Did you grow up in or before the 80's?

• Did you grow up in or before the 80's? by Tyler on 19 Sep, 2006 01:09
• IF you were alive during the 80's you will think this is hilarious!!!!
  
  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 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 29, 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 freakin’ 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 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 mail box 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 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 messed 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 Play station 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 was 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 twerps!
  
  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 Jiffy Pop 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!
• #1 by scaredtoshave on 19 Sep, 2006 18:22
• Amen brutha
• #2 by Yeti on 25 Sep, 2006 00:59
• I second the "amen brotha"! hehe   
• #3 by happyharry on 04 Oct, 2006 11:28
• Ha ha ha! Great post, Tyler. I too grew up in the 80s. And I remember the 80s as much simpler times.
  
  They were exciting too: women wearing leggins on the streets (nowadays only those who lost some bet do that), there was all this cool music (A-Ha, Depeche Mode, The Smiths etc.), and great films that had a comfortable pace (not the lightning speed pace of Star Wars Episode II and III) that were a joy to watch. That was also the time when George Michael was still cool (and not considered a sexual predator) and straight men listened to "Freedom" and wanted to be just like him. It was the time when computers and keyboards (digital pianos) where so cool when you saw them in somebody's home ("hey, you've got a computer...nice! What can it do? Wow, and it has a mouse! Turn it on, turn it on!"). Ha ha, I too remember the Atari consoles, and the Commodore 64 (the rich had the Amiga 500, and the ultra rich dandies had the Amiga 2000), and I remember playing Monkey Island 2 with the mouse in my right hand and holding 10 disks in my left hand (you had to switch them often during playing). Aahh, these were great games.
  And I remember my neighbour who just got her new pc back then. I was so jealous (a real pc! All I had was a crappy Amiga). And it was so powerful! It had a LED display on its tower casing and it said "16 MHz" and if you pushed the TURBO button next to it it changed to "32". Cool...
  
  I think children today are no more or less lucky than we were back in the 80s. I guess we all have a special weakness for the decade we grew up in. With us it's the 80s. In some twenty years (and we might find this laughable now) the next generation will tell their children how lucky they are, for in the first decade of the new century, the battery of your iPod only lasted 20 hours and TV sets weren't part of the walls (what do you mean daddy, they weren't part of the wall?)
  Anyway, let's enjoy any decade we find ourselves livining in. I for one am glad the 70s are never going to return (orange plastic furniture...nuff said.)
  
  
• #4 by Yeti on 05 Oct, 2006 02:07
• I loved Loadrunner on the Apple II ES & GS   hehe  (Still have a copy on the original 4 1/2 in "true" floppy disks)   lol