Since Sahara brought up age, I decided to be naughty in a different way this week.A friend sent this to me in an email and I altered it slightly. If you are 30 or older, you will think this is hilarious! If not, send it to your parents! They’ll think it’s funny! Don’t show it to anyone under 30, they will only roll their eyes at you and sigh just like you used to do to your parents.
It happened to all of us when we were kids—adults boring us to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up. I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on 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, actually over the age of forty but who’s counting, 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.
When I was a kid, we didn’t have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves… In the card catalog! Do you even know what a card catalog is? Didn’t think so!
There was no email. *gasp* We had to actually write somebody a letter… With a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street to put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there.
There were no MP3’s or Napster. 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 mess it all up! Of course, that was back when they still played music on the radio instead of just talking all the time.
All this instant news and live videos of events unfolding just didn’t happen. You had to stay awake until 11pm to watch the news on TV or wait until the paper got delivered in the morning to find out what was going on.
They invented something great called MTV (Music Television) that played music videos 24/7. What happened to the music videos? Now MTV is nothing but reality shows.
We didn’t have fancy stuff like call waiting or voice mail! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal and had to call back, that’s it.
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, a collections agent, you just didn’t know! You had to pick it up and take your chances.
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 the 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… Hang up and talk to them later.
Cell phones, forget about it. You had to walk until you found a payphone that worked and scrounge up the cash to make a call.
We didn’t have any fancy Sony Play Station or X-Box video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600, baby. 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.
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, you were just screwed!
Some of us had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu! For those of us who didn’t have cable we only had 3 maybe 4 channels and if the president was on it was on the 3 good channels. To find out what was on you had to use a little book called a TV Guide. 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!
And we didn’t have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! 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.
For the writers. There were no computers with lovely programs like MS Word that underlined possible errors and checked your spelling. You had to stick a piece of correction tape in there and type over your mistakes. And you couldn’t cut and paste paragraphs with a few keystrokes when you typed on a manual typewriter. Editors didn’t tack on electronic comments that could be removed. They got out a red pen and marked up the page, which you now had to retype.
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
