This story was found in my inbox this morning, author unknown. I thought this was cute in lieu of what Denise was just talking about over at her blog about Making Do!
The Near Extinct Card Catalog
The Spoiled Under 30 Crowd
"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!
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 in heck 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 dang Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you'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 usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up!
4. 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!
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't know!!! 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, you were just screwed!
8. Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 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 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.
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"
I'm ducking now - ;D if you've just got to throw something make it hundred dollar bills, won't you?
January 15th, 2008 at 08:39 pm 1200429546
LOL!
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June 26th, 2008 at 05:25 pm 1214501106
When I was a kid, circa 1935, we didn't have the Internet either, but no one told me about the library. No one told me that it was a place of learning and the world could be mine if I used that library correctly. Everyone was too busy wondering where their next meal was coming from.
My mother and I were on what was then called Home Relief. My father had taken off two months before I was born so my mother and I were at the mercy of the State of New York. In those days, mercy was pretty scarce. We would receive a Home Relief check every month for about $20.00 as I recall, but we didn't have to buy food with that if we liked potatoes. We could go down to the Home Relief store with the sawdust on the floor and get a 10 pound bag of potatoes as part of our Home Relief benefits. So, with our $20.00 we would live on things like SPAM, which was only ten cents a can.
I can't remember how, but we managed to buy a radio, which was really a luxury. We would sit around, stare at the radio and listen to programs such as The Shadow, The Green Hornet and, of course, The Lone Ranger. My mother and I used to go to the movies a lot. Movie theaters charged ten cents for adults and five cents for kids. You would see TWO feature films, a newsreel and a cartoon. It was quite a good deal, but not as good as on Saturday afternoons. You would get your two feature films and maybe two or three cartoons, but the greatest treat was, you got the current chapter of whatever serial was playing. Flash Gorden would do battle with Ming the Merciless or maybe it was Superman doing battle with Lex Luthor. Today . . . well, when you take nostalgia into the equation, it ain't nearly as much fun going to the movies and if you take the cost of a movie ticket, parking fees and gasoline into the equation, it ain't no fun at all.
Today kids MUST have a cell phone. How could any young person possibly survive without a cell phone? My mother and I didn't get a telephone actually in the house until I was eighteen years old and, believe it or not, it was one of the biggest moments in my life. Instead of standing up in a phone booth I could actually talk to my friends while I was sitting in the livingroom. It didn't get any classier than that for an eighteen year old at that time. Today's kids can look back at that time and snigger, but with all the friends I had, no one drove drunk, no one took any form of drugs, no one got pregnant and, best of all, no innocent kid ever got shot in a drive by shooting.
When you take into consideration the really important things, life was a helluva lot better back then.