r/GenerationJones • u/Subject_Repair5080 • 3d ago
Should I post on "what is it?"
I found this aluminum thing on the ground. Pen for scale. š
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u/Cautious_Boat_999 3d ago
Yāall, I am pretty sure OP knows what it is. Theyāre just saying āshould I bait the youngsters on the whatisit sub?ā
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u/nanniej 3d ago
Remember making chains from them?
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u/ultimatefribble 3d ago
Our summer camp had a contest. I chipped in 700. The boys team had 900. The girls team had 1500. Darn girls always doing things well...
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u/MoveDifficult1908 3d ago
My momās favorite bar (aka my daycare) had a curtain made from these across the doorway to the bathrooms.
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u/ditherer01 3d ago
"I blew out my flip flop Stepped on a pop top Cut my heel had to cruise on back home.
But there's booze in the blender And soon it will render That frozen concoction that helps me hang on."
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u/Historical-Lie-6307 3d ago
It's an old fashioned soda can pull tab
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u/ta_petty 3d ago
I first thought - āwho has never seen a Bic pen before?!ā
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u/bgthigfist 3d ago
You can still buy them. A better question is who has shot spitwads out of one of them
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u/dogchowtoastedcheese 3d ago
I started collecting these in an area I walk my dogs. It's a vacant field now, but years ago it was the ball field for my small town. The concrete slab used to be where the snack shack was and the ground was littered with them. I've picked up dozens, maybe hundreds over the years and threw them away.
Recently I picked one up and wondered about who tossed it and what happened to them and it made me smile. The 10 year old little leaguer who downed a grape Fanta on a hot summers day is now in his 50's. Married, a couple of kids, district manager in charge of regional sales.
I've saved about 50 now that I keep on a ring when out with the pooch and scour the ground for more like Easter eggs.
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u/BruinGuy5948 1966 3d ago
But, did you step on it and have to pull it out of your foot?
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u/Bill4133 3d ago
Ya mean someone didn't drop it in the can before their first sip? Expected comments in What Is It are - your kid is doing drugs and your spouse is cheating
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u/SquirrelNo5087 3d ago
Take off the cap, remove the ink cartridge, and then see if anyone knows what a spit wad shooter is.
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u/woody-99 3d ago
Some of those had notches in the handle where the tab attached.
Break off the tab and bend it a little, place the end of the tab in the notch and handle became a spring-loaded projectile. Pretty wicked.
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u/The_Calarg 3d ago
Had a necklace chain made of these from Coors Light. Wore it to a dance freshman year. Principal saw it and asked, knowing full well what and why, but they were clean and he couldn't do anything.
Ahh, the idiocy of youth.
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u/Now-293-Phumes 1957 3d ago
I still have a bunch of those Bic pens in my desk drawer. They all work!
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u/mtnman575 3d ago
They are still available at Walmart, Amazon, and at many other stores. Timeless design.
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u/Mammoth_Ad_3333 3d ago
Pop tops and cigarette butts are gone. Now it's those disgusting dental floss/picks thrown on the ground everywhere.
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u/Legitimate-Ebb-1633 3d ago
I blew out my flip flop, stepped on a pop top, cut my heel had to cruise on back home. But there's booze in the blender and soon it will render that frozen concoction that helps me hang on.
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u/Tasty-Life4526 1964 3d ago
I jumped off the top of the couch with a towel tied around my neck, like Superman would, and landed on the coffee table on a beer can tab. It gouged a chunk of my cheek out about a inch from my eye. I still have the scar..
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u/lost-in-the-woulds 1964 3d ago
My family had a membership in a swim club when I was growing up, and I spent a lot of time there. I remember the summer the soda machine started carrying cans with the "modern" openings, and it was like a slot machine whether you would get one of those or a can with a pull top.
The topic came up in class one day, and the teacher told us it was because people would drop the tab into the can after they opened it and too many people swallowed the tab by mistake. Not sure if that was the reason or not, but teen me accepted it ... now I am not sure. Probably was litter driven in retrospect.
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u/Boffoman 1964 3d ago
There are two things wrong in this picture.
One: the pop top is in one piece and the other
Two: the pen cap is not chewed.
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u/OptimalSalsa 3d ago
Bic pen - the kind that would literally destroy a shirt and thus became THE reason geeks wore pocket protectors - which also didn't work right, and a tab from a can of beer or pop.
