Growing up without a cell phone
 

There are more than a few of us who can relate:p

If you are 40, or older, you might think this is hilarious!

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 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!




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

Hehe. Good stuff. My mom was good with the "safety arm".

Pay phones, man...


KT

When I was a kid, the 40year old adults did not play computer games like they do to day. How many of you old farts (40+) play games? I do not. When we needed to see porn or just some pictures of tits, you had to go to the mag. section and hope an adult or workman would not see you and scream at you, "Hey kid, put the dirty magazine down. How old are you?" Now, just wait out your parents or hide in the garage with a lap top and smack that monkey.

Hold on, my pager is beeping...


KT

that is a pretty funny list

Hey, just think of what today's kids will tell their kids they didn't have at their age when they are over 40! We couldn't have imagined the stuff they have today when we were kids.

What is this "card catalog" you speak of...is that like Wikipedia? :)

it's like punch card but without all the holes

But we had 8-track and our slide rules were much nerdier than calculators.

I am looking forward....
To hearing Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane in the nursing home.
:)
Good list by the way.

#6. That came out about 1980 to where I lived. One of my buddies had it. We used to knock him off the mainframe by calling his house, which would interrupt his modem. We would then proceed to dial in...NERDS!

#10. There were remotes. Our cable box had a big long wire for changing the channel! One thing was, even with 30 channels, there was nothing on during daytime. You really needed to be sick to stay home during the week. Daytime TV was a waste land of bad talkshows, soap operas, gameshows and dialing for dollars...

#12. Microwave ovens were definitely around. We were the last ones in our neighborhood to get one, around 1978.

Shall I regale you with stories of cranking the handle on the telephone to reach the switchboard or someone else on your party line? Actually, I only had to crank the phone when I was at a friend's house. We had the switchboard for the community in my house. (Insert "Operator" jokes here.)

Dial telephones? Kids! Huh!

Reel to reel and LPs! That was real music. Bring the 78s and don't be late.
(In fact, I might just have a 78 by Johnny Cash with Big River and Ballad of A Teenage Queen around here someplace. Seems odd that I can now carry an FM receiver, about 1000 songs and pictures in a device about the size of a small box of matches.)

Time marches on.

My Father, who was born in 1903 used to say,"Anyone who talks about 'the good old days' wasn't there."

Les

If I owned a TV channel, it would have cartoons from the early 1960s - late 1960s. All the classics were on then. How ironic that they're all gone now, but that humor is probably needed now more than ever.

I grew up with a BLACK & WHITE tv. I was the youngest in the house so I was the remote. And there were just three stations. The speaker was a tiny little thing on the TV, mono baby.

Dad always watched the news which was soooo boring. We just went OUTSIDE and played.

My brother's sons asked my brother once what sort of electronic games we had. We had a slot car set and a erector set with an electric motor, and I had a 3.5 inch reel to reel tape recorder.

Alas, I still have a pager for work. I sometimes wonder if that contract costs more than getting us cell phone plans.

Erector sets (no way you could get that product name on the shelves today!), tinkertoys and legos were the best. And the star wars action figures. The legos only came in about 6 size/shape configurations and the action figures had paint that would flake off after about a week (probably toxic too). A pack of baseball cards would make you the most popular kid in school that day...

Life was a LOT simpler then.

Don't forget, NO CABLE TV. I am just young enough, 40, to have gotten cable when I was still a kid in the early 80s. But I remember 3 main channels and having to tune the tv to the UHF channels, and they usually didn't come in that good.

Still have my dial telephone with the fabric covered cord.

Kids have it so easy these days...

I remember growing up without electricity! We had to watch TV by candlelight!

My parents must've been really behind the times. Their first one was from 1983.

remember listening to the radio with my grandpa, the radio that had the police channel and others, programs like Amos and Andy, Red Skelton, Groucho Marx.

When I was about 6 we got our first TV, a little one with a oblong screen and since I thought I could be on TV by just going to the back of the TV, everyone got a good laugh out of that.

Got tired of skating with those skates that clamp on the shoes so we took a 2x4 with a crate box in front and nailed the skates on the 2x4. Went to the school yard down the street and proceeded to play demolition derby.

Having great fun running behind the ddt fogging machines driving down the streets to kill those mesquitos.

Going to the corner store and for a penny get 5 baseball cards and a flat piece of gum, if only I could remember where I put those shoebox full of cards??

