A trip down memory lane

As a kid, adults used to bore me stiff with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were; walking twenty-five miles to school every morning, uphill, barefooted and so on. I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to torture my kids with how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it! Now that I’m embracing the twenties, I can’t help but notice how easy kids have it today. 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 write letters! As if that wasn’t bad enough, you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox. The letter would take about a week to get there! Child Protective Services or the police didn’t care if our parents beat the daylights out of us. In fact, even my friends’ parents had the permission to whack my butt! There were no MP3’s or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself! Either that or, you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would annoyingly talk over half the song and mess it all up! There were no CD players! We didn’t have fancy things like Call Waiting! We had landlines the size of Congo. If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal -that was it! There weren’t any mobile phones. If you left the house, you were on your own until further notice. Think of how boring it is to not be in touch with your friends 24/7! Now you guys have it all. Texts have been phased out, now the only thing you guys do is whatsapp all day long! Please! There was no fancy Caller ID either! When the giant landline rang (with a tone that would make you spill all your secrets just to get it to keep quiet), you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, a drug dealer, the collection agent... you just didn’t know! You had to pick it up and take your chances! PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics were unheard of! 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. You could never win because the game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like life!Television was a drag especially when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your seat and walk over to the TV to change the channel because there were no remote controls! We had to wait all week for cartoons because they only aired on Saturday mornings. And it wasn’t your fancy Cartoon Network or Boomerang! Some Z-list cartoons I couldn’t bother