2002

• deleted 3y ago
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• toadi 3y ago
  Fun fact I still leave at 5pm. People mostly not work outside work times except if it is planned or you are on call. Not in Europe no Sir ;)
  • schnitzelstoat 3y ago
    In Spain we finish at 6pm. Some people even work until like 7pm.
    • nervousvarun 3y ago
      Sure but you guys take daily hour+ long afternoon breaks and relatively longer lunches no? At least that appeared to be the case when there on my honeymoon :).
      • schnitzelstoat 3y ago
        Not really, I think the shops close during the day, but those guys work until 9pm. I mean it's 9am-6pm with an hour for lunch so it's still an 8-hour day if you don't count the lunch hour as working. But if you are working in the office it still kinda sucks as you can't really do much in that time.
      • Symbiote 3y ago
        Spain is also in the "wrong" timezone. It's directly south of Britain and should fit in the +0000 timezone, but politics and history put it in the same timezone as France (which should also be in +0000) and Germany.
        • schnitzelstoat 3y ago
          That's true but most people still start work at 9am though. I think it used to be more common to start at 10am, but not anymore.
      • benhurmarcel 3y ago
        No, only shops do this. Office employees typically don't take an afternoon break.
    • deleted 3y ago
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  • EdwardDiego 3y ago
    Yep, I do my 8 hours then stop. If something's on fire in prod and I'm the best person to help, I'll respond. But I'm a firm believer that having to put out fires outside of business hours is a sign of a fragile system. And anyway, I learned my lesson about the unidirectional flow of loyalty in most businesses at a previous company. I gave them untold unpaid hours outside of normal work time for years. About a decade of doing so when the next paragraph kicks in. I unexpectedly got sole custody of my five children, and wanted to work from home when they were sick, as my sick leave had been quickly exhausted because, well, five children, and sick leave provisions in my country were minuscule - 5 days a year, recently changed to 10 days a year to the disgust of the business community. After all, I wasn't sick, and could still write code while looking after my sprogs instead of not writing code and using my annual leave. Shit, when I was taking leave when they were sick, I was still writing code ( in between nursing duties) for my company because loyalty and my desire to deliver... . ...So it made sense to me, instead of me not working at all, I'd work from home on those occasions, knowing it wasn't ideal, but it was far more productive than not working, and I expected the company would understand and support me. After all, how much had I done for the company for free in my personal time in the years prior? I'd had years of late night firefighting, and regular video calls in my evening with product owners 11-13 hours behind me. An occasional bit of flexibility from the company was a fair and decent recognition of my years of flexibility and unpaid labour, I thought. Haha, no, I got a verbal bollocking/warning. (This was pre-pandemic, naturally.) So yeah, these days, I give you 8 hours, and I'll do my damnedest to make sure you don't need me outside of those 8.
• senko 3y ago
  What's barely believable in that article? From what I can see around myself, it's more or less the same except you can whatsapp someone instead of leaving a message on their voicemail. Oh and it's a lot easier to sync up, no more wondering if they saw the message that you're at another bar, you send them your current GPS location.
• deleted 3y ago
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• charlieyu1 3y ago
  I'm old enough to remember what I did in 2002, online games and offline games, ICQ and forums instead of social media. So, not much difference
  • triangleman83 3y ago
    Yeah it really wasn't so far off now. Most of the people I knew had a cell phone (I had gotten it in '99) so there was definitely communication possible anywhere for the most part. In 2002 I was in a student apartment with decent wired internet, a Nokia cell phone (no texting plan), and was in touch with many people via AIM. The mid 90's is probably more the time to blow the current generation's mind because that's when many households didn't have internet and virtually nobody under 18 had a cell phone.
    • ghaff 3y ago
      Yeah. I'd put the date about ten years earlier. You're pre-Web. You may have a cell phone (as an adult) but you probably don't carry it around with you all the time. You may well have a home computer but any dial-up connection is probably a BBS (commercial or otherwise) rather than internet. You probably have email and most of your friends probably do as well. Early 90s is probably when things start to look fairly alien from a technology and communications perspective. There are probably a lot of hints about what's coming but they're mostly not really realized and certainly not mainstream.
