afairmaiden
A Fair Maiden
30s. Christian (nondenominational evangelical turned confessional Lutheran). Inbox always open.
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https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8C3ACUg/
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I don't know how strictly accurate this is, but one of the things I find shocking about watching historical dramas is how many people there are around all the time---according to Madame de... (1953) a well-off French household in the Belle Epoque maintains a workforce of at least 3, and the glittering opera has staff just to open doors. According to Shogun (2024) you can expect a deep bench just to mind your household, and again, people who exist to open doors.
Could people....not open doors in the past? Were doors tricky, before the standardization of hinges? Because otherwise, the wealthy used to pay a whole bunch of people to do it for them in multiple contexts, and I find myself baffled.
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"when people ask how you're doing, they don't really care." most of them do, actually, the amount they care is just directly proportional to how well they know you. you're just mad you can't be the main character of the Twice Daily.
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Have been thinking a lot lately about how, when a new technology emerges, people who were born after the shift have trouble picturing exactly what The Before was like (example, the fanfic writer who described the looping menu on a VHS tape), and even people who were there have a tendency to look back and go "Wow, that was... wild."
Today's topic: The landline. A lot of people still have them, but as it's not the only game in town, it's an entirely different thing now.
(Credit to @punk-de-l-escalier who I was talking to about this and made some contributions)
for most of the heyday of the landline, there was no caller ID of any kind. Then it was a premium service, and unless you had a phone with Caller ID capability-- and you didn't-- you had to buy a special box for it. (It was slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes.)
Starting in the early nineties, there WAS a way to get the last number dialed, and if desired, call it back. It cost 50 cents. I shit you not, the way you did it was dialing "*69". There's no way that was an accident.
If you moved, unless it was in the same city-- and in larger cities, the same PART of the city-- you had to change phone numbers.
As populations grew, it was often necessary to take a whole bunch of people and say "Guess what? You have a new area code now."
The older the house, the fewer phone jacks it had. When I was a kid, the average middle-class house had a phone jack in the kitchen, and one in the master bedroom. Putting in a new phone jack was expensive... but setting up a splitter and running a long phone cord under the carpet, through the basement or attic, or just along the wall and into the next room was actually pretty cheap.
Even so, long phone cords were pretty much a thing on every phone that could be conveniently picked up and carried.
The first cordless phones were incredibly stupid. Ask the cop from my hometown who was talking to his girlfriend on a cordless phone about the illegal shit he was doing, and his wife could hear the whole thing through her radio.
For most of the heyday of the landline, there was no contact list. Every number was dialed manually. Starting in the mid-eighties, you could get a phone with speed dial buttons, but I cannot stress how much they sucked, because you had to label them with a goddamn pencil, you only had ten or twenty numbers, reprogramming them was a bitch, and every once in a while would lose all of the number in its memory.
All of the phone numbers in your city or metro area were delivered to you once a year in The Phone Book, which was divided between the White Pages (Alphabetic), the Yellow Pages (Businesses, by type, then alphabetic), and the Blue Pages (any government offices in your calling area (which we will get to in a moment)).
Listing in the white pages was automatic; to get an unlisted number cost extra.
Since people would grab the yellow pages, find the service they need, and start calling down the list, a lot of local business names where chosen because they started with "A", and "Aardvark" was a popular name.
Yes, a fair chunk of the numbers in it were disconnected or changed between the time it was printed and it got to your door, much less when you actually looked it up.
One phone line per family was the norm.
Lots and lots and LOTS of kids got in trouble because their parents eavesdropped on the conversation by picking up another phone connected to the same line.
A fair number of boys with similar voices to their father got in trouble because one of their friends didn't realize who they were talking to.
And of course, there were the times where you couldn't leave the house, because you were expecting an important phone call.
Or when you were in a hotel and had to pay a dollar per call. (I imagine those charges haven't gone away, but who pays them?)
Since you can't do secondary bullet points, I'll break a couple of these items out to their own lists, starting with Answering Machines.
these precursors to voicemail were a fucking nightmare.
The first generation of consumer answering machines didn't reach the market until the mid-eighties. They recorded both the outgoing message and the incoming calls onto audio cassettes.
due to linear nature of the audio cassette, the only way to save an incoming call was to physically remove the cassette and replace it with a new one.
they were prone to spectacular malfunction; if the power went out, rather than simply fail to turn back on, they would often rewind the cassette for the incoming messages to the beginning, because it no longer knew where the messages were, or how many there were.
Another way they could go wrong was to start playing the last incoming call as the outgoing message.
Most people, rather than trying to remember to turn it on each time they went out and turn it off when they got back, would just leave it on, particularly when they discovered that you could screen incoming calls with it.
Rather a lot of people got themselves in trouble because they either didn't get to the phone before the answering machine, or picked up when they heard who was calling, and forgot that the answering machine was going-- thus recording some or all of the phone call.
Eventually the implemented a feature where you could call your answering machine, enter a code, and retrieve your messages. The problem was that most people couldn't figure out how to change their default code, and those that did didn't know it reset anytime the power went out. A guy I went to college with would call his ex-girlfriend's machine-- and her current boyfriend's-- and erase all the messages. He finally got busted when she skipped class and heard the call come in.
And, of course, there's the nightmare that was long-distance.
Calls within your local calling area were free. (Well, part of the monthly charge.) This usually meant the city you lived in and its suburbs. Anything outside this calling area was an extra per-minute charge.
This charge varied by time of day and day of the week, which made things extra fun when your friend on the west coast waited until 9pm for the lower charges, but you were on the east coast and it was midnight.
Depending on your phone company, and your long distance plan, the way your long distance work varied wildly. Usually in-state was cheaper-- with zones within the state that varied by price, and out of state had its own zones.
