Originally Posted By ajsmommy IF you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!! ( I did edit alittle from the email I recieved ) 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 .. yadda, yadda, yadda And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in heck I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on 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 dang 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 dang 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 & pencil! 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! There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! 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! 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 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" and the graphics sucked! 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! When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed! Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! 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 and 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 brats! And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up . we had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire ?.. imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that Stupid JiffyPop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot. 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! Regards, -The 30 Something crowd! Or ( 60 Something )
Originally Posted By Mrs ElderP I'll turn 30 this year and I can distictly remeber the internet slowly taking over my like. And about stealing music over the internet, I can remember one house we moved into where we had a satalight dish and free Disney Channel for about 9 monthes till they started scrambeling it and you had to pay for a de-scrambler box (oh the inhumanity of it all!)
Originally Posted By DisneyChica hey I'm not 30 and I remember growing up with some of that stuff. -no caller ID -Atari 2600 (Which we still have packed away in my closet with, like, every game they ever made for it) -no Internet or MP3 players (I actually just got my first MP3 player for Christmas)
Originally Posted By mickey_ring I dig the nostalgia topics! I was 11 in 1976... push button phones were still new. Cable was new, with a hard-wired control box with a row of little buttons. It was connected to our GE television that needed a new tube somewhere almost every day. Even with cable TV, if you missed the Christmas specials, you were out of luck for an entire year. My Mom got a Mr. Coffee for Christmas. It gurgled and steamed and had a switch to brew and one for the warmer. Our stove had a big oven on the bottom and a smaller one on top. No microwave. WDW was one park and it was awesome enough for me. I'll be back with more memories.
Originally Posted By DVC_dad <<< -Atari 2600 (Which we still have packed away in my closet with, like, every game they ever made for it) >>> Hey Chica you know, if you put that on ebay you could get quite a bit of dough for it! I remember having to get out a roll down screen and a movie projector for my dad when it was time to watch home movies on 8MM. I remember going with my dad to buy a new truck one time and the salesMAN (not a woman's job in that day) sold him on the fact that the 8 track tape player was hidden behind the face of the radio dial !
Originally Posted By ilvdland I didn't have the 2600, I had the Sears knockoff. My mom still has it. I still remember the day I was sliding my channel sliding thing on the sliding channel cable box - the one with the letters and the numbers??? I remember stopping on the letter "M" and finding a Heart video - my mom walked in the room to me screaming "WHAT IS THIS???? DON'T TOUCH THE TV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I became obsessed with MTV that day, so badly that I had a log of every video they played. That lasted about 6 months, then I couldn't keep up anymore. And that was BEFORE VCR's, so I was just watching it CONSTANTLY. I had OCD issues as a child, now I've just tranferred them to DL......
Originally Posted By wonderingalice You guys think you had it rough...?!? Try going back and being born in 1958 or EARLIER! We REALLY suffered! ;-) (And dang, what I wouldn't give to see today's kids have the easygoing, safe, simple fun lifestyle that we had back then. Those were the days... I wouldn't have traded them for the world.
Originally Posted By DVC_dad I think, no I believe that the secret to raising children this day and age is showing them that you love them,,,making them know that they are loved. And second to this, the greatest thing you can teach your child is the meanin of the word "NO". So far three of my 5 kids are old enough to be exhibiting many of the traits that will become them for life. My ten year old is advanced academically and is kind and giving. My 6 year old is the best behaved child in her class and makes excellent grades. My 4 year old is very advanced academically and is the life of the class without being disruptive... I am either very very lucky with them or I am onto something. Three with a good start and three more to go. (Yes 5 kids with 1 on the way)
Originally Posted By DVC_dad Uh oh, my wife is looking over my shoulder and just told me that bragging about one's own kids is against the parent rule book. Sorry if I offended anyone.
Originally Posted By a goofy guy How about dialing a phone with a little thing called a "finger stop"? Everything was pulse not tone and a phone number was two letters followed by 5 numbers. There was no "redial" button, you had to hang up and use the rotating dialer all over again.
Originally Posted By Goofyernmost The reason it is against the Parental Rule Book is because usually, right after you have bragged, the little tykes do some bone head thing and you now join the ranks of the rest of us. Shaking your heads and thinking, what could I have done different to have avoided this. But in all fairness, my kids never gave me a minutes worth of problems and since they are now in their 30's I can safely say that my influence is no longer a deciding factor. Whew!
Originally Posted By DVC_dad OMG! Your timing is perfect! I just got a phone call from my 10 year old's teacher, he was caught with his PSP at school today. She wanted to warn me that he has detention for a week, causing me to have to sit out in the parking lot with his siblings and wait an extra 30 mins!!! Not only this but they keep all electronic devices to the end of the school year! I am going to kill him this afternoon. Not so much for his offense, but as with any good parent *wink wink nudge nudge* its going to make things very inconvenient for ME!!!
Originally Posted By TomSawyer Don't wait in the parking lot, DVC_dad - take the "good" kids to get ice cream. And be sure the let the 10 year old know about it.
