When I was a kid...

When I was young, adults used to try to make us kids feel guilty about how hard things were when they were growing up.  What with walking twelve miles to school every morning, up-hill both ways through five feet of snow, carrying their little brother on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job on the farm where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!  And they were thankful!

Now that I’m the adult, I can’t help but notice, with the way technology has progressed, that kids today have no idea how easy they have it!  When I was a kid, we didn’t have the internet.  Now it’s hard to imagine life without it!  When we wanted to know something, we had to read about it in a BOOK!  (For you kids, that’s like a 500-page text message.)

And there was no email!  We had to wait for our information or communication to show up in our mailbox.  When we wanted to visit with a friend, we had to actually write them a letter with a pen, walk it to a mailbox and wait about a week for it to get to wherever it was going.

We didn’t have iPods or cell phones – we had to tape songs off the radio and hope the DJ didn’t talk over half of it or cut off that awesome instrumental riff at the end and mess up the best part of the song!  We had to waste our precious time rewinding video cassettes before returning them to the store!

You want to hear about hardship?  We didn't have fancy stuff like texting! If you wanted to talk to someone, you had to call them on a phone attached to a wall!  And if somebody else called, they got a busy signal!  We didn't have Caller ID either!  There was no screening calls - when the phone rang, you had no idea who it was!  It could be your boss, your Mom, that kid you don’t want to talk to…you had to take your chances!

And we didn't have any fancy Wii or X-Box games with HD 3-D graphics!  We had the Atari 2600 with games like ‘Space Invaders’, ‘Asteroids’ and ‘Pong’!  Your character was a little square and you had to use your imagination.  There was no such thing as a ‘level’ or a ‘new world’, it was just one screen til you lost and that was it!  You never win, the game just kept getting harder and faster until you died, just like LIFE, buster!

We didn’t have Cartoon Network - you could only get cartoons on Saturday morning.  We had to wait ALL WEEK!  You kids today have no concept of a rough life – you’re spoiled rotten!  You guys wouldn't last five minutes back in 1980!  We had no computers and no wireless anything…and we were THANKFUL!