Hey Kids!!

[Gob]

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... Barefoot. 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 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!

1) 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!!

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! Stamps were 10 cents!

3) 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!

4) 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!

5) 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?

6) 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!

7) 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 GOSH !!! 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.

8) 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!

9) 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!

10) 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?!?!

11) 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!

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


13) 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!


14) And car seats - oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were lucky, 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 1970 or any time before!

Regards, The Over 40 Crowd

[@meric@nwom@n]

[dales]

Yes, I recall having those exact same ruminations almost 20 years ago.

[Lord Jim]

That brought back memories...

I related a very similar experience three years ago on the CSB:


A couple of years ago, the WP and I were watching television when the remote went missing...

I thought this would be a great opportunity for a "teaching moment "...

"You know", I said, "When I was a little boy, we didn't have a TV remote...."

I continued, warming to my theme:

"We didn't have phones we could carry around in our pockets either...or phones in the house you could walk around with...the only phones we had were tied by a wire to the wall...

"Not only that, we only had six television stations we could watch, and when we wanted to watch TV, we had to get up and change the channel on the television...

"And if we wanted to watch a movie, like the Wizard of Oz (our personal favorite) we couldn't just put it in our DVD player and watch it whenever we wanted to...we either had to see it in a movie theater, or wait till it came on one of the TV channels...

"Also, we didn't have any computers, or any video games...

She didn't say anything for a moment, and then looked at me with great concern and said in a whisper:

"Daddy....were you poor?"

ARRGHH!!!

And then I burst out laughing...

It was at that moment, I realized I was starting to do something I swore I would never do ....

I was starting to sound like my father...

I remembered my father telling me about how when he was a kid there was no television; they all listened to the radio...

And I remembered thinking...great...a whole bunch of people sitting around staring at a big brown box...

That must have been a party...

[loCAtek]

I remember 'hanging on' in the back seat. I swear to gawd, the way my Dad drove, he was trying to fling us kids out the windows, so he'd have less mouths to feed.
We did not call 'shotgun'. At the announcement of 'Gettin the car!' we'd all race, kicking' and scratching at each other, to get a seat with one of those 'oh shit!' straps by it. From when I was small, the technique was to stand on the seat and brace yourself with your planted feet in a wide 'V', and the strap wrapped firmly around the back of your wrist and hand. You did not just hold it, you used it to pull yourself as closely to the wall of the car as you could, to provide further bracing. It was like preparing for a shuttle launch.


Elmo as entertainment on the headrest DVD? Ha! You were the entertainment! With so many rug rats, one or two would always be left in the middle of the back seatbench with nothing to hang on to, and those were the ones my Dad would play human pinball with, by swerving and breaking as hard as possible. The goal was to knock heads together because then *ping* he scored bonus points!

I don't even remember us actually going anywhere; we'd just get in the car and scream an yell as we got bounced off the flippers and bumpers, much to Dad's amusement.
I think I used to have a dog, a few cuzzins and another brother who got ejected on some of those rides. Thinking back, there were three of us who survived to adulthood, I may have had as many as 8 siblings prior to those days of whine and road rash.
When he was done and bored, we'd hear 'Get outta the car!' and be dumped out on the driveway to fend for ourselves till the next quarter tank. Game Over!

[Captain_Obvious]

You know, growing up I really never got the 'when I was your age we didn't have...' speech... not until I was much older... However, I did get the "color was invented when I was twelve" speech... thanks to my little eyes noticing that the picture of my dad as a (gasp) little kid was indeed in black and white.

I would have prefered, "We had to walk fifteen miles in fifteen feet of snow to school, uphill... BOTH WAYS!"

[Miles]

Don't feel too bad your older brother and sister fell for it too.