    • dghughes 3y ago
      >virtually nobody under 18 had a cell phone. I had a StarTAC but nobody I knew had a cellphone but calling their home wasn't all that fun you'd probably get "why are you calling me?". I liked a cute girl who worked in a bar. So I set my Windows computer to delay sending a fax but I picked my phone. I knew when I'd be at the bar and I got a call and answered it to EEeeeeeeeeeeee pretending I was Mr. Important. She didn't fall for it. lmao
  • itairall 3y ago
    Exactly. Download mp3s, chat with friends on ICQ/AOL IM, forums of various interests, online dating. There were even real audio podcasts basically at this time but they just weren't called podcasts. The only thing I can't remember is if I would have downloaded movies or not. The ipod was released October 23, 2001 lol. This article is backwards. It is shocking to me how much things have stagnated. Compare 1982 to 2002.
• andybak 3y ago
  How universal is it to get work emails in the evening that you have to respond to? I run a small agency and we wouldn't dream of it unless it was an emergency. It seems pretty horrific to me (outside of high-powered corporate roles where you get rewarded enough to make up for it). And is this regional? i.e. maybe US and East Asia but not Europe so much?
  • ryandrake 3y ago
    I’ve worked one tech company in my life where this was an expected norm (a fruity place in Cupertino), and it was pretty miserable. There are plenty of places where you leave work and you’re done until the next day. Highly recommend finding one.
  • gnz11 3y ago
    > we wouldn't dream of it unless it was an emergency. Everything seems to be an "emergency" now. Which means you need to take the time to log back into work, figure out what is going on and then find out it could have waited until the next work day. Repeat the cycle.
    • Loughla 3y ago
      Legitimately, though. It does seem like many individuals are no longer able to really differentiate between emergency, important, and standard. The number of e-mails I get with high importance marked now is sort of shocking. Everything needs to be done immediately. Not today, not this week. Right now, in this moment. Instant gratification is killing us, I think.
  • pmontra 3y ago
    Europe here. I check my mail manually, I disabled push and notifications or my life would be a hell of automated messages of a number of services. I check my mail a few times per day, delete useless stuff, reply to the few real messages. Costumers write me on slack. If it is urgent they use WhatsApp. If it is really urgent they call me. It doesn't happen every year.
  • dghughes 3y ago
• ryandrake 3y ago
  > The very idea that, once work hours were over, no one could get hold of you—via email, text, Slack, whatever—is completely alien to contemporary young people, who never let their cellphones leave their hands. If your work requires a phone or computer, they should be providing a dedicated device. Then, turn off your work devices when you are done with work for the day. I know I didn’t invent this solution just now. Who are these people carrying around their work phone when they are not working or on call? If you are working at a place where this is the norm (I did, briefly) leave. It’s not worth it.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • Hermel 3y ago
    Depends on your position and motivation. I myself am always reachable and read my emails day and night. I enjoy being involved with my company just as others enjoy checking their personal emails every hour.
    • sledgehammers 3y ago
      You are welcome to do as you please. As a collective, we need to acknowledge the burnout epidemic. People need to have the honest freedom to be offline, without any social or business pressure. There's more to life than emails and a corporation that is free to fire you at any point.
      • deleted 3y ago
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      • lo_zamoyski 3y ago
        Not to mention that, this can translate into neglect of one's duties, such as one's duties toward family, duties that, broadly, have higher priority than the wants or even needs of an employer.
