Uphill Both Ways

I didn't write the following. In a former life, it was an e-mail forward sent to me by a dear friend, who is in the old-timer crowd with me at school. I thought it was cute.

When I was a kid, adults bored me to tears with tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up - walking twenty-five miles to school every day…barefoot...in the snow...uphill BOTH ways!

I swore I’d never lay a bunch of crap like that on kids, but now that I'm over the proverbial hill, I can’t help myself. I hate to say it, but you kids today 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 library and look it up ourselves. In the CARD CATALOG!!

There was no email, either. We had to actually write letters. With a PEN! Then we had to walk all the way across the street and put it in a mailbox. And it would take like a week to get there.

There were no MP3s. No Napster. 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 a song off the radio...and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and screw it all up.

Talk about hardship - You couldn't just download porn. You had to steal it from your brother, or bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11. Those were your options.

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. No 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 had to pick it up and take your chances.

We didn't have any Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D & nbsp graphics. We had the Atari 2600, with games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids". The graphics sucked ass. Your guy was a little square, 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 actually 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. To find out what was on, you had to use a little book called a TV Guide.

There was no channel surfing, because you had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel on the cable box. There was no Cartoon Network. 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-bastards!

We didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove or go build a friggin’ fire! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid JiffyPop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

You kids wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980.