Last week’s SNL aired a movie trailer parody about a hotshot car thief who couldn’t drive a manual transmission Car Heist - SNL - YouTube . It’s not funny, just notable because they thought this worth a joke.
Stick shifts have been called a millennial anti theft device for a while now. My brother’s determined his kids will learn on one of his stick shift cars 3-4 years before the oldest can learn to drive.
My daughter, who is 37, has never driven, nor even ridden in, a car with a manual transmission. Let that obsolete technology fade into the past where it belongs.
My 34 year old daughter learned to drive in my manual transmission pick-up when she was 12. Up until 3 years ago she has only owned manual transmission cars. Long live the stick shift!
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Agree. 
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I learned to drive a stick when I was 16. Left to me, every car I’ve ever owned would have a manual.
It would be interesting to watch a bunch of millennials trying to use a rotary phone…
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Or a pay phone. 
My daughter was astonished when I told her about pay toilets in department stores.
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Both my kids, now in their low 30’s, learned to drive with a stick simply because it’s a worthwhile skill to master and has actually come in handy for them.
And if you think pay toilets were astonishing, my daughter’s reaction was jaw dropping when I informed her that “back in my day” many colleges wouldn’t admit women at all, including the Ivy’s and the Service Academies.
One of my sons in law drives a Golf GTI with a manual as his commuter. He’s about 33 and while not a Millennial, he’s darned close.
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Millennial here (1988), and yup, I know how to do that. Learned on a stick shift too.
Know that one too!
I feel like a lot of the crap people blame on the Millennials they really mean to attribute to Gen Z… 
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How many GenZ people have ever played a CD, or even been in a music store? What’s a music store? Heck, what’s a car key? Or a window crank.
They do know a crank, though. It’s me, asking these silly questions.
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What do people use to clean the wax out of their ears nowadays?
considering Gen Z is roughly birth years 1997-2012 I would think many of them, particularly the earlier end of the generation.
I’ve never actually owned a car myself that doesn’t have key…neither has my wife (although the amount of crap she keeps on her ring makes me wish she didn’t have a physical key…)
I mean, you said it, not me!
Lots of people like to beat on older or younger generations. I don’t worry about it much. All my Millennial children turned out great, and I’m forever pleased with that.
When touchtone (does anybody use that word anymore?) came out you had to pay more for it. I remember ‘dialing’ calls by pushing the button, like Morse code.
Remember using a penny and whacking the phone at just the right moment to get it counted as a dime? Checking the coin return for abandoned nickels?
I stopped buying when vinyl records were discontinued.
My son only buys vinyl records. There’s actually a pretty big business in new vinyl.
And, for car content, he sometimes drives to get to the place where he buys that vinyl.
When I was about 12 I was driving our 58 Chevy straight stick up and down the driveway. Needed to sit on a Sears catalog and never got out of first and reverse much. A year later Mom would let me drive through the fair grounds at night so I could use all the gears. I suppose it was child abuse.
I was around before vinyl 33 1/3 records. When I was in kindergarten in a small town in Illinois, the teacher played records on an acoustically amplified Victrola. The turntable was spring driven. The teacher turned a crank which wound up the spring. There was no electrical power to the Victrola. I remember when the vinyl records, which were called “long playing” came along. My dad and I replaced the 78 rpm record changer in our Magnavox console with a changer that would play the 33 1/3, 45, and 78 rpm records.
The telephones in this community had no dials. One took the receiver off the hook. The operator came on and said “Number Please”. One would then give the phone number of the person you wanted to call and the operator would connect you with that party. The community had three cab companies:. The ‘57’, the ‘63’ and the ‘180’. Each company probably had only one or two cabs. If you wanted a cab, when the operator said “number please”, you would say “I want a 63 at 423 Jackson Street”.
When we moved to Indiana to a larger community, we had rotary dial telephones. I thought this was really impressive. However, though our house had dial service, the country school which housed grades 1 through 12 was on a telephone exchange from a small village. To make a call from the school, you turned a crank which operated a magneto and lit a light on the operator’s switchboard. You then told the operator who you wanted to call. My home was about 4 miles from the school, but on a different phone company with dial phoned. If I had to make a call from school to home, it was a long distance call and I was charged a dime. The school and our house were on party lines. As much as things change, the voice recognition of my smart phone where I can speak a number is no more convenient than giving the telephone number to the operator.
My son remembers the old days as when he would walk ten feet across the shag carpet to change the television channel.
For those motorists who would like a stick shift car, I sell stick shift conversion kits. I mount a gearshift knob on a toilet plunger. The kir includes a tube of glue. The installation is easy–put the glue on the rubber cup of the plunger and stick it on the floor. I sell these conversion kits for $39.95 plus shipping and handling. If one wants an additional kit for the second car, I will include a second stick shift conversion kit for only an additional shipping and handling charge. This kit will scare off a car thief when he sees the car has been converted to a stick shift.
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It would be even funnier to see the person try to drive a 1908 Ford Model T. “Where’s the starter?” “That would be that crank on front of the car, make sure you are in neutral first.”
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