      • soupfordummies 3y ago
• dghughes 3y ago
  "Did you see [show] on TV last night? lol" was a common thing to hear when back at work the next day. For work if you got a call at home from work it was a shock. There was no way anyone from work would need to call you at home. As a teen in the mid 1980s I did have to carry a pager the size of a paperback book. But it was nowhere near as bad as now or when cellphones and mobile email got going. First it was Nokia 3310s, then BlackBerry, then later iPhones. For phones I think some people now may find it amazing to be in the middle of nowhere and not have a phone. No voice or data just you in the middle of nowhere with a wallet and a few quarters in your pocket. You get lost or car breaks down? Too bad it's now your job to figure out a way to get back home or anywhere really. Socially for me the Internet came around just in time. I wasn't a bar hopper or into sports or really anything social. Suddenly in 1993 I could talk to the world it was amazing if not expensive at 60 hours a month. But companies took another decade to catch on. Cellphones were still basic just a phone and expensive to use and only a few people had them.
  • treeman79 3y ago
    Friend of mine held out longer than most on cell. Instead he had a pager. Once paged he would turn on his ham radio so we could go and find him.
  • piaste 3y ago
    > For phones I think some people now may find it amazing to be in the middle of nowhere and not have a phone. No voice or data just you in the middle of nowhere with a wallet and a few quarters in your pocket. You get lost or car breaks down? Too bad it's now your job to figure out a way to get back home or anywhere really. I was in my early teens when cellphones became universal, and I remember thinking of how so many movie plots were going to become unusable or require an implausible amount of battery deaths to be added. Non-supernatural horrors or thrillers, comedies of errors, a lot of crime stories...
• switch007 3y ago
  As if a) we didn’t have parents who worked and observed their behaviours, b) don’t work jobs where it’s normal to not be contacted after hours > Can a modern young person ever understand what it was like to simply watch whatever happened to be on television The insults just keep coming. And linking to a survey taken during lockdown and many more people WFH with less to do after work? Pretty trash article overall
  • gipp 3y ago
    I get where you're coming from, but I also have trouble understanding this response people have to feel like any discussion of generational trends is somehow an insult to themselves and their generation. Like those articles that are like "millennials aren't buying houses," why does everyone get so defensive about those as though they're being blamed for something? It's just a dry description of economic trends. Seeing the way things were from the outside, through your parents or television, is simply not the same as actually experiencing how dramatically different it felt just to be in the world pre smartphone.
    • switch007 3y ago
      They chose to write an article using such insulting wording. But you’re right, we shouldn’t respond to it or take the bait I think you’re also ignoring the part I quoted. “Can we ever understand” ?? Gosh I don’t know we’re all so stupid and unable to study any kind of history !
      • stcroixx 3y ago
        I don’t see why that would be insulting at all. If you didn’t grow up in that world, you can’t understand it really - having it explained to you, studying it, or emulating the situation today can’t replace an era from the past. I’m not offended I can’t understand what it was like to ‘go steady’ with a girl like they did in the 50’s and that doesn’t make me stupid.
        • switch007 3y ago
• donatj 3y ago
  > We would just walk to a movie theater and whatever was starting next, that’s what we’d see. It seems impossible to imagine. Oh man, that takes me back. We had a dollar theater in my neighborhood growing up and my friends and I would just see whatever was showing. I saw sooo many movies as a kid, many of which would probably have been considered inappropriate for my age these days. Even as I got older, there were times I ended up seeing unexpected and strange movies because the showing we had gone to see was sold out. These days pre-purchasing preselected seats really takes the spontaneity out of the equation.
  • pmontra 3y ago
    Italy: newspapers used to have a page or two with the movies and times at each theater of the city for today and the next few days, plus prices. You could always find a friend with a newspaper, or somebody would buy one to check the listings. Then they started to give away smaller newspapers for free at subway stations. I can't remember if they had movie listings but the sales of established newspapers took a hit. It was the time when everybody started to have a phone on their pocket or in hand to play games.
  • EdwardDiego 3y ago
    We got hold of the phone number of a free taxi phone at the cinema in my town, and instead of reading the paper to see what was showing when, we'd ring the taxi phone and ask people what was listed on the "now showing" board, people were surprisingly happy to recite it to us.
• iso1631 3y ago
  > Sally: You had to plan more ahead and hope it worked out. People didn’t flake as much. There’s no option to text someone 10 minutes before, because you knew they were waiting for you. That wasn't 2002. Not in the UK any way. Pre 2000 maybe.
