When I was a kid….

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 at the ripe old age of 50, 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 go tit!

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!!

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 ass! Nowhere was safe!

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!

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?

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 darn 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!

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!

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?!?!

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-finks!

And we didn’t have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! 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,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 then.

Thanks Fishy Mary

 

10 thoughts on “When I was a kid….”

  1. >> 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!

    Bullshit. Even back then we knew the difference between infringement and theft.

    We taped music we wanted off the radio via the condenser mic on our PRESS PLAY AND RECORD Radio Shack cassette players.

  5. I can relate to everything except the remotes for tv’s. Remote control tv’s came out in the ’50’s. Maybe it was cause my old man was an appliance salesman but we had a tv remote when I was growing up…at least in the living room.

    Oh yeah, one more thing. We had a microwave in ’75. It was as big as an oven and it had a big old rotary dial but we had one.

  6. Madd Maxx – I remember us getting a stove/microwave combination in ’76 or ’77 when my parents remodeled the kitchen.

    On the Atari 2600, we had Freeway (you played a chicken crossing the road–from easy (Lake Shore Drive in Chicago at 2:00 a.m.) to difficult (the I-5 in LA at 5:00 p.m.)) and Missile Command.

  7. We got our first microwave in ’79 or ’80. It was the original GE spacemaker that went over your oven. It worked well for more than 20 years. I remember at first how it was such a learning process to change your way of thinking about how to cook food. We were ok with no metal pots or utensils but cooking with paper plates and paper towels and plastic was scary for the first few days. And cooking by the minute or seconds took some time to figure out for each thing we tried. My mom bought microwave cookbooks and some special cookware, most of which was unnecessary. Oh all the bad food we made in those early days. It didn’t take long to realize it was an expensive contraption best for warming up leftovers and maybe cooking a hotdog once in a while.

  8. Oh, heck. I remember when there was no TV at all. And then there were ten-inch screens. Color? Dream on. Needless to say, there was not even Pong.

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