Growing up without a cell phone

[Racerbvd]

There are more than a few of us who can relate

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

[slodave]

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

[trekkor]

Pay phones, man...


KT

[look 171]

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.

[trekkor]

Hold on, my pager is beeping...


KT

[Tobra]

that is a pretty funny list

[Evans, Marv]

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.

[audiman08]

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

[RWebb]

Originally Posted by audiman08

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

it's like punch card but without all the holes

[sjf911]

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

[dennis in se pa]

I am looking forward....
To hearing Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane in the nursing home.

Good list by the way.

[red-beard]

#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.

[oldE]

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

[genrex]

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.

[GH85Carrera]

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.

[UconnTim97]

Originally Posted by trekkor

Hold on, my pager is beeping...


KT

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

[Porsche-O-Phile]

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.

[masraum]

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.

[Joeaksa]

Still have my dial telephone with the fabric covered cord.

Kids have it so easy these days...

[Crowbob]

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