Riding in the car with the windows rolled up and them smoking away.

115 comments

Also, car seats in the 70s:
- My boomer bitch ass parents used to complain about us needing a few minutes to strap a car seat into a car in the 2010's.
  "We didn't need car seats when we were babies and we survived."
  They were fucking obnoxious.
  
  Did you point out that they have brain damage from lead poisoning and it might be compromising their ability to think?
  
  Survivorship bias. The ones that died aren’t there to contradict them.
  
  What a dumb thing to say honestly. My sisters boyfriend bought a old stupid pickup truck that doesn't have seatbelts. He's so proud of the fact that he doesn't need seatbelts. I think it's the main reason that he wanted that car. He drives around his children in it, and the previous owner had it all prepared that you could put in seatbelts, but he would rather die than use seatbelts. Same with helmets. They bought ebikes to go on rides, and everyone wears a helmet except for him. Hy sister tells him all the time to wear one. She has him as far now that he takes a helmet with him, but he's not wearing it. A almost 50 year old man doesn't want to look uncool on his bike.
  
  It's always fun when a relative admits they don't care about your child's safety.
  
  Survivor bias right there.
- The last thing you want in a car accident is one whole baby flying into the front seat area.
- Sliced clean in three
- I remember being maybe 6 and napping on the "shelf" between the back seat and rear glass if my parents' boat of a Cadillac. Not like there were seat belts to keep me in place.
- As if anyone used car seats. Most people didn't use the seat belt.
- You didn't need much since your car was 6000 pounds of solid steel that would go right through a house without you even feeling it.
  
  That, or you'd get crushed alive since the car wasn't designed to actually protect you...
  https://youtu.be/C_r5UJrxcck
- Your parents didn't just stuff you in the back window?
- Also, house seats in the 20s:

I remember whenever you went to a sit down restaurant you had to tell the person seating you if you wanted smoking or non-smoking. As if it mattered lol.
- Our favorite restaurant* growing up had a little corner with like 3 tables as the non smoking section. We'd go there because my kindergarten teacher and her husband owned it.
  *Bar that served food
  
  We're cool, we allow these pesky non smokers here.
- more egregiously, plane tickets!
  
  Actually, most planes from that era circulated air front to rear and smoking was always the rear section, and the entire cabin's air was renovated every 1-3 minutes, so unless you were seated in the row immediately before smoking, you didn't get smoke.
- One of the last times i was in a restaurant where indoor smoking was still a thing, the waitress asked us if we want to be seated in a smoking or non smoking section. We picked non smoking, because, gross. We were right on the line between smokers and non smokers, and i sat back to back to a guy who chainsmoked when we were eating.

This was my grandma man. She died at 98 smoking until the very end. She used to drive a 1972 Lincon Continental I would ride in the back seat with no chair or seat belt as she chain-smoked filterless Camels and spit dip into a Styrofoam coffee cup.
Edit: I called Camels "cowboy killers" but those were Marlboros and that's what my mom smoked. Grandma didn't dig filters because "that's how you get cancer."
- To be fair back in those days I believe filters were made containing asbestos. Your grandma was a smart cookie!
  Edit: This was actually the 50s
- Grandma didn't dig filters because "that's how you get cancer."
  That was true for a time. I think it was the 50's when cigarette companies were using asbestos for their filters.
  
  I think that was actually some other horrible lung disease.
- Living to 98 is pretty darn impressive for a smoker
  
  Yeah, she was a tough old woman. She was the exception to the smoking rule for sure. She chain-smoked, dipped, and drank whiskey all day lol out lived two husbands and one child.
- I had an uncle that smoked like it was a cure for cancer and would sit over a sprayer tank pouring chem in there with a smoke hanging out the side of his mouth and no gloves on. Washed his hands with gasoline to get the grease off.
  Lived to 95.

People are still doing "Nobody:" memes? They don't even make sense. This would be improved 100% by removing the "Nobody:" line.
- Nobody:
  Absolutely no-one:
  CrayonRosary: Nobody and no-one suck!
- Imo they are trying to set the tone.
  I would go with “meanwhile” personally
  
  Meanwhile... decades in the past? Still doesn't make sense.
- People want everything to be reddit so hard.

