Betty by Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen for September 16, 2021

Actually, it is called a “handset”.

I’ll bet that if one rang in your house, the kids would just stand there and stare at it. Remember coming back home after being out all day and the first thing you did was check the answering machine?

Show the kid an old movie.

Did you know that the mouthpiece and earpiece on the old receivers were interchangeable?

Let him work all this out for himself. Otherwise you’ll want to dope-slap him.

Send him to Citizen Dog today for what’s really new!

I remember the look on my young nieces and nephews faces when I showed them a record player. Priceless.

Could have been even more confusing if the icon had been that of a rotary dial.

I get that this is a comic strip, not a documentary, but this is pushing the plausibility of how clueless a kid would be, realistically, about old tech. Yeah, nobody’s claiming that everybody’s like Junior, but he’s clearly meant to be a representative of Kids These Days™ in general.

i remember when Harry Connick Jr had his show on TV and he had some kids on and had items available for them to try and figure out what a they were and how to use it; one was a landline dial phone. the look of confusion on their faces were priceless!

Has this kid never seen an old movie or television show? It would only have to go back about 30 years. Cell phones didn’t start being really ubiquitous in the late 90s, and even then a lot of people didn’t have one.

You should kids these days freak out when they see a car with a manual shift lever and three pedals on the floor……

Recently, I tried to describe a cassette tape to my 13 yr old. I don’t have any in my home so I showed him images online, but he still can’t quite understand how sound came out of it. This is a child who has ever known the occasional cd (his dad always has one in the car) and only listens to his music digitally.

Remember our parents yelling at us for overusing the telephone if we were on it more than a few minutes, " you are costing me too much money, talking on that thing all the time! "

When I use Microsoft Office, I wonder when, if ever, the company will decide to change the Save icon. Are they planning to wait a few more generations, until enough people are confused over what that funny looking square — an icon of a 3.5" floppy disc — has to do with the Save command?