"You're Old!!!" moments

[Kitsune]

Originally posted by sycamore
At the time this incident occurred, I was 24, and had only been out of college for a year and a half.

I'm twenty-four, now, and I can say I've experienced similar things as of late. Two years ago, I returned to my high school to visit and speak with my old Chemistry teacher. Students were still milling about even after classes were over with and they overheard me talking about college and how classes were treating me. I'm not sure how we got on the topic, but the student looked at me strangely when I mentioned cassette tapes.

"You know, for music?"
"Huh?"

Yep -- after further questioning, I found out that the graduating class of 2002 only knows compact discs. They have never owned magnetic media for music.

Another extremely depressing moment happened in my undergraduate psych class just this recent semester. The discussion: episodic memory storage. The instructor was trying to find a way to explain to the class that instructional memory is not stored in the same way you store episodic.

"Episodic, you see, is when something dramatic happens", he said after stomping on the stage loudly to make everyone jump, "and there are some things you will never forget. You know, like Challenger -- I will never forget exactly where I was when I saw it lift off and explode and neither will you."

The class, at this point, was giving him confused looks. Someone in the back raised their hand and said it would be better if he used September 11th as the example because "I was, like, one year old at the time, but my parents told me all about it".

Shit.