Wednesday, January 16, 2008

To the "spoiled" under 30 crowd...

Even though I'm just barely over 3o.... I can relate! :0)

When I was a kid...

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 BOTH ways...Yadda,yadda,yadda.
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of stories like that on my kids about how hard I had it, and how easy they've got it!

1. When I was a kid, we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the dang library and look it up ourselves...In the card catalog!! (Do you even know what a card catalog is?? Didn't think so!)

2. 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!

3. There were no MP3's or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the dang record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usuallytalk over the beginning and mess it all up!

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

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

6. We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like"Space Invaders" and "asteroids" and the graphics were horrible! Your 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!

7. When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, too bad!

8. Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like15 channels and there was no onscreen menu! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! And 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!

9. And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove or go build a fire ... Imagine that!? If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid JiffyPop thing or a pan with HOT oil and Real popcorn kernels and shake it all over the stove forever like an idiot.

10. When we were on the phone with our friends and our parents walked-in, we were stuck to the wall with a cord, a 7 foot cord that ran to the phone-not phone base, the actual phone. We barely had enough length to sit on the floor and still be able to twirl the phone cord in our fingers. If you suddenly had to go to the bathroom - guess what we had to do..... Hangup and talk to them later.

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled!! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980!

Regards,
The over 30 Crowd

3 comments:

Shawna said...

OMG!!! This is absolutely hilarious! I love it.

Shawna said...

OMG!!! This is absolutely hilarious! I love it.

Anonymous said...

I'm under thirty (just turned 28), and these all apply to me as well, so maybe we should say under 25?

I grew up with no internet (and I still know how to look things up in a card catalog by subject, author, or title, by the way), no email (AND our mailbox was down our 1/2-mile gravel driveway, which was fun when it snowed), only record albums (not even many tapes at that point), no caller ID or call waiting, only Atari 2800 or 7600 (we had both and, to be honest, I miss it), no cable at all (not even those 15 channels), no microwave AND no Jiffy-Pop, and a corded phone that would fall off the wall or table (depending on which one you were on) if you so much as sneezed while talking on it.

As for stadium seating, I've never had much luck in a movie theater, either before or after stadium seating, because I've always been on the short side--and the tall guy always sits right in front of me (and the stadium seating doesn't help when you're a foot shorter than the person in front of you anyway.) Of course, we never got to go to the movies much anyway, since that was ALL THE WAY IN TOWN, which was a good hour away.

So...I'm just barely UNDER 30, but I also relate. Maybe it depends on where you grew up, too, though...

jess