Growing up without a cell phone

[TxTink :)]

I got this in an email today and thought it was just too funny...


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 (& IN THE SNOW-even if they grew up in the deep South!) ... 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 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 damn Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

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 ***! 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 damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOD !!! 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 *** 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-finks!

Also, 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 in 1980 or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd

 

[polkadotsuitcase]

Okay, I'm on deadline which is why I'm puttering around the DIS. Now I have to procrastinate even more and go forward this, because it's just too darn HILARIOUS not to! So funny! Thanks for posting this...

 

[2goofycampers]

 

[DaveInTN]

That's hilarious!

 

[jturling]

Those were the days when you left work you were "off work"!

 

[auntie]

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!

 

[Born 2 Fish]

true that.

 

[gmflanigan]

those were the days..... DD keeps reminding her children when she was a kid she asked to go outside and cried when she had to come in

 

[I'mDownWithDisney]

I am 34, and all of those are pretty accurate, except the microwave part. We must have been ahead of the curve, because we had a "radarange".

Web pic

 

[Lil' Lisa]

I am 34, and all of those are pretty accurate, except the microwave part. We must have been ahead of the curve, because we had a "radarange".

Web pic

We had one of those early microwaves. The scary thing was that the safety switch was right inside the door so you could actually run the thing with the door open if you were ...ahem... so inclined.

 

[AuburnJen92]

OMG, Lisa, you did that too????

I loved that thing. My parents would never get rid of it until it finally died in the late 80's. I was in college.

 

[Shan-man]

I don't spend a lot of time over here on the CCom side of things, but am sure glad I checked out this thread. I don't often literally LOL, but this had me in tears such that I had to read it to DW... who usually really doesn't want to know what I'm laughing at. Very entertaining.

Being somewhat older, I have a little different perspective. I remember my first video game console: it was a pong game... it didn't even have color! Never mind animated characters (the little dancing legs on the Space Invaders was a major advancement!). I remember when Space Invaders arrived at the bowling alley (back before Arcades), it was in B&W too! Oh, they made it LOOK like it was in color by putting transparent color strips on the glass over the screen! We were a pretty 'high-tech' family though. Our first color TV had a clicker, that is, a remote control that made a variety of click sounds that the TV recognized (sometimes) to change the channel up or down. I was still tasked with changing the volume, but boy was it nice to not have to hop off the couch to switch from Lawrence Welk's channel to Wild Kingdom's channel (we lived with my grandparents!).

My first computer was in '79, an Atari 400. It had a 1.8MHz processor and 4K of RAM! The primary storage device was a cassette deck! My favorite program took an HOUR to load off of cassette and I had to flip the tape halfway through the load! I got 'online' when I was 18. It was a local-run bulletin board that you would dial into and at 300 baud you could read as fast as the pages came across... it was like watching someone type!

My uncle worked for IBM, and was always a gadget guy. He had the first electronic calculator I ever saw. It was roughly the size of an 8-trac tape and had those red, bulb-shaped LED digits. IIRC he said it was a $600 device! Speaking of 8-tracs, I had a player in my car and when cassettes started to take over I bought an adapter that would let me play them in the 8-trac player... kinda. We were always on or near the cutting edge. We had one of the first consumer video cameras: a Sony Betamax camera with a shoulder-carried recorder that had to weigh 30lbs! Like all good things, it came from Sears. We had the first microwave of anyone we knew. I was the first person I knew to have a CD player (also from Sears), which was really cool, except that the record store only had maybe 20 CDs to choose from. I was so desperate to have something to listen to I bought my first jazz and classical CDs, even though I had no interest in those genres at the time. In retrospect, that was probably a good thing, wrenching me away from thinking Cassey Kasem's top 40 was an all-inclusive view of music.

I remember making calls when not at home. They were called phone booths. I wonder if folks these days would even know what one was is if it weren't for Superman or Dr Who? Course, a dime per call was a bit of an extravagance, so once you made the call you stayed on for HOURS! I got my first cell phone when I was 23. It was 6" by 9" by 2.5" and weighed about 4lbs! I think I got 30 minutes of talk time or 6-7 hours of standby. It actually had a handset that connected to the base with a cord! If I wanted to text I carried a post-it pad.

Anyway, it was heavy, I mean really way-out, retrospecting like this!

 

[juligrl]

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!

There was no DVR to record my once a week cartoons either. I watched them once, with all the commercials even, and had to wait 'til next week to see them again!

 

[auntie]

Dating myself here..but what the heck.
Anyone remember that you had to wait ALL YEAR to watch the Rudolph Christmas speacial?...ALL YEAR! No video tape, no DVR.

I'm such a dork that I still watch it when it airs on network TV each year still. I feel like I'm missing out if I don't.

 

[liv luvs disney]

Thanks for sharing!

 

[gmflanigan]

Dating myself here..but what the heck.
Anyone remember that you had to wait ALL YEAR to watch the Rudolph Christmas speacial?...ALL YEAR! No video tape, no DVR.

I'm such a dork that I still watch it when it airs on network TV each year still. I feel like I'm missing out if I don't.

I do--I even remeber when we got our first TV. It was a big box that sat on the floor and everything in was black & white.

 

[Shan-man]

Dating myself here..but what the heck.
Anyone remember that you had to wait ALL YEAR to watch the Rudolph Christmas speacial?...ALL YEAR! No video tape, no DVR.

I'm such a dork that I still watch it when it airs on network TV each year still. I feel like I'm missing out if I don't.

And the once-a-year showing of the Wizard of Oz. I remember recording the audio on a portable reel-to-reel so I could experience some little bit of it during the rest of the year!

 

[Eeyore'sthebest]

And the once-a-year showing of the Wizard of Oz. I remember recording the audio on a portable reel-to-reel so I could experience some little bit of it during the rest of the year!

We used to go to a friend's house, their mom would pop a huge bowl of popcorn, all the kids would sit on the floor (because that's where kids sat) and we would be glued to the television for hours. It was so much fun!!!

 

[stacktester]

Dating myself here..but what the heck.
Anyone remember that you had to wait ALL YEAR to watch the Rudolph Christmas speacial?...ALL YEAR! No video tape, no DVR.

I'm such a dork that I still watch it when it airs on network TV each year still. I feel like I'm missing out if I don't.

Don't worry about the dating Phyllis. The "otter spotter" requires carbon dating technology to go back in her past.

I'm so in trouble come 4th of July.

 

[Disneylitch]

We went to our neighbors house to watch The Wizard of Oz and the Christmas specials because they were the only ones in the neighborhood to have a color TV. Remember when the VCR's first came out. We paid over $600 for it and then we had to get the HEAVY recorder to go with it. That was another $1200 on sale. We need to get back to telling kids to go outside and play, and adults too for that matter. My married son comes home from work and still plays games on the computer and playstation 3. He's a computer geek for a living. Now why would you want to come home and sit back down in front of a computer. Go outside and live. Maybe that's why so many of us love The Fort and WDW.