  • disgruntledphd2 3y ago
    Mobile phones & texting became much more common earlier in Europe versus the US.
    • Kon-Peki 3y ago
      I worked in mobile infrastructure at Motorola in 2002. The entire world had more advanced mobile systems than the US. We’d be selling/installing our best stuff in Africa & Asia, while American operators just wanted replacement parts for their existing tech. The landline infrastructure in the US was so good, people didn’t want to let go of it. I don’t think people really changed their minds until the iPhone came out.
      • bachmeier 3y ago
        > The landline infrastructure in the US was so good, people didn’t want to let go of it. I don’t think people really changed their minds until the iPhone came out. Sorry, but this is simply wrong. I was did some consulting work for a company that had a big pay phone business. I saw their financials. They'd already lost much of their business by the late 1990s due to cellphones. Their main customers by then were low income or had bad credit and thus couldn't get a cell.
        • justsomehnguy 3y ago
          > due to cellphones Or maybe due to cellphones, email, IRC, AOL, ICQ and whatever else were there? It would be kinda strange to "let's meet in 15 minutes at the corner of ... / AFK" and then find a payphone to.. tell exactly that again?
    • 3y ago
• xethos 3y ago
  > Now, if someone calls me on the phone, I’m like, “How violent of you to call me.” I am twenty years their junior, but good god that made me feel old. Is it primarily how rare phone calls are (albeit coupled with lack of body-language and real-time decision-making, but still) that makes so many young people in their twenties fear them?
  • ThalesX 3y ago
    I'm in my mid 30s and I don't fear them. I dislike them. I don't want to be interrupted from whatever I am doing to answer a phone call that could have been a message. I don't care about your body language or the need for real-time decision making unless it's something truly important to me, like a family matter.
  • gnz11 3y ago
    I understand that feeling. Phone calls aren’t the first order of communication anymore so when it does happen it’s either a telemarketer, scam call or potentially someone with bad news.
  • shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Knocks at the door are even scarier. It's just the irresistibly impending and involuntary socialization that's scary. I assume it's an evolutionary thing, like dogs being afraid of thunder.
• haunter 3y ago
  > We would just walk to a movie theater and whatever was starting next, that’s what we’d see. It seems impossible to imagine. Only impossible because it sounds fake or at least over-romanticized. 2002 was not the dark ages lol I’m from the same age group and local magazines, newspapers, leaflets etc. were carrying the cinema schedule (well they actually still do in some places)
  • ghaff 3y ago
    2002 is post-dotcom era and I'm pretty sure I could get movie showtimes by dialing a phone number long before that. (Or looking in a newspaper as you say.) Go back and information generally was a lot harder to get but I'm not sure the time of movies is a great example.
    • awiesenhofer 3y ago
      Heck, even in 2002 you didnt need to use your phone for actual calling anymore. Back then you could already (for years at that point!) ask for the local showtimes via SMS codes or look them up on WAP/i-mode info pages. Or was that not a thing in the US?
      • ghaff 3y ago
        WAP was a thing in the US but I'd say that--in general--it wasn't a super-mainstream thing around 2000. I'm not sure I ever used it personally. The future was definitely unevenly distributed with respect to mobile in the US until relatively latterly.
• fidotron 3y ago
  The truly funny one not dug into much here is dating. I have had younger colleagues flat out tell me we are obviously lying about how people used to meet as to them it sounds insane. For many these days the idea of doing something without vetting it online first is inconceivable.
