13 October 2011

How did you know you were getting old ?

Some abbreviated replies from an interesting thread at Reddit -

Minor accidents like falling down hurt considerably worse and for longer.
I had to specifically ask for socks last year and I was legitimately excited to get them.
The first time I had a doctor younger than I was.
Someone mentions being born in the 90s.
When I started getting tired of all the bullshit. ALL of it. Then I realized I had become the grumpy old man.
When I realised I'd started checking for wedding rings.
My friends and I were talking about the price of toilet paper tonight at the bar.
When the flashback weekend on the radio station plays the stuff you like.
When your friends start having babies that aren't accidents.

Here's my offering.  When I lived in Kentucky in the 1980s, my friend's daughter came to him with a question.  "Daddy, settle an argument.  Didn't Paul McCartney have another group before Wings?"

When did you first feel "old" ?

42 comments:

  1. It was so long ago that my elderly brain has forgotten.

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  2. During a classroom refit over the summer we found a blackboard on a wall behind something else.
    None of the children in the class (Year 4) had ever seen one before.

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  3. Had to have blood taken when I was ill and I jumped when the nurse stabbed me. She looked surprised and I said I didn't know what to expect, I'd never had it done before.
    Her reply?
    "At your age?"

    (I'm 39)

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  4. I don't count as old to anyone but teenagers, but I've had a couple of unpleasant shocks.

    My husband is a substitute teacher at a junior high. He's working with kids who have no memory of pre-9/11 America. That scares me.

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  5. Daily prescriptions with the pill bottles kept in the kitchen.

    That is so 'grandparent-y.'

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  6. That's not a nice way to say happy birthday...

    I'm 27 now...

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  7. I'm with João Campos (I turned 47 on Oct 13).
    I was told years ago that you're officially old when the local policemen look young to you. For me, that happened at least 25 years ago!

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  8. Not really an old test, but you're no longer a kid when you like the peanuts in crackerjacks more than you like the popcorn. You never stop hoping for the temp tattoo as a prize.

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  9. When I was in the mall one day and I saw a single baseball card in a lucite case that was from a year that I used to collect them as a kid.

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  10. When I was told I was too old (to be starting a career as a fireman). At the ripe old age of 28 1/2. One captain suggested if I really hurried and got my EMT and went through a rapid pace paramedic school I might barely make it... Many larger city fire departments cap the age of new hires at 30.

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  11. I was told "It may be called forty but it is really the beginning of your fifth decade on this planet". Where has the time gone?

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  12. I first felt old when I felt no compunction at yelling at Other People's Children (though that may be a side effect of being a teacher).

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  13. The first time I asked the cabbie what the fare was, and with no hesitation he quoted me the senior discount rate.

    --Swift Loris

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  14. When I realized that I was older than every single NBA basketball player I was watching on Tv

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  15. I went to Best Buy a few weeks ago to buy a simple cassette tape player. The sales-girl working there laughed at me. They didn't have anything that even played a cassette tape.

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  16. The first time I got "ma'am"-ed. Unfortunately I was nineteen and at the bookstore of the university I attended. I went home and had a nice lie-down.

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  17. Reminiscing about the fall of the Berlin Wall (Nov 89) in the pub. A friend in her early 20s points out that was the year she was born.

    "...and now I feel old."

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  18. Some high school kid who was selling magazines called me "Sir."

    I think I was 21.

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  19. When people started calling me mam.

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  20. You know you are getting old when almost 1/2 the people you play D&D with are grandfathers and you used to go to high-school with them.

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  21. Several years ago I moved back to Louisville, after 20 years away. I returned to the barber shop I had gone to as a teen. Same barber was there, but this time he asked if I wanted my eyebrows trimmed. He didn't even ask about the ear hair.

    This guy has has a picture of himself with a family of 4 generations of males. He has cut the hair of all of them!

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  22. When my younger cousins asked "What are Smurfs." Obviously, this is long before the movie came out.

    ...They're in college now.

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  23. That's when you say "Yes, dangit! The Beatles! Who RAISED you anyways?!" and glare at your friend.

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  24. When my kid didn't know who Johnny Carson is.

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  25. Back in '96 or '97, talking to some teenagers in Disneyland and mentioned I had seen Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly and the Who play a concert in Phoenix. They went 'Wow, you must be old, dude'. I quietly finished my Pluto hotdog and hobbled away.

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  26. I was looking at my hair in the mirror, and thought there was dust on the mirror. I wiped the mirror only to find there was no dust, and my hair really was that color...

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  27. "How did you know you were getting old ?"

    My primary care physician is about 10 years younger than I but I've gotten used to that considering I've been seeing him for 5 years or so. I really felt my age a couple of weeks ago though when I went to see an Ophthalmologist for a problem with my eye. She was younger than my daughter! That was weird.

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  28. The day the highschoolers started looking like kids to me.

    This was about a month after I got into college...

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  29. New inmates coming into my prison that were born after I started working here.

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  30. I have a Dave Concepcion bobblehead on my computer. None of my co-workers were alive during his career.

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  31. It didn't worry me a bit when I turned fifty, but later that year when my twin daughters turned thirty, I couldn't figure it out. How could it be?

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  32. When I was 27, one day I woke up and I felt like my eyelid was folded in a weird way. I checked in the mirror to see what was wrong. It looked fine. I rubbed my eyes. The feeling persisted for about a week. Then I saw it: my first clearly delineated wrinkle, just under my left eye. I had actually felt it forming.

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  33. I quit wearing mascara because I can't see the mirror without my bifocals on.

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  34. I refuse to feel old!

    A man's only as old as the woman he feels.
    Groucho Marx

    Mike Z. 64

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  35. Many years ago we were discussing the original Star Wars trilogy and the excitement of waiting in long lines to see the next. A co-worker then commented how excited he was they were in the theater again because he hadn't been born when the originals came out!

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  36. I remember the day clearly when it really hit me. I was watching TV in an exhausted stupor after another long day working in the world of advertising. Then, an unremarkable commercial featuring parents and teens came on and I finally realized that I was no longer the one being sold to in the commercial (the younger one) but instead I was THE PARENT. Wasn't I 21 just yesterday? I freaked out, big time.

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  37. I browsing the roster at a minor league ball game and was surprised to see that one of the players went to my high school; it was in another state. Then I noticed that he was born the year I graduated.

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  38. Old? Seventy-three's not old...is it? I forget.

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  39. I work at a university. Nearly EVERYONE is younger than me.

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  40. When I heard Led Zepplin's "Stairway to Heaven" in an elevator... yeah, Muzak... it was tragic

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  41. It was when I realized that, a few months later, more time would have elapsed since my birth than elapsed between the Wright brothers' first powered flight and my birth.

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  42. Trying to explain to my son(21 years old) that when I (50 years old)was his age and one of the Christmas specials were on (A Charle Brown Christmas, How The Grinch stole Christmas) Yoe either watched it on the day it was aired or you were waiting 365 days to see it again.

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