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That 90s radio jingle I clicked after my nephew asked what a pager was
Last weekend my nephew saw a VHS tape at a yard sale and asked what it was. I pulled up an old pager ad from the 90s on my phone, one of those beep-heavy skits that ran on MTV nonstop. I clicked it because I remembered laughing at it in my dorm room back in 1997, but my nephew just stared at me. He said, 'So people paid money to be told to call someone back?' That hit different because I never thought about how absurd the whole thing was until he said it out loud. Now I kind of miss how simple those ads were, no algorithms or influencer pitches, just a weird jingle and a phone number. Do you ever hunt down old commercials from your own childhood and realize they made no sense at all? Has anyone else shown a younger person a classic ad and gotten a confused reaction?
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matthewg631mo ago
The part about how "he just stared at me" is funny but idk if the takeaway here is really that deep. Kids are confused by everything from our past, that's kind of the deal with kids. My niece asked why we had a phone book and I didn't walk away feeling like the 90s were some lost simple time, she's just 9 and phone books are weird now. The pager ad thing mostly tells you that stuff gets dated fast, not that life was better before algorithms. Those ads weren't simple either, they were annoying on purpose so the jingle would stick in your head, that's the same trick every ad uses today just with better targeting. Maybe it's just me but the confused kid reaction is more about them being a kid than about us losing something.
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