Got my first pair of skis when I was 9, a pair of skis with just a strap to slide the foot thru. My dad cut a inner tube to make a loop so I sorta had a cable binding. First run down this hill in a park by the house, couldn't turn didn't know how just went straight and got to the botten only to go thru a picket fence to stop me. Great fun, next yr my Dad got me a real pair of skis with steel edges and cable bindings, I was hooked for life.

I was lucky and never went to a public school, the church school was at the end of the block were I lived. My 4th grade teacher was Mr Maas, a older gentleman that when we got him real mad at us he would turn blue in the face and have to sit down. He made me write soooo much that my Mom was concerned about the big bump growing on my writing finger. It was legal to whip you in school if you did wrong.

In high school during lunch one day a food fight broke out, great fun until someone thru something that landed on the big picture on Jesus at the last supper. Everything stopped and the teacher in charge wouldn't let us leave until someone confessed to the act. When the kid stood up, he was marched out into the hallway and proceeded to get beat.

At 15, my brother went off to college and he told me to start up his car once in awhile. One sat night in march my parents went to a wedding so I was home alone. Might as well take to the ol bro's car out for a spin. Back then we were into the drag racing so at a stop light when the light turned green, well, I hit the pedal to the metal only to find a big patch of ice about a half a block from the light. When the car stopped I was throw almost out the passenger door with the car wrapped around a big oak tree by the drivers door. My first thought was to run from the scene because I had no drivers license but I couldn't run because I broke some ribs and punctured my lung, busted. My punishment was that I could not get my license till 18. My bro when he came home from college wasn't a happy scene either.

The Encyclopedia Britanica.

My parents bought a set when I was 9 or 10 years old. I can remember spending hours reading about things I never knew existed.

At least I grew up 'peeking' and 'poking' my Commodore 64.

1969 here.

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FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You're right there, Obadiah.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
A cup o' cold tea.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Without milk or sugar.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Or tea.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In a cracked cup, an' all.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was right.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.
ALL:
They won't!

I can vividly remember our Britannica. We had a yearly update volume that had the new entries. I still remember looking through the update and one of the new words was hippie. And the description was something like "one who is hip." That did not help me at all. I had no idea what that meant. Another new word in that volume was astronaut.

World Book on the top shelf and the Britanica on the second shelf with the updates above.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1297191699.jpg

I was in high school when we got a microwave.

My kids can't believe that I used to get swats with a paddle at school. I can still remember my dad giving me a sip of his beer when I was 6. He would be sitting out with the neighbors and I would ask for a sip and nobody questioned it. Try doing that today and see what happens.

Herr Leitzinger whacked me upside the head for 'talking back' in class..
when I told my Dad what happened..
he smacked me on the other side ...
and told me to apologize to him as well..
which I did..

Rika

We just spent hours going through old photos with my mom last weekend. Comments were made about the red shag carpeting in the living room. Yes, we raked it with a leaf rake.

We got our first microwave around 1981-82. My mom is still using it.

We got our set around 1969. I read it cover to cover - the whole set. I also read most of our large Webster's Dictionary but I quit around P . . . In the 80s, I was an ace at Trivial Pursuit. :cool:

Ian

Well you bunch of whippersnapers, as one of the older farts around here, I can tell ya a thing or two. When I was little - about 4 or 5 - my grandparents had an old wood, crank phone on the wall. They had to pick up the ear piece, crank the phone, and tell the operator who they wanted to talk to. We got our first TV in 1950. I watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth on that in 1952. In grammer school, we got swatted regularly, especially me. I made my teacher so mad on day in 5th grade, she hit me on the head with her paddle. It cracked down the middle of course. My grandparents on both sides got to hear the news about the Wright Brothers' first flight, and my father's mother rode a few places on a stage coach. I'm totally amazed at the technological progress I've seen in my lifetime sofar. I think my grandparents felt the same about the progress made during their lives. It feels like it's going to spin out of control some day.

Actually I bought my 6 year old son an erector set for Christmas this year, he loved it. It's a simple one with no motor, we built a helicopter with a pulley system to turn the rotor. You can find them at hobby shops, I don't think the mainstream stores carry them.

One of my fave toys as a kid was always Lincoln Logs. Cant get any simpler than that. I must have had hundreds of pieces. I'm amazed at how expensive they are nowadays.