What Are Childhood Sounds Younger Generations Will Never Hear

Every day, I, an Elder Millennial, grow older. That’s true of everyone, of course, but once you hit a *ahem* certain age, that sense of tragic deterioration only becomes more apparent and more keenly felt. My children are always on hand to let me know which pop culture references I’ve made that they don’t get. (“What do you mean you don’t know who David Hasselhoff is?!”) But one Redditor recently made me consider a whole new world of showing my age: sounds.

The question posed on “Ask Reddit” was simple: “People over 30: what’s a sound from your childhood that younger generations will never hear?”

You know that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where the bad guy drinks from the wrong grail cup and rapidly ages into a pile of dust? That’s how I felt reading these answers, which could broadly fit into a few main categories.

Phones

• “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and then dial your operator.”

Fun fact, kids: you could, in fact, call “the operator,” a person who handled incoming and outgoing calls and answered questions. My uncle would, in fact, call the operator because he thought she was his fairy godmother.

• “A dial tone. Or the sound land line phones would make when you left the receiver off the hook.”
• ‘The sound of someone slamming the phone when hanging up on them.”

“I keep a rotary phone around for this very reason,” one redditor replied. “I’ll never give up the slam.” Honestly, a great move: the sound and tactile nature of a rotary phone in and of itself is incredibly satisfying.

• “A phone in a phone booth ringing.”

Computers

• “A floppy disk being read…especially when you’ve got six more to go after this one finishes.”
• Anything AOL related

Plenty of people were quick to chime in with the classics, from the iconic “You’ve Got Mail!” to O when a friend logged in (and the crushing slamming door sound when they left).

• “For me, it’s the screeching dial-up internet sound. I can still hear it in my soul.”

Honestly, I’m still a little bit convinced that that was the sound of a robot getting murdered in order to fuel the internet…

• “The Windows 95 start-up sounds have been burned into my soul.”

Media

• “The cassette rewinding faster and faster and faster until that final thump, and then a whine as it tries to keep rewinding and can’t.”

I’ll add: a lot more things “thumped” back in the day.

• Static from the TV on the wrong channel or when the antenna wasn’t adjusted properly.”
• “Yo quiero Taco Bell.”

RIP, Taco Bell Chihuahua.

• “Disney movie trailers voiced by Mark Elliott. If you don’t know his name, you’ve definitely heard his voice in Disney trailers from the 90s and 2000s. He died in 2021, so younger gens will never hear him promote a new Disney thing.”
• “Waking up at 3am on the couch to, ‘How will I ever live without you! ULTIMATE LOVE SONG COLLECTION OF THE 80S’”

Raise your hand if, when you hear any one of the songs featured on those compilation albums, you start singing the one that appeared next on the commercial immediately after.

• “It’s 10 o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”

(Kids today would not have survived the ’80s, I swear to God…)

Miscellaneous

• “The clink of those metal seat belt buckles. Bonus points if it branded the GM logo into your leg because it was 9,000 degrees.”

(I’ll give you all a minute if you need to recover from this memory…)

• “The cha-chunk of a manual credit card machine thingy.
• “Smoking or Non-Smoking?”

Ah yes, the magical days when cigarette smoke stayed in its own designated air-space and never ever drifted over to where non-smokers were trying not to cough themselves to death over their meal…

• “The popping sound of the orange cap guns with the paper caps. Even the smell of igniting each one every time you ‘shot’ it.”
• “The sound of an old-fashioned cash register … Young people today must not know why people say ‘cha-ching!’ sometimes.”

(I’ve seriously never thought of that, but yes.)

• Manual typewriter keys clacking.

If you’re feeling old after reading all that, well, welcome to my world. Now let’s go play some BINGO in the rec-room…