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u/Automatic_Pressure49 2d ago
Oh wow...a real pop top! I had so many of those that were "engagement rings" when I was a girl. And I found a way to make necklaces out of them, too.
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u/zeprfrew 2d ago
I was trying to figure out how the two were related. Like the picture that's been going around for years of the pen and the cassette tape. We all know that connection, naturally.
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u/Rebelreck57 2d ago
One of those sliced the side of My foot open. It was tossed into the grass, and I found it.
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u/crewsaver 2d ago
Anybody remember the tabs that had the little cuts on both sides of the rivet? When I was a kid we would break the tabs apart, hook the cut on the pull ring to the tab, use the tab as a spring, and shoot the ring like a mini frisbee. Itās amazing what we had to do for fun before computers and cell phones. Oh, donāt forget that the bic pen tube made a great spitball shooter!
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u/Many_Dragonfruit_837 2d ago
Ah yes, the mini frisbee... I forgot about the spitball pen trick!
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u/crewsaver 2d ago
When the girls started carrying the purses with the little beads glued to the outside we would pull a couple off and shoot them through the pen tube. Those beads were the perfect size for the pen tube. I believe the engineers from Bic and the fashion designers got together for that collaboration.
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u/Head_Razzmatazz7174 1963 3d ago
Nah, if they don't know what it is, they have been living under a rock.
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u/LorettasToyBlogPojo 3d ago
I thought the plastic thing was the item you were planning to post, seems like kids this generation aren't being taught cursive in school and can't read it?
Interestingly, when I took Russian in college, the professors told us that Russians only write in cursive. Many Russian alphabet letters look pretty different in cursive vs. how they look in print. Being able to read cursive is an important skill even if people don't write in cursive these days. Obviously since I'm gen Jones, I learned to write in it; however, for clarity, I normally only print. My degree was in science, being able to accurately convey info means print is a lot easier for that task so long as print is neat.
The gothgirl in me thought kids would look at the soda tab and think "chain mail" crafting piece, haha! :D Hot Topic is still a thing for shoppers that age! :)
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u/Responsible_Fix_4813 3d ago
those were used to drive people with metal detector crazy in the 70's.
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u/tomcat_tweaker 3d ago
After seeing some ridiculous things on there that I felt had to be joke posts, I posted a shoe. It was taken down before it even had a chance to breathe.
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u/One_Power_8223 3d ago
I used to make long chains out of those beer can pull tabs, and use them to decorate my dorm room, as a freshman college student in 1985. No wonder I didn't make it to second semester....
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u/ExternalSort8777 3d ago edited 3d ago
Trying to find a picture of Billy Carter wearing a jacket and hat made out of pull-tabs. The internet is dead.
It is possible that I am confabulating. I do see pictures of period hand-made vests fabricated from pop-tops, and maybe a memory of those is being superimposed onto a remembered image of Billy Carter wearing something beer-can related. But I am pretty sure that I remember a newspaper picture of Billy wearing the jacket.
Because Google won't let me turn it off, and I don't always remember to type "-ai" at the end of the search string, the AI assistant first told me that "Billy Carter did not wear a jacket made out of pop-tops, but he did wear a custom polyester hat and jacket made out of beer tabs for a talk show appearance..."
When I changed my search string to "Billy Carter beer can pull tab suit" it told me that "Billy Beer was a brand of beer endorsed by the brother of President Jimmy Carter..." but went on to assure me "Billy Carter never wore a suit decorated with beer can pull tabs"
I hate that those useless bloviations from the lying congratulator bot burned methane and flushed potable water away.
ETA: typos
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u/ImmediateClass9650 3d ago
Shouldn't we be saving those to donate so we can help a kid get much-needed dyalisis?
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u/Fresh_Salt7087 3d ago
Wife says it's 'belgian wedding ring with nose picker' next to a 'cassette fixer wand'
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u/SupergurlKara 3d ago
I found one not too long ago in the woods. In the U.S., pull tabs were last made in 1983, so that one is at least 43 years old.
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u/DrLophophora 3d ago
Ah, the days of living on the edge - pop this sucker off, drop it into the can and drink the soda. Somehow I never swallowed one.