  • Melatonic 3y ago
    I still only meet people in person and do pretty well - there is a big backlash against apps now - although I will admit that it has become the standard. But people are definitely tired of them. Seems like big group activities are the new dating game (and friend game) and I am very much here for it
• mabbo 3y ago
  > One survey suggests that U.S. workers were logged into their employers’ networks 11 hours a day in 2021, as opposed to 8 hours a day before the pandemic. A mentor of mine many years ago gave me the best advice: work sane hours, and live a life outside of that. He'd hold me accountable too, and say "It's 5:30, we got here at 9:00, we're going now" (half seriously). The rules I work by: 1. Work 8 hours per day, 5 days per week. 2. When 1 isn't possible, work a 40 hour week. 3. When 2 isn't possible, average a 40 hour week per month. 4. When 3 isn't possible, talk to management about the problem and find a solution. 5. When 4 doesn't work, find a new job. I have never needed to get to number 5, fortunately, but I hold myself accountable to do so. I have a family and they are my life. My job exists to support my life.
  • nikanj 3y ago
    I’ve noticed that people tend to work about the same amount, some just do more hours. The 11-hours-per-day crowd spends much more time resting on Reddit / HN, because they haven’t rested enough at home. I’ve learned it’s better to put in fewer hours filled with work, instead of more hours of semi-alt-tabbing around
    • hombre_fatal 3y ago
      This is surely speculation or a hunch rather than behavior you’ve actually noticed in others. For example what experience would give you real insight here?
    • mdrzn 3y ago
      This is the main reason to push for a 4 days work week, or less hours each day.
      • CoastalCoder 3y ago
        My brain is only good for about 5-6 hours of software development per day, and I don't think I'm unique. So if 4 days means 4x10, I suspect I'd get less done overall. Not sure about 4x8. I wonder if 6x6 would be a win though, not that I really want to work 6 days per week.
• throwaway22032 3y ago
  I'd count myself as being a young person in the smartphone era, every job I have had has been post ubiquitous mobile data, and I don't identify with this "work emails" thing at all. I don't know if I got a work e-mail after hours. Until 2020 there would have been no way for me to even know, my computer was at the office. After 2020 I closed it at 5/6/whenever the end of office hours was. People talk about doing crazy hours being the way to be promoted. In my experience it is exactly the opposite, doing that establishes that you are desperate and will do anything for a wage. It's like being overly needy in dating or a relationship, people take that as an indication that something is wrong with you.
• rchaud 3y ago
  > 7th Heaven. I didn’t like it. It was just that I came home at a regular time, and that show just seemed to be on, and I watched it because that’s what you do This is a big reason why I barely watch any new TV shows these days. Back then, you'd turn the TV on and there would be something, and you'd just watch it even if it was midway through. Today, there's just an endless grid of thumbnails, forcing you to expend mental effort to figure out from the tiny image and 3 line synopsis if it's worth trying.
  • random42_ 3y ago
    > 3 line synopsis if it's worth trying. That was a good thing. Now Netflix--at least for me--doesn't even give me that for most series/movies; it only says crap like "This movie was the most watched in US this month" or something useless like that.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    I'm not that inclined to especially romanticize channel-surfing.
  • awiesenhofer 3y ago
    I can't find the link anymore, but this reminds me of the guy who set up a Raspberry Pi to continuously play random Simpsons episodes as a kind of TV channel to watch when you cant decide what to watch.
• rabbits77 3y ago
  I am surprised how much of this hit home! I would have assumed that although the same age as these people that I’d somehow not be able to relate since I was an overworking software engineer at the time. Things like finishing a Masters degree after work, having places to go where you know you’d run into people you knew, physical media all rung true. One thing that seemed to be missed though was that the downside of not having the technology to enable work from home meant the development of the “late at the office” culture. Think of the xkcd comic with the sword fighting while compiling. Those sorts of silly things were routine after, say, 6pm in an office. Now if you need to work after hours you do it from home, where your day may have started anyway. Twenty years ago you and some colleagues would stay in the office, order some food, play some music on someone’s speakers, take occasional breaks for a game or even a nap and keep plowing through work until 11pm or even later. Also “on call” was still a thing, but it meant a phone call or page and then you physically go to the office to solve the problem!
• aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
• weinzierl 3y ago
  At least in North America and Europe cellphones started getting traction in the early nineteens and were pretty widespread in 2002.
• pjmlp 3y ago
  2002? Cellphones were common in Europe since around 1996.