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.
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 hitting the ripe old age of forty, 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!! Can you say papercuts? And after walking all over the library to find the book you needed, it was usually already checked out.
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 reach them.
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. If you wanted music, you had to find a way to the record store and buy 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 it finished and the tape would come undone and you'd try to wind it back up with your fingers so it wouldn't sound all wobbly next time you popped it in.
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, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances.
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 TV. 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.
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 before 1980!
Circa. 1974 - Check out the TV in the back! On the top is the box to move the antenna on the roof.
2 comments:
LOL, I remember the friends who had that antenna thingy on their roof---you'd turn the dial and hear "CLICKCLICK, CLICKCLICK" as the antenna moved. (why didn't we ever have one??). And, I remember thinking it was so cool when I was old enough to CALL the reference librarian to ask her a question---and, she'd put me on hold to look up the answer! What does that poor woman do now?
The best part was *just* as you'd get a good picture the antenna thingy would keep going and everyone would scream "Hold it! Hold it! Right there" and then you'd have to wait until it came around again. Good times!
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