OBSOLETE: Remember the show “Duck Dynasty”? Phil Robertson said once on that show, “I’m a low-tech man in a high-tech world.”

Looking at the list of things that have become obsolete, we might be right there with him.

Land-line telephones and fax machines — both of which are still in use in our office. Well, when the fax machine decides to cooperate. Typewriters. There’s at least one of those at The Era offices as well. 

Phone books. Yep, we still have those, too.

Calculators. OK, so there are probably some in the office. Sometimes, when you are talking on the landline phone, texting someone on your cellphone, and taking notes on your computer, a calculator comes in handy. (We’re not joking. Budget time of year for municipalities means lots of math for us.)

Floppy disks and pagers aren’t in use, but we wouldn’t be surprised if some exist in the office somewhere.

DVDs. This one bothers us a bit. There are a lot of people in McKean County, and likely other rural places, who don’t have the internet, and rely on DVDs for entertainment. 

Other obsolete things on the list include cassette tapes, VHS tapes, encyclopedias, maps, video stores, standalone GPS devices, iPods, Walkmans and buttons on a phone.

We imagine CDs would be on lists of obsolete things, too, but we still like listening to them in the car. There are places in the region where your internet signal isn’t going to come in for things like Sirius XM or Spotify, but your CD doesn’t cut out.

We’ve talked about rural life and how it’s different from life elsewhere. Having a backup plan like DVDs for when the internet is out is part of that.