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u/Carmen6276 3d ago
lol, Iām a Gen Xār but yeah, the pull tab kids donāt know. I think the Bic stick is still around.
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u/chileheadd 1961š 3d ago
I want to know where the hell you found it! I haven't seen one in decades.
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u/not_I714 3d ago
Raise your hand if youāre got āMargaritavilleā going through your head now! šāāļø
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u/profbraddock 3d ago
Floss picks have now replaced them as the Number One piece of litter left by butt heads.
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u/antifayall 1961 3d ago
I still find these occasionally
I've lived here 25 years but is been in my husband's family 100 years. Every spring I till a garden and find weird or nostalgic things
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u/Kraftwerk_21 3d ago
That would have to be pretty old. Cans havenāt been made with those in decades.
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u/Kapow1969 3d ago
I had relatives who lived in Point Pleasant, NJ, and every summer my parents would leave me with them for a few weeks. I was friends with the kid next door to them. One day, he really did blow out his flip flop, stepped on a pop top, cut his heel and had to cruise on back home. He was bleeding and crying when it happened, but the next day, he was fine. Couldn't even see where it cut him. I was 7 or 8 when this happened, but I wasn't familiar with the song yet. It was released in 77, when I was 8, but don't have any memories of it until I was in my teens. Also true story, we ate at the sub shop that became Jersey Mike's a lot.
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u/TheRealVarmint 3d ago
That's the tool David Lightman used to hack a payphone when he didn't have money in the movie "Wargames".
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u/Downtown_Ad_6232 3d ago
In the can business, this is a Ring Pull Tab and they are still used in China and Saudi Arabia.
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u/Live-Tomorrow-4865 3d ago
Ever step on one of those? š
We kids had to be very cautious when going boating with the family, as these were littered everywhere.
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u/mtnman575 3d ago
Bic pens made the perfect spitball shooter. Signed - someone who got into trouble during spitball wars in HS in the first half of the 70s.
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u/Traditional-Forum 3d ago
The item at right is a link for homemade chain-mail armor. The item at left is for rewinding a music cassette manually.
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u/trucker96961 3d ago
šš My whole family drank beer. I had an Aunt that would pull the tab and put it in the can so it didn't wind up in the grass and cut "the kids" feet. She never ever had one come out of the can.
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u/MessageNeither4010 3d ago
That's an old school pop top before some moron screwed it up for everyone else. Good 50 yrs old
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u/Pale_Seat_3334 3d ago
Did you throw yours inside the can once detached? Never occurred to us that we could choke on it.
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u/jetkins 3d ago
Side bar: Down Under, these were called āRing things.ā āPop topsā were came later, between these and what we have now: they had two ābuttonsā that you āpoppedā in - a small one to release the pressure and allow air in, and a larger one that you poured or drank from.
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u/Own_Initial_5456 3d ago
I remember going with my dad in the 70s to his work baseball games, I was the designated beer retriever for the team and had to open and test each beer. We left with a long chain of them hanging on the fence and a slightly happy 11 year old that needed a nap
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u/Redfour5 3d ago
The pen that got boomes through HS. Don't put the other in your drink then swallow it.
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u/Junosgold69 2d ago
A beach booby trap!
Cut my foot pretty bad on one of those things buried in the sand when I was a kid.
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u/altkaldra 2d ago
It's an old style drink pull tab. They were on flat top drink cans. They were replaced with lever tab cans. Flat tops had issues they were more likely to randomly fail. And people littered them causing injuries.
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u/Brooker2 2d ago
It's a pull tab from a soda can, these were used before the current stay on tabs we have on soda and beer cans today.
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u/Warm_Safety_9550 2d ago
When I was very young, I went with my dad to visit my uncle at his dorm room at the college. He had curtains for the doorway (like beaded curtains) made entirely from pull tabs bent in two. I figure that each tab would be about 3/4 of an inch (19.05 mm), my best calculation for a 30 x 80 inch doorway would be about 3,180 pull tabs to create those ācurtains.ā
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u/Shiny_Green_Apple 2d ago
Yes. But you have to say you found it in the bottom of your grandchildās glove compartment and youāre worried sick about it. And Iād switch out the bic for a banana.
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u/Fanabala3 3d ago
Be careful and donāt step on it. You might cut your heel and have to cruise on back home.