Published on April 21, 2010 By Locamama In Just Hanging Out

JUst one of those email forwards but I thought it was funny enough to share with the joeuser crowd.  I did not write this so don't be patting me on the back or beating me senseless over the content. 

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning.... Uphill... Barefoot... BOTH ways… yadda, yadda, yadda 

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it! But now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.  You've got it so easy!  I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! 
And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it! 
 
I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet.  If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!   
 
There was no email!!  We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen!   Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there!  Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us.  As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!


There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes!  If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself! 
 
Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!  There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car..  We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby!  Dig?   And those darn EIGHT TRACKS! 
 

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting!  If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it!


 

There weren't any freakin' cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOD !!!  Think of the horror... not being in touch with someone 24/7!!!  And then there's TEXTING.  Yeah, right.  Please!  You kids have no idea how annoying you are.


And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was!  It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent... you just didn't know!!!  You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics!  We had the Atari 2600!  With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'.  Your screen guy was a little square!  You actually had to use your imagination!!!  And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen... Forever!  And you could never win.  The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died!  Just like LIFE!


You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing!  You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!!  NO REMOTES!!!  Oh, no, what's the world coming to?!?!


There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning.  Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks!

 

And we didn't have microwaves.  If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove!  Imagine that!    
And our parents told us to stay outside and play... all day long.  Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort.  And if you came back inside... you were doing chores!  
And car seats - oh, please!   Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on.  If you were luckily, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shot gun" in the first place!   
See!  That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten!  You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or any time before!


Regards,

The Over 30 Crowd


Comments
on Apr 21, 2010

LOL, with the exception of the carseat rant this was excelent. I will be making my 11 year old read this.

on Apr 22, 2010

NO cell phones?  I remember party lines!

I got a kick out of one of these my mother sent me.  In it, the person who wrote it was probably about mid 30s.  They were complaining about ONLY having Atari (not when I was a kid) and having to tape songs off the radio with a cassette (not when my mother was a kid).

on Apr 23, 2010

Yep we're pretty spoiled now days. 

on Apr 26, 2010

My grandmother died in 1986; she was 89 years old.  She not only was alive, but remembered when the Wright Brothers flew for the first time.  She lived to see Armstrong walk on the Moon.  The rate of technological expansion is accelerating every year.  I bought our first calculator in 1976.  It was about three times the size of my daughter's "telephone".  It could add and subtract, multiply and divide, and if you could figure out how, it would give you square roots.  My daughter's phone has more computer power than was available in the whole world when Apollo 13 went to the Moon.  In fact, it has more computer power than the PC I am using right now.  I don't even remember what all I didn't have.

on Apr 26, 2010

I bought our first calculator in 1976. It was about three times the size of my daughter's "telephone". It could add and subtract, multiply and divide, and if you could figure out how, it would give you square roots.

I got my first one when I graduated HS back in 74.  It was the size of 2 decks of playing cards, and that is all it did (add, subtract, multiply, divide).

I got to use my first cell phone back in 95 (it was the employers, but assigned to me).  It was the size of a shoe box!