HUMOR- THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!!

[TedH]

Got this in an email today. It made me chuckle, and I'm sure some of you can relate.


THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!!


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 stuff 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
darn 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. If we wanted to
know something, we had to go to the darn library and look it up
ourselves, in the card catalog!!

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!

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 butt! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3' s or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had
to hitchhike to the darn 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 @#*% 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 the tape would come undone. Cause that's
how we rolled, dig?

We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone
and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!

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 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!

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'. 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!

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 butt and walk over to the TV to change the channel! NO REMOTES!!!

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!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had
to use the stove! Imagine that!

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!

[mescalero1]

That was funny.

[milton]

That makes me feel OLD !! Great post !

[Ysabel Kid]

And true!

I can remember our first color TV. Phones that dialed. I used computer punch cards in college. Saw my first fax when I started working after college; cell phone too. And I'm only 45!!!

[mescalero1]

Don't remind me, I learned to program with punch cards.

[FWiedner]

We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-bastards!

Yep, we got it easy today.

The first computer I ever serviced had a "Hard-drive" drum that was 4-feet tall and 18-inches in diameter. It had a capacity of 2.5KB. The memory card was an 18-inch X 18-inch copper-wire loom with 1024 tiny magnetized ferrite "cores" which saved or lost data by being zapped by 1's and 0's. You guessed it, 1KB, and there were two of them. There was no such thing as an integrated circuit or a microprocessor.

PC's and thumb drives have made people into computer-pansies.

[piller]

I am 44 and this is all too true. I even remember when CDs came out. 8 tracks were pretty good for their few years.

[AJMD429]

Funny but true.

I'd like to think that even though we were 'spoiled' relative to our parents, that we retained some respect for hard work and honesty, and some acceptance of responsibility if we selected freedom over security.

It's THOSE things I'm not sure the latest generation has grasped, whether 'spoiled' or not.

[66GTO]

You 40 somethings don't know how easy you had it.

When I was a kid, we only had three TV channels, all black and white. If you stayed up too late or got up too early and turned on the the TV, all you got on the screen was either snow or a test pattern with a Indian chief in the middle. The test patterns were used to adjust the horizontal, vertical, and focus settings on your TV, and they needed frequent adjustment. All of the TV sets used vacuum tubes that burned out as often as a light bulb, no transistors or circuit boards. Every Sears and Western Auto store had machine to test the tubes and sold replacements. Not all of the stations were in the same direction so you had to go outside and turn the antenna while someone inside yelled out the window "A little more! Too much!" until the picture was as good as it was going to get. And before that all we had was AM radio!

Cassette tapes? Eight track? What was that? Your car had a fancy sound system if your AM radio had a reverb rear speaker. There was no FM and certainly no stereo anything.

I thought I was hot stuff when I got a portable transistor radio when I was a teenager. I would sneak it to bed at night, pull the covers over my head, put the speaker next to my ear and listen to the rock and roll stations in far away places like Chicago, New Orleans, Little Rock, or the outlaw stations just across the Texas border in Mexico (Wolf Man Jack!) or country music on WSM in Nashville.

If your parents had an air conditioned car you were considered a "rich kid".

It was years before we had a telephone that was not on a party line. For those of you who don't know what that is, it is when several houses share the same phone line and each phone has it's own ring (one ring, two rings, three rings, etc.) You weren't supposed to answer if it wasn't your ring. Every party line had at least one nosy neighbor who would eaves drop on your conversations by picking up after they hear your ring.

The CBS, ABC, or NBC evening TV news lasted only 15 minutes and then later it became 30 minutes. And we wondered how they could find enough news to fill 30 minutes.

The nearby medium sized town had a morning and an afternoon newspaper so you could find the "late breaking news" in the evening paper. Our little town had a weekly paper.

The downtown stores and banks would close on Thursday at noon and all stores closed on Sunday. To this day I don't know how that Thursday tradition started or why, but no one does it anymore. Saturday was when all the farmers drove into town to do their shopping and deliver produce. You'd see all of the pickup trucks and stake bodies parked downtown. If you needed a prescription filled after hours, you could call the pharmacist and he would meet you at the pharmacy and open up just for you.

Grocery stores sold on credit and you could phone in your order and they would deliver right to your door!

The local AM radio station was the source for local gossip, birthday, wedding, and anniversary announcements. If you've ever heard The Statler Brothers do their "Lester Roadhog Moran and the Cadillac Cowboys" Saturday morning radio show or saw Charlie Ferguson of WKORN on Hee Haw, that is pretty much how it was. The station owner did most of the announcing and hired a high school kid to cover when he wasn't there.

A quarter would get you into the local movie theater on Saturday afternoon to watch Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, or the Lone Ranger (this explains my fascination with lever rifles as an old man ). At the local A&W drive-in you could get a hot dog for 10 cents and a root beer float for 15 cents. Gasoline was about 25 cents a gallon. You could buy a new car for less than $2,000.

All recorded music was on vinyl records. My first memory was of 78 rpm records, then 45 rpm singles, and later 33 1/3 rpm albums. No tapes other than reel to reel, and only audiophiles and radio stations had those. All records were mono (single channel) and I was a teenager before I heard my first stereophonic record.

Ah, the good ol' days!

[Ben_Rumson]

Hey 66GTO .. You forgot the part that before TV went to snow or test pattern they played the National Anthem and showed the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi.

[66GTO]

Hey 66GTO .. You forgot the part that before TV went to snow or test pattern they played the National Anthem and showed the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi.

You are right. How could I forget that they always signed off by playing the Star Spangled Banner?!

[Ysabel Kid]

Funny but true.

I'd like to think that even though we were 'spoiled' relative to our parents, that we retained some respect for hard work and honesty, and some acceptance of responsibility if we selected freedom over security.

It's THOSE things I'm not sure the latest generation has grasped, whether 'spoiled' or not.

AJ -

I think you are right. Seems that every generation for the past 3 or 4 has had more of their number not being willing to work for what they want, and not being willing to wait for what they want, and instead wanting everything RIGHT NOW. Seems each one is also less willing to take responsibility for their actions. Not everyone mind you, but the evidence is hard to ignore...

[lever-4-life]

I use a rotary phone, still don't trust those black magic cooking boxes the rest of the world calls "microwaves" pop corn is made in a griswold skillet on a gas range in the summer or a wood stove in the winter. New music just plain stinks, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, John lennon, Jimmi Hendrix, Janis Jopplin, keith moon and Jim Morrison are all dead... I Miss 40 years ago

I will keep my plasma T.V. and i mac though

[dbateman]

yeah that is a good one
we had phones like the one you were talking about 66GTO and that was when I had left home to go to and work 11yrs ago ..
but the home that i growe up in we did not have power or a phone till I was about 10-11yrs old
gas stove
kero fridge and heater not that you need the heater much we had 12v set up to run some basic lighting
in the kitchen and dining room copper wood fired hot water system (the best hot water)
we did have a genset but it was not used it was to power the workshop that was it......

and I had a grate time growing up!!!! playing in the Australian bush