The spoiled under-30 crowd!!!

[starlifter]

THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!!


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 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 catalogue!!
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! No where was safe!

There were no MP3' s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music,
you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself!
Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio
and the DJ'd 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 the tape would come undone. cause that's how we rolled dig?

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!

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 mom, your boss, your Bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!!
You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

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'.
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!

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!
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-bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up
we had to use the stove ... Imagine that!

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 or before!

Regards,
The over 30 Crowd

[lawren2]

TOO FUNNY! Thanks I'm sharing that one!

[dougp26364]

No bottled water. You drank water from the tap or garden hose. Anyone remember lawn mowers that were muscle powered? No gas engine, just blades. Forget power walk behind mowers or getting a lawn service to cut your yard. Heck, if you wanted money in the summer, YOU were the lawn service cutting yards. In the winter you prayed for snow so you could make some spending money shoveling driveways.

Four channels on TV (if you had rabbit ears) and, if the president was on, you were done for the night. No DVD players. You watched whatever movie was on one of those four channels. No movie channels. You just used commercials as an excuse to go to the kitchen to get a snack or go to the bathroom.

YOU were your mothers dishwasher.

YOU very well may have been your mothers clothes dryer as well if you had ot hang your laundry on a clothes line. BTW, seems clothes lines are outlawed by most HOA's now. Hows that for energy conservation in the USA. You can't dry you clothes using mother nature if you wanted to, just to save the planet.

If you wanted to go somewhere you had to wait for you dad to get home from work with the car and beg him to take you (a lot of mothers did not drive) or, ride you one speed bike. Only the rich kids had bikes with different speeds.

Malls as I remember them weren't indoors. They were outdoors and you were shopping, not hanging out with friends.

Busy signal? Heck, there was a time you had to pick up the phone and make sure someone else wasn't on the line before you could make a call. Nothing like sharing a phone line (party line) with 4 other households. Especially if one of those households were a little noisy.

How about phones with cords on them? Remember not being able to walk more than 10 ft from the phone because it was attached to the phone body by a cord! In my house there was ONE phone and if it rang, you had to walk all the way to the kitchen to answer it. The answering machine was you writing down the message on a piece of paper.

Forget video games. We had board games like monopoly, risk, stratego, mousetrap et....There was the pool hall but you had to avoid getting caught by your parents if you ventured into one of those. Whatever happened to pinball games? One ball rolling around a deck with different bumpers, bells and lights. If you shook the machine to much, it tilted and your game was done.

All this walk down memory lane makes me wonder what our kids and grandkids will be saying about "the old days" when it's their turn to complain.

[mas]

Originally Posted by dougp26364

...Busy signal? Heck, there was a time you had to pick up the phone and make sure someone else wasn't on the line before you could make a call. Nothing like sharing a phone line (party line) with 4 other households. Especially if one of those households were a little noisy.

How about phones with cords on them? Remember not being able to walk more than 10 ft from the phone because it was attached to the phone body by a cord! In my house there was ONE phone and if it rang, you had to walk all the way to the kitchen to answer it. The answering machine was you writing down the message on a piece of paper.

Touch Tone? What's that? Rotary dial phones were it, I had a friend with a bunch of 9's in his phone #... what a pain

[dougp26364]

Originally Posted by mas

Touch Tone? What's that? Rotary dial phones were it, I had a friend with a bunch of 9's in his phone #... what a pain

Yep, how could I forget. But maybe I'm thinking about the under 40 (or 50) crowd instead of the under 30 crowd.

For that matter, I believe those graduating from high school may never have known a world without home computers. The first typewritter I had wasn't even electric.

[mas]

Originally Posted by dougp26364

... The first typewritter I had wasn't even electric.

When I took typing in high school (mid 60's) there were 2 IBM Selectrics in the classroom, the rest were Royal manuals. You felt pretty special when you got to use the fancy electric typwriters with new fangled strike balls, and no moving carriage!

[dougp26364]

Originally Posted by mas

When I took typing in high school (mid 60's) there were 2 IBM Selectrics in the classroom, the rest were Royal manuals. You felt pretty special when you got to use the fancy electric typwriters with new fangled strike balls, and no moving carriage!

I have to admit my typing class had all IBM Selectrics in it. At the time, I took the class for the credit. I never imagined that typing would become a major part of my life. Way back then I could never imagine myself typing above 35 words per minute and that was on a really good day. I have no idea how fast I type now but I imagine it's at a considerably faster pace.

[Joe L]

Speaking of rotary phones. I remember this lock my parents put on it. It locked into one of the numbers so you couldn't dial. Anyone else remember the lock?

[vintner]

Oh yes, I remember the phone lock, not from home, but I had seen them in businesses.
And no, there were no computers in high school. I did put together some crude form of a computer in Vo-Tech school (now community college).

I remember taking some typing in college, not high school. I think it was the IBM ball style, but really, I can’t remember back that far for school memories. Pretty much anything having to do with school has been cleared from my memory. It wasn’t good being a nerd in school.

Though most of my school years, I did walk to school, and yes, it was up hill both ways, through the snow. And it would snow even in April. After the Junior High School (now they are Middle Schools) burned down, we had split shifts in the high school. I would go to school in the afternoon, and then I would walk my paper route.

[JoAnn]

OK you "kids", I can remember when we only had 4 (that's right FOUR) numbers to dial. There were no prefixes, but they came out when I was in high School and some one from the Bell system came to our school and explained the new system or letters/names and numbers, i.e WELls_1234, or was it just WE-1234?? Some one from the audience (probably a guy ) asked how we were to dial the dash!!!!

When we were first married, we lived with DH's parents on the farm. They did not have a rotary phone...but the old fashioned crank phone. And their "ring" was something like 2 long-1 short. I believe at that time there were 4 others on the line. You could hear the other 3 party liners rings, and you could (and many times did) pick up your phone and listen in. No wonder everyone in that town knew everything about everyone!!!