Obsolete Technology

On my message board, someone posed the question of whether people's kids would recognize an ashtray.

I thought this over. Ed and I do not smoke. Ed's mother smoked, but not around the girls, and she died in 2005. Minnesota doesn't allow smoking in restaurants and bars. Molly and Kiera do have one friend whose father smokes (the little girl down the block) but he may not smoke around his kid, or in the house.

So I pulled up this image and called Molly in to look. "Do you know what that is?" I asked.

(Ed glanced over at my screen and started laughing.)

Molly squinted at it. "Uhhhh," she said, and glanced at me for clues. "It's a....dish?"

"Do you know what it's used for?"

"...water?"

"It's an ashtray," I said.

"That's what an ashtray looks like?" Molly said, incredulous. "I had pictured them as looking like a cookie tray. I mean a cookie sheet. Only smaller."

I pulled up another picture, this one with a cigarette in it, so she could see how people would prop their cigarette in the notch. And then she saw the Google image search results for "ashtray" and was briefly fascinated by the robot gorilla ashtray and the pirate ashtrays, before being sent off to brush her teeth.

It's weird how much has changed in a generation. (My parents never smoked, but I had enough friends with smoker parents that I'd seen plenty of ashtrays by the time I was nine.)