Your long distance plan came in lots and lots of distracting packages, and was billed to your phone bill.
At one point, when I was living in North Carolina, a scammer set themselves up as a long distance company and notified the phone company that a shitload of people had switched to their service. They got caught fairly quickly, but I was annoyed because they were actually charging less than AT&T.
"Would you like to change your long distance plan" was the 80's and 90's equivalent of "We have important news about your car insurance."
Had a friend who lived at the edge of a suburb in Birmingham, and for her to call her friend two miles down the street was long-distance, because the boundary of the calling area was right between them.
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Hey, please read this, just getting this all off my chest helps a lot itself.
I am Layla, a 17 year old student from India. I currently study at Woodstock International School, which is one of the schools here in Mussoorie, India. I've been inactive recently as I was very busy with my A levels exams and my household situation. My mom is from Bangladesh while my father is Indian. Recently, due to him getting unemployed 3 months ago, our family has been going through some very tough times. I in my school am on scolarship and much of my tution fee gets waived off but recently our condition has worsened and my parents are in a lot of mental stress due to our school fees (me and my 2 other siblings) as a major part of their expenditure are payments for our education. I really dont want my education to suffer and can't see my parents stressing about my tuition fee.
11,000 INR is needed which is around 135 USD
Paypal
This is my family's account (my fathers') for all of the donations and incase this doesn't seem to work or you need some more information, please feel free to mssg me or send an ask.
Sorry for making this long, but i really had to swallow my pride while making this. Please help out if you can, and again, thanks for reading. Every type of donation or reblog would really mean and matter a lot. <3
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You just told your coworker that you think myths are fun stories but don’t really communicate any truth. You walk into your office. There on the table you find a piece of paper. On the piece of paper there is a poem. It’s a good poem. It’s also, you realise as you read it, an academic refutation of your stance. It makes excellent points. It also rhymes and scans. Pov your name is Clive Staples Lewis
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I think the funniest dynamic for arranged-marriage royalty would be a queen who came here 100% prepared to murder her future husband and rule as a widow queen in her own right, only to discover that the king is autistic as hell and responds to her wish to rule with "oh thank god please do, I don't want to be bothered by these people. I can just tell them to go bother you instead, if you really want that. I've got beetles I wanted to study."
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I started with succulents like everyone else but tbh orchids are rapidly becoming my plant blorbos. Everyone takes care of them wrong and it's not your FAULT because the care instructions that come with them are!! Incorrect!!! If you do what they say then your orchid will die!!!! If you give them the right environment they're SO easy. They're such easy plants to grow. They have been UNFAIRLY SLANDERED by a MISINFORMATION campaign. They don't deserve this.
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Men who slam doors and furniture are making sure you hear how much they want to hit you.
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Credit where credit is due if I were in the Philistines' position I probably would have wanted to kill Samson too.
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I think the worst tumblr behavior was definitely the old trend of "hey everybody this person you never met says this other person you never met was a toxic friend, spread the word and StAy SaFe everyone!!!"
I think it's the "stay safe" and "reblogging to PROTECT my mutuals!" kind of language that annoyed me the most, like what did that mean exactly? If you mistakenly become casual internet friends with that person you're gonna suffer psychic damage? They're some kind of demon in a human disguise with an actual goal to hurt people? Hey believe it or not people not only grow and change but sometimes the problems in an interpersonal relationship are the once-in-a-lifetime result of precisely the chemistry of those two people under precisely the circumstances they were brought together. I've almost never met someone who was just habitually shitty to everybody.
Like I wouldn't be friends with someone who was physically abusive to someone but a lot of those old callouts were just laundry lists of complicated emotional clashes and fights that weren't anybody else's business.
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do you ever think about how darcy's perspective of the visit to rosings is just... a completely wild time.
so like. he and his favourite cousin goes to visit with his weird aunt, and ends up running into this hot girl, that he's really kinda increasingly into? she's staying in the area for a while with her bestie.
so like. he was expecting a boring social obligation visit & getting pressure into marrying his other, less favourite cousin.
instead, he watches the hot girl hold her own with his aunt in conversation. she banters with him over the pianoforte and they have a Moment™. he keeps going over to the house she's staying at, just to awkwardly chill there, even though he doesn't like the other people there. has a whole conversation with her about how she wouldn't mind living far away from family, as long as she could afford the travel. he extends his visit so he can keep seeing her.
when he runs into her on a walk, she makes a point of detailing the exact route she prefers to take while out walking, clearly encouraging him to join her, so he does. he has a really nice time on these walks, they spend a lot of time in companionable silence, but he manages to flirt a little by implying some stuff about the future & what their married life could be like, and they have some conversations about that.
and sure, she has some family baggage, but none of them are around so it's a lot easier to ignore, y'know?
so eventually he just can't take it anymore, and he shoots his shot. she clearly values honesty so he explains his scruples as well, but he thinks she's been dropping some favourable signals, so he's got a good chance, right?
and then not only she turns him down she ROASTS THE FUCK OUT OF HIM. she insults him. she insults his honour as a gentleman. she flips the fuck out about... oh yeah crap the sister thing, turns out his cousin blabbed, and then I'M SORRY YOU SAID WHAT? ABOUT WICKHAM? THIS IS ABOUT FUCKING WICKHAM, MY FUCKING NEMESIS? HE FUCKING SAID WHAT ABOUT.... OH MY GOD. oh fuck. I've fucked up so badly I need to reevaluate my entire life & risk sending a letter to an unmarried woman who hates my guts, just so i can explain shit. fuck.
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saw some people talking about "how could Percy say Luke was his real friend after like a day" and unfortunately while I get your point I remember being twelve and lonely and insane and daydreaming about being lifelong besties with anyone who was nice to me for two minutes
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