Life before smartphones and digital everything required a special kind of patience. From memorizing phone numbers to wrestling with paper maps, many now-obscure activities were part of everyday life. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and explore forgotten tasks that shaped Boomers’ pre-digital world, which was full of manual daily tasks.
#1: Memorizing Phone Numbers
Before smartphones, everyone kept databases of at least a dozen essential phone numbers — their dad’s workplace, best friend’s house, the local pizza place, and so on. Payphones didn’t come with contact lists, and pulling out an address book in public wasn’t cool, so folks memorized as many numbers as possible. Even today, many Boomers can rattle off phone numbers from their youth as easily as reciting the alphabet.
