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By now, we graybeards should have stopped declaring that the good old days were always good.

Our grandchildren are our reality check.

“Oh, so you thought TV with rabbit ears was so great, Grandpa? Well, now we have 1,000 channels on cable.”

“Oh, so you thought a cross-country train was a big deal, Grandma? Now we can make that trip in five hours.”

As for rotary-dial phones and physicians who made house calls, it’s a guaranteed eye roll.

Smug, aren’t they, those babies with smooth skin and their original hair color?

But one product allows oldsters to strut their stuff and prove that the old days were inventive, clever and effective.

Carbon paper.

I recently proved this at a social occasion brimming with 20-somethings. I made a passing reference to this former office staple — that filmy wonder that was dull on one side and inky on the other.

In my first job, I trumpeted, I would type a memo — and make a copy for the file using carbon paper.

My 20-something conversation victim gave me a blank look. “What’s carbon paper?” she asked.

Oh, my. Really?

Here came a three-minute rhapsody: Before carbon paper, I told this poor unsuspecting soul, contemporaneous copies were impossible.

Before carbon paper, secretaries would have to type a letter — and then type it all over again to make a file copy.

Before carbon paper, government was perhaps one-tenth as efficient.

Before carbon paper, book manuscripts had to be typed a second time. For example, Ulysses is 730 pages long. Imagine the effort that James Joyce had to exert to make a copy before he sent the original off to his publisher.

By now, my conversation partner was turning glassy-eyed. So, in an effort to be honest, I spelled out some of carbon paper’s negatives.

It was hard to handle. It tended to slither through one’s fingers and slide into a curly heap on one’s desk.

It was dirty to handle. If you grabbed a piece of carbon paper at the wrong place, your fingers would immediately become dark.

It tended to clump and crease. If not perfectly smooth, the carbon paper would duplicate some words but blot out others with a great big black streak.

It was somewhat expensive. If memory serves, a box of carbon paper — maybe 100 sheets — cost more than double what a box of plain paper cost 50 years ago.

It was invented in 1805 and never changed. Go ahead, name another product that wasn’t improved across 200-plus years.

If you made an error as you typed, you had to start all over again. Or battle with ineffective erasers.

It didn’t really work all that well. Yes, you’d get a copy of what you typed. But it was often blurry and faint.

And yet…when you slid a piece of carbon paper between Sheet One and Sheet Two, you got the feeling that you were truly typing for the ages (even if you weren’t).

When you re-used a piece of carbon paper — and you could, a few times — you were being frugal.

When you used several pieces of carbon paper to make several copies at once, you were bringing the whole office into the picture in much the same way that an email message does today.

Back came the millennial rejoinder to all this: Photocopies are much faster, cleaner and easier, said this callow youth. Yes, they are, I admitted.

On a computer, all you have to do is hit a couple of keys and you have a digital copy forever, she said. Yes, true, I acknowledged.

Besides, she asked, as if to skewer me once and for all, when’s the last time you made a carbon copy, Bob?

She had me there.

Or did she? That night, I went to forward an email to friends. In the copy field, it said “cc.”

Three guesses what “cc” stands for.

 Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.