Hilarious Video: Kids React to Rotary Phones

It’s true, most days I don’t feel like a proper grown up. Even though I have children of my own, I’m still struck by that feeling occasionally that I’m a bit of a fraud – not a real grown up at all. I mean, proper grown-ups have everything all figured out, don’t they? Whilst I still often feel as though I’m making it up as I go along – Winging my way through adulthood, hoping that nobody else notices.

And then something totally disarming will happen, like catching my 35 year old reflection in the mirror when I’m pulling out the dance moves with my daughter to Michael Jackson’s Bad, or watching a video showing how children react when faced with a rotary phone, and I’ll suddenly feel old!

Rotary phone? I’m so old I didn’t even know it was called a rotary phone. In my day it was just called a PHONE!

In a video titled ‘Kids React to Rotary Phones’ The Fine Brothers present a group of children aged between 5-13 with an ‘old-fashioned’ telephone and asked them a series of questions with hilarious results. Whilst most of the children recognised that it was a telephone, (they probably saw the toy one in the Toy Story Movies!) they had no idea how to dial a number, or what a ‘dial tone’ or ‘busy signal’ was. In short, the speed with which technology has advanced in the past few decades has rendered something that many of us remember fondly from childhood (which REALLY wasn’t that long ago), as almost completely foreign to the new generation of phone users.

That’s a whole generation of kids that have never experienced the slow methodical process of dialling a number (remember the frustration if you dialled the last number wrong and had to start again?), the strangely gratifying whirring it made when it sprang back to its original place, and of course the satisfaction of slamming that receiver back onto the cradle in the midst of a disagreement. (You are nodding, I know you are!)

TIP: You have to watch to the end! Things get even funnier when the kids are asked if they know how to send text messages on the rotary phone!