This Girl Doesn't Know How To Use A Landline Phone

Want to feel old? Then check out this charming but surprising video of a girl who can't use a landline phone, via the Daily Mail. Layla, who's perhaps 12 years old and was probably born post-2000, is apparently staying in a hotel room with her parents. Dad calls the front desk to request wakeup service and passes the handset to her, asking his daughter to hang it up. She looks mildly confused and stands there looking at the phone for a minute before mom comes over and puts it back down on its base. She's not playing dumb — why would she? This girl legit has no idea how landlines work.

I'm not even 30 yet, and still I grew up using a wall-mounted landline phone. It was an ugly shade of beige with a long, looped cord that my mom would stretch to its limits around the island in our kitchen. When we got a cordless phone, that was a pretty big deal. When I got a cell phone in high school, it was at the same time as my parents got theirs, and we learned how to use them all together (though this went unnoticed by me at the time).

It's no shortcoming on Layla's part, of course. She never needed to know how to hang up a landline phone, and may have never even touched one before, and it's not like landline phone skills are innate to the human species. But there could hardly be a more striking example of just how much times change, and how quickly it can happen. A commenter on the video asks "What next? Girl can't play DVD?" That was supposed to be facetious, but it's probably right — I got rid of all my DVDs the last time I moved, because it's all streaming now (and I don't even have a device to play DVDs anymore, either).

My soon-to-be-born daughter will never hold a landline, a CD, a DVD, or maybe even a USB drive (thanks, cloud storage). The churn of technological progress is apparently endless, but we're stuck marking time in our lives by its pace.

Image: Africa Studio/Fotolia; Giphy