There's all these iconic photos of Walt Disney where he's pointing at stuff with a two finger point. I've heard that some within the company say that this is the example by which their resort employees always use the two finger point to direct guests.
In reality, he was holding a cigarette and the photos have been airbrushed. He died of lung cancer in 1966. Pointing with two fingers is just seen (kind of universally across cultures) as being non-accusatory. Like, say you saw someone talking to someone else and you cannot hear them (or it's in a language you don't understand); they're pointing with one finger in your direction, you may be inclined to think they're talking about you. If they're using the two finger point, you're less likely to think that... it's the same for airliner flight crew.
- I'm a former cast member, can confirm. During Traditions (company culture and job orientation/training), they're taught to point with two fingers for exactly the reason you point out, and Walt Disney is shown pointing like that in the slides. They don't tell you, but most people eventually figure out, that there's a cigarette photoshopped out of his fingers.
  
  Traditions! That's what it's called! Couldn't for the life of me remember.
  Where'd you work? I was a monorail pilot down in Orlando.
- Pointing with two fingers is just seen (kind of universally across cultures) as being non-accusatory.
  womp, citation needed. not to be a downer but this would be waaaay way too interesting if true to let it be said without some grounds
  
  Sorry, was drunk when writing that. Meant it to be implied that this is what companies tell their employees about why they do it.
- That's an interesting insight into human behavior that I never thought of.
  I remember a long time ago, I was at Boston South Station with my then-girlfriend. We were looking at a monitor on the wall trying to spot when our train home would come in, and I pointed at it to show her.
  A nearby homeless woman then informed me that it's unpolite to point. That always stuck with me. She was standing right in front of the screen...but now I know, I should've used two fingers.

This is what my mom drove in the 80s-90s.

This is where i would lie down...
- Dang, was your mom single then? (I'm on my way inventing a time machine).
  I had a similar experience in the 90s, but with a non-cool car - parents bought a TV & to fit it in a tiny car they had to put the back seats down ... which left the trunk for me (in a 5-door car, but still, highway speeds, and when I pointed out the safety issues they just said to hold on to a seatbelt ... ?).
  The same parents ultra-terrified of me getting in a car accident with anyone (because others are terrible drivers), and to this day terrified I'll crash my car each and every time Im in it ... the patents that totaled a few cars vs me never in an accident and almost keeping up with professional kart racers (well, ""almost"", and even that on my best few laps before ahdh starts fighting me entering a corner).
  \ Oh, and also the same parents I have to buy tires for against their will & have a few fights with to get them changed.
- What was this car again? I remember this.
  
  87 Mazda rx7

I remember my parents having guests. Everyone smoking.
There was so much smoke that it pushed the clean air down and made a distinct separation.
There was about 2 feet of clear air at the floor.
- I actually miss bar fog

Straight up my parents did this all the way into the early 2000s
They really didn't give a fuck about other people
- I was thinking the other day about how in my 80s childhood that we were taught to avoid "dirty old men". Like nobody did anything about men preying on children, they just told you to avoid them. We had a neighbour growing up who had lost his teaching job for exposing himself to his students, and he also exposed himself to several other people in the neighbourhood, and did a lot of other creepy antisocial things (like abduct my cat and dump her outside of town, or put a sandwich bag over her head), and yet I was sent to piano lessons with his wife, where sometimes he would wander into the room in his underwear. If that was someone today he'd be on a sex offender list and in jail, but my parents thought it would be rude not to send me there for lessons.
  We also had a guy who roamed around naked in the woodlot behind the grade school. I thought it was an urban legend and then I saw him myself one day when I was crossing the bridge overhead.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Survivorship-bias.svg/1024px-Survivorship-bias.svg.png

I don't think we could have made the progress with smoking in the US now like we did back then. Would have turned into a partisan issue about freedoms and all that.
- Oh, there were plenty of people throwing a fit about it back in the 90s too. The only difference is no one had social media to go find one another and rile each other up. The few foaming at the month couldn't shout loud enough. You should have heard my bio dad at the time frothing he couldn't walk into the grocery with a lit cigarette. Apparently the communists had won.
  
