Back Then

[jerry]

BACK THEN....
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 through year 'round
blizzards carrying their younger siblings on
their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where
they maintained a straight-A average despite
their full-time after-school job at the local
textile mill where they worked for 35 cents
an hour just to help keep their family from
starving to death!
And I remember promising myself that when I
grew up there was no way I was going to lay that
on kids about how hard I had it and how easy
they've got it!

But....
Now that I've reached 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 don't know how good
you've got it!
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 library and look it up ourselves!
And there was no email! We had to actually
write somebody a letter, with a pen! And 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!
And there were no MP3s or Napsters! If you
wanted to steal music, you had to go to the
record store and shoplift it yourself! Or, we 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!
You want to hear about hardship?
We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting!
If you were on the phone and somebody else called,
they got a busy signal!
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 boss, your Mom, a
collections agent, you didn't know!!! You just
had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
And we didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation
videogames with high-resolution 3-D graphics!
We had the Atari 2600! With games like
"Space Invaders" and "Asteroids"! Your guy was a
little square! You 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 faster
until you died!
Just like LIFE!
When you went to the movie theater, there
was no such thing as stadium seating! All the
seats were the same height! If a tall guy sat in
front of you, you watched his hairstyle!
And sure, we had cable television, but back
then that was only like 20 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! You could
only get cartoons on Saturday morning...
D'ya hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL
WEEK!
That's exactly what I'm talking about! You
kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled!
You guys wouldn't last five minutes back
in 1984!
-- Author Unknown

graduated high school in 1984..wish I could go back knowing what I know now :right:

[jerry]

I'm a '84 grad too LD. 20 yaers this year 'eh.

[colt45]

how true.

[Big Dog]

Heck, when I was a kid, the Atari 2600 was only a fever dream in the mind of an MIT geek - anybody remember the old game "system" with the funny colored plastic screens you put over the TV picture tube? That was "State of the Art" in the sixties. :insane:

I still miss my ol' Atari 800XL - that was a nice machine in it's time. All 64K of her . . .

[DANA]

My Heros Were Tom Mix, Don Winslow, And Red Ryder

Dana

Originally Posted by jerry

I'm a '84 grad too LD. 20 yaers this year 'eh.

hard to believe it's been 20 years Jerry..one of my heros is Dana

[jerry]

ESP? I thought that my self. Ox too :right:

[Indy7373]

I was born in 1984