I got this email from my mother this morning. She Cc’d me on this list followed by all her over 50 year old friends. I found it hilarious. See my reply to everyone at the bottom.
Growing up without a cell phone
If you are 36, or older, you might 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… 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 over the ripe old age of forty, 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!
1. 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!!
2. 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!
3. 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!
4. There were no MP3′s or Napsters oriTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!
5. 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?
6. 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!
7. 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 MYGOSH !!! 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.
8.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!
9.We didn’t have any fancy PlayStationorXbox 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!
10. 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?!?!
11. There was no Cartoon Networkeither! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I’m saying? We had to wait ALL WEEKfor cartoons, you spoiled little rat-bastards!
12. And we didn’t have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!
13. 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 1970 or any time before!
Regards,
The Over 40 Crowd
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Dear over 40 year olds.
Thanks for creating this world for us!
Sent from my iPad, iPhone, PlayStation all while driving my self parking car.
XOX
Renée
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Do you agree?
Yeah, that’s how I remember it too; I’m 53. But I was lucky: I got online when I was 13, which was really unusual back in 1971, and have been online ever since. It raised my expectations and I think that’s why I relate better to GenY than to most people my own age. (That and not having kids, something which makes many people act annoyingly superior to everyone who’s much younger than them.)
Now among other things I serve as an advisor to Toronto company InteraXon, which does thought-controlled computing, because back in 2012 we actually had to TYPE or SPEAK what we wanted. Imagine that! And I’m developing a product idea of my own, because in 2012 we also had to BROWSE for what’s happening even if we’d really want to know about it. (A cure was recently found for what you have. Too bad you didn’t check the news that day. Ha ha!)
One challenge I have for GenY is to think of the stories you’ll be telling about all the problems you had, so you’ll know what needs fixing. Unfortunately some of them would be things like “our parents and grandparents borrowed tons of money and expected us to pay it back” and “their idea of democracy was for a bunch of hucksters to run things and then tell us that if we didn’t vote it was our fault”. Harder to fix but more important!
Hey Rohan!
I think the challenge I will be telling my kids is this “Our cellphone batteries only lasted half a day and we had to PLUG THEM IN TO the wall to charge them.” I can imagine that the near future brings wireless recharging, or even better, little to no battery at all as it will remain booted up via wifi networks, 10G (Assuming 4G will be a laugh by then), or some sort of technology.
Renee
Renee,
That was a great story and a nice analogy of how things were as compared to today. You are right, kids have it so much easier today when you put it that way. Having said that, watching, my 8, 7, and 5 year old grow up in some ways they have it tougher. They have like a gazillion things coming at them at once. Their day is scheduled to the hilt, because we can do that now with our Windows Phone, PCs, 4G, Wireless hotspots out the wazoo available 24/7 technologies. My kids are wayyyy smarter than I was at this age. How can they not be? If they want to know something, they can do voice search or Bingle (That’s combo of Bing and Google) almost immediately and read the Wiki article or about 100 more articles on the topic of choice. Using gestures on our Xbox 360 and multi touch on the phones let alone the old laptops that they use is so freaking intuitive to them. They will be a much more advanced generation that we will ever hope to be, but they will also possibly miss out on the unplugged experience if we don’t provide some control and guidance. Given you have a new one coming, think about it. Congrats by the way!
Kevin