Issue raised by confused Gen Z hotel guest leaves thousands feeling older than ever: 'What on earth is THIS?'
A young traveller's innocent query about a strange wall socket in their French hotel suite has triggered a wave of nostalgic panic online - with thousands admitting they felt 'older than ever' after reading it.
The British hotel guest posted a photo of a wall plate featuring a small rectangular opening marked with the word 'Legrand' - a well-known French manufacturer of electrical fittings - and asked: 'What is this thing?'
Sharing the image with a Euro coin for scale, the confused traveller added on Reddit: 'It almost looks like the sort of thing that you slide a security chain into - but it's nowhere near the door or windows.
'I'm British and travel fairly extensively, particularly on the continent, but I don't think I've ever seen one of these before.'
To anyone born before the smartphone era, the answer was obvious: it's a landline telephone socket.
The device was once a common fixture in nearly every home, hotel room and office around the world.
But for younger generations, it's nothing short of a relic.
'Damn, that's hitting the getting old target really hard,' one user wrote.
'That's a phone socket for house phones. Not sure what the word is in English. Landline phone?'
Another joked, 'I'm feeling older every day… That was the socket used to plug landline telephones. Welcome to the 20th century.'
The socket in question is known in France as a 'prise en T' - a T-shaped telephone jack developed by the French postal and telecom service.
Similar to the UK's BT-style plug or Australia's RJ11 ports, it was designed for analog landline phones before digital and mobile technology took over.
Once a lifeline for everyday communication, landline phones have slowly fallen out of use over the past two decades, as mobile phones became more affordable and accessible.
In Australia, the shift began in earnest in the mid-2000s.
By 2010, mobile phones had already overtaken landlines as the primary form of communication.
Today, fewer than half of Australian households maintain a fixed phone line - with most of those used by older residents or for emergency services.
In 2022, data from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) showed that just 34 per cent of households still had a home phone service connected - and many of those were bundled as part of internet plans rather than used regularly.
One commenter summed up the mood best: 'It's wild to think that kids today won't even know what a dial tone sounds like. We used to trip over cords in the hallway, now you barely see a house phone anywhere.'
While telephone sockets like the one in the French hotel room are still technically functional - and may even connect to a working line in some properties - their presence today is more often decorative or leftover from another era.
As one Aussie wryly put it: 'It's official. We're old. The landline is now a museum piece.'
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Daily Mail
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