Any young resident will tell you that they’re tired of stories about the good old days of medicine—times when doctors didn’t have to ask twice for something, when they had practices of their own, and when the residents weren’t so lazy. But you shouldn’t always view the past through rose-coloured glasses.

Medicine had some recent dark days—ones that Millennial and Generation Z doctors will never comprehend. Practising medicine in recent decades often required a lot more patience, a lot less technology, and much more paper. Here are 5 scenarios that young doctors will never understand.

Scenario 1: Beeper blues

Prior to the advent of smartphones—or even cell phones—doctors had a different wireless device holstered at their hips. The beeper, or pager, was a mainstay among doctors.

These primitive cellular devices would alert doctors to call a number, which would display on the pager’s calculator-like display. Then, payphone panic would ensue. Doctors would scramble to find the nearest payphone or ask a nearby business or homeowner to borrow their phone.

Because pagers were limited by their simple prompt to call a number, it was impossible for doctors to weigh the sense of urgency behind the page. It could be because a patient needed a prescription refill, or because they were on the verge of death.

Scenario 2: Fax freakout

The fax machine is quickly becoming a primitive telecommunication device of a bygone era. But not too long ago, these clunky, jam-prone machines were the bane of many doctors’ existence.

In the days of dial-up modems, your fax machine would call another over a landline connection. Once a connection was established, the machine would slowly scan the document you were transmitting, then send it to the other machine, where it would print out. What could go wrong?

Well, lots of things. Suppose you had the wrong number. You might have just sent private medical information to a bad actor. Or, suppose someone picked up the phone mid-transmission. That would interrupt the process and you would have to start over. Sometimes the line you were calling would be busy. Doctors would have to wait to send the fax until later.

Going even further into the dark past, instead of using plain white paper, some fax machines used a receipt-like paper that curled on itself. Try quickly scanning a document for vital medical information that you also have to unscroll.

Scenario 3: Who the heck wrote this?

Many doctors curse their EHRs. But here’s something many won’t miss: deciphering cryptic doctor handwriting. The days of paper charts often meant trying to figure out what the doctor from the previous shift meant when he scrawled some runes across a patient’s chart.

Doctors in private practice faced an additional burden: where to store thousands of paper charts. Many had entire rooms devoted to paper medical charts with movable shelves that support staff moved with giant hand-cranked wheels.

Veteran surgeons can regale you with stories of hours spent leaning over an operating table during an arduous, marathon surgery. Procedures like these were hard on the hands and the back—not to mention hard on patients. Surgeons sometimes had to forgo complex procedures, due to a patient’s age, the state of their immune system, or if they were undergoing other treatments, such as infusion therapy.

The advent of robotic-assisted surgery changed that. Devices such as the da Vinci Surgical System allow doctors to operate from a seated position near the operating table. Robotic surgery is often less invasive, helps patients heal faster, and often leads to higher patient quality of life.

Scenario 5: Hurry up and wait

Pretty much everything is faster now. Millennial and Generation Z physicians don’t have as much experience with waiting. But being a doctor used to require a bit more patience—particularly with lab results. In the 1980s, it could take 90 minutes for a chemistry panel to arrive in the emergency department, and up to 5 hours for more complex lab tests. And patients seeing their doctors in private practice often had to wait days.