The Good Old Day!

Received this in an email, but how true it is :)

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.... in snow or good weather....BOTH ways… yadda, yadda, yadda....

And 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 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 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 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 and couldn't "google" it. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library (by bus) and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen, on paper! 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 a**! Nowhere was safe! And, if you got one down the street, there was another one waiting on you when you made it home!

There were no MP3's or downloading any tune ever recorded for free or iTunes and put like 5,000 songs on your iPod, or Zune! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike or ride your bike or take a bus to the record store and shoplift it yourself! Only the bravest of the brave stole music because it was very hard hiding an album the size of a turkey platter under your jacket....

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! 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 sometimes the tape would come undone winding itself around the innards of the tape player rendering the tape useless. Cause, hey.... that's how we rolled, baby! ....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!

There weren't any freakin' cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a 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.

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!

There were no such places as Second Cup, Seattle's Best Coffee or Starbucks where you order up a Caramel Macchiato made from amazing coffee beans from all around the world fixed up with nonfat milk, sugar-free vanilla syrup topped off with caramel drizzle. Our parents bought cheap off-brand, generic coffee that tasted of burnt molasses.

We didn't have any fancy PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had 'Pong' (let's not go there because even describing it would bore you to death) and then later the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination (can you imagine that, I didn't think so)!!! 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 lazy butt and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh my goodness, what's the world coming to?!?!

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! You know, that big metal box in the kitchen with fire on top! Imagine that!

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!

And car seats - oh, paw..lease! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were luckily, 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 the 1980’s or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 40 Crowd