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Let the Two Teens Dumbfounded by a Rotary Phone Force You to Contemplate the March of Time

Let the Two Teens Dumbfounded by a Rotary Phone Force You to Contemplate the March of Time

Last year, Kevin Bumstead posted a video that features the simplest setup in the world: two teens have four minutes to make a phone call on a rotary telephone. But the simplest premises sometimes lead to the deepest, most existential questions.

Because this is much more than two teen boys fumbling with a piece of technology so foreign to their understanding of the world it may as well be one of Indiana Jones’ three trials in The Last Crusade. It is also a meditation on the relentless march of time and the way everything you know and love will one day be rendered strange and incomprehensible. Your favorite gadget. Your slickest device. None of it is any match for time.

Time — like these boys, who figure the phone out at the buzzer — is undefeated. It is coming for us all.

 

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