Indeed, they were always perfectly acceptable. I was just commenting how you usually knew the location of the person you called because you knew to call that locations landline. You still wouldn’t know receiving calls off the bat, at least until caller ID.
There’s also the opposite problem, when you can’t sleep because you don’t want to fast forward to all the bullshit you’ll have to get back to tomorrow.
Man, those were interesting times. It’s funny, elsewhere in these comments I remarked about a question people didn’t ask back in the day. “Where are you?” was hardly ever asked because of landlines.
Your response reminded me of an inverse question, one that’s rarely asked nowadays.
Definitely as a millennial I’m of the last generation that will remember arranging to meet up somewhere in advance and sticking to that plan (or rearranging over landline with more than a day’s notice…)
This is related to an interesting phenomenon I noticed while chatting about this with my parents. The question “where are you?” was hardly asked back in the day. With landlines, you already knew where they are. The only time that question was asked involved payphones. And those barely exist anymore either.
It’s fuckin annoying. The whole time I thought I was Gen X up until a decade ago. Then all of sudden other people are telling me I’m this bullshit.
For fucks sake, I remember using rotary phones and fucking with TV antennas to get better reception. I remember when no one had cell phones or the Internet. If you didn’t know an answer to something, you just made your peace with that.
It’s definitely cultural. I know people who consider it abhorrent. Other cultures teach their kids how to help serve the alcohol. For example, I learned how to make mojitos once I was old enough to carry the pitcher.