“I had to explain to a teenager the other day what this was…I don’t think he got it.”

I’m an award-winning writer and editor living in New York City, where I currently work at BuzzFeed as the Senior Lifestyle Editor.

"More than that, no ATMs. If you want to spend any money on the weekend, you’d better withdraw it before 5 p.m. on Friday."

"Hell, cashing your paycheck used to be a thing. I had to go to the bank after work on Friday."

"I was just thinking recently how exciting it was when I got my own computer as an adult and could get film developed, but also get a CD with all my pictures included for an additional couple of bucks. I so vividly remember loading up Google Picasa, making edits, uploading to Flickr, and posting them on my little 2005-era Blogger/Blogspot site. It's so easy and instant now, but that middle era between print-only and instant posting was something special."

"I remember it used to be three years between theatrical and television release."

"I was the youngest of six...I was the remote!!!"

"Oh, and by 'on the phone,' it was actually 'on the phone.' You could not talk through the phone while on the internet.

I had to explain to a teenager the other day what a landline phone was…I don’t think he got it, because he was like, 'Why couldn’t you just text them?' I told him landlines didn’t have screens, and he didn’t believe me. Or at least it seemed like he didn’t."

"And if it's clothes, they either didn't fit you right or weren't as high-quality as the pictures in the catalog made them look. It's still like that now, but at least we can return them and leave a scathing review online."

"My most painful pre-Internet library experience was an assignment in elementary school where we had to fill out worksheets of facts and bullshit trivia for every single one of the 50 US states, (e.g. capital, largest city, flag, land area, date founded, state bird, state flower, state motto, etc.) like at least 10 or 15 things for every state.

Now, today, you could do this trivially with Wikipedia. The information boxes on the right side of the state's entry have everything that those worksheets required (and more), in a convenient list.

But in the early '90s, not only did I have to go to the library and use the encyclopedias, but the encyclopedia entry for a given state would only have some of these facts. So I had to look up each state in each of the several different encyclopedias that the library had, hoping that the other brand of encyclopedia (or the older version of the same brand) would have one or two additional bits of information. And then, after exhausting all the encyclopedias, I'd still be missing some information and would have to move on to atlases and then to travel guides. I eventually discovered that Fodor's guides were pretty likely to contain the last bits of trivia that the encyclopedias didn't, but those guides cover cities, not states, so I'd sometimes have to pull the guide for multiple cities in a given state before finding the information I needed.

That project took me days at the library."

"You could write to your favorite video game magazine and hope that your letter was one of the ones they chose to publish next month."

"Or going in person to your local grocery store or city hall to pay bills. When I was a kid, bill pay was worked into the weekend errand plans, but nowadays you can pay everything without even putting on pants."

"I was finishing a research paper in high school at the last minute. It was getting really late, and my mom was helping by typing the pages I had finished writing by hand.

Naturally, I finished first. I went to bed while she stayed up typing the rest.

Ten minutes after I got comfy in bed, my mom comes upstairs, puts the light on, and drags me out of bed, saying, 'If I’m up, you’re up!!'

"My grandma used one of those! She said it was where the term 'on the rag' as a euphemism for menstruation came from, because she would have a belt, and a cloth rag to tie between her legs, and she would need to wash them by hand at the end of the day, so that they would be clean to use the next day again. If I’m remembering her correctly, she had five: one for day and one for night, a second set for emergencies, and one extra for if her flow was heavy that time and she needed extra absorption."

"Such a nostalgic sound and smell, though.

Also, weirdly good for your attention span: watch through an entire feature film, then take a minute to properly rewind it for the next viewing."

"Funny how people get all breathless about your 'email address getting leaked.' Remember when we used to print a giant book with the full name, home address, and phone number of everybody in town, make tens of thousands of copies of it, and just drop them on everybody's porch?"