  They did have Rush Limbaugh crowing about smoking bans, but the lung cancer that eventually killed him makes it harder to take his advice

I remember the first time I was at someone's house and they asked a visitor who who was about to light up to take it outside. It seemed so.odd. My mom, grandmother and aunts would sit around the dining room table with a thick haze. Nobody thought nothing of it
- Like Plato allegedly said: "The unexamined life is not worth living"

Nobody:

in the '70s/'80s*

My parents ,much of my family, as well as most of their friends smoked indoors, in their cars, and even in restaurants. Despite living in near poverty for parts of my childhood, they chain smoked cartons of cigarettes a week. Must have been expensive.
I wish I could say that they stopped smoking, but no. The worst part for them isn't even the fact that they know that it has taken at least a decade or more off their lives. It's the realization at how much they are missing out on near the end of their lives and how difficult it is living with debilitating health issues from smoking. They simply cannot do what other people their age take for granted.
And to the title of the post: Yes, I was the kid in the car while my parents chain smoked cigarettes. Sometimes they rolled the windows down, though I'm not sure if that was better since it meant the ashes and red hot "cherry" would inevitably come flying back in and smack me in the face.
- Remember how everything smelled like cigarettes? Like that was the smell of the 80s.
  
  Where I live, the indoor smoking bans started in the early 2000s. Before then, people that went to bars and clubs ended the night smelling like cigarette smoke whether they themselves were smokers or not. Sometimes even eating out at a restaurant would leave you smelling like a smoker. Back in those days, though, I was still so used to it that dealing with it was second nature.
  For most of my life the smell didn't really bother me, but I've found that within the past 5 years or so it does.
  As a child, I guess I just grew up with it, so it didn't bug me much. I hated being teased about it at school, which was a regular thing. I also used to hate how the tar would build up on the walls of our house to the point where it would form tear-like patterns. My parents kept an otherwise reasonably clean and tidy house, but for some reason THAT didn't bother them, so periodically I'd spend a few hours scrubbing our walls to get rid of the stains and cut down on the smell a bit.

Still that way when I was a baby in the 90s, and when my niece/nephew were coming up in the early 2000s their mom would smoke while nursing them
- Ah, yes, the beekeeper pacification technique.
  
  Image won't load for me and I desperately want to know what it was lol

This photo could be straight out of my photo album. This looks just like my dad, in hair, beard, clothes, and ciggie.

A friend of mine tells a funny story about how shortly after seatbelts became mandatory, he was jumping around in the front seat of his mom’s car while driving and she asked him several times to belt up.
Being a kid, he refused and finally she tapped the brakes. He does this hilarious impression of eating the dashboard and needles to say he started wearing the seatbelt from then on.

Four out of five doctors recommend Marlboro cigarettes. The fifth one would too, if he weren't currently in the hospital with all this unrelated lung cancer.

What's Donald Duck doing back there
- Yes, this!?!
  \ Just what or who wiped which (curly?) part on the curtains to make that pattern?!

My wife's family used to mop the walls as part of cleaning.
It wasn't until she moved out that she twigged that non-smokers don't have to do that.
We'd all put on our scruffiest clothes before visiting my granddad, because they'd be going straight into the washing machine the second we got back. No wonder he kept giving us money, he probably thought we were poor as dirt.
- I was the same way when I visited smoking family, I'd strip at the door and hit the shower when I got home.
  Mopping the walls, my God.

You can probably just replace "nobody" with "everybody"

I wonder if the reason I see duplicate memes on All is because a lot of people have blocked lemmy.ml and other large instances
- Lemmy.ml is the wayer coming out of a full ashtray when you pour stale beer on it.

I remember my mom pushing me into the footwell when we were about to hit the ditch in a snowstorm, of course I wasn't wearing my lap belt, I mean, who did?
I wouldn't ride with her for a week after that, she was quite offended.

What’s that noise? I’m sure I heard something.
-Last recorded words of Rodney Jenkins before he was attacked by Howard the Duck

That was the "Me" generation after all

And lead gasoline

My mum's got a great anecdote about how the doctor came around about my cough when I was a newborn, and he came into a room full of local mums all fawning over me in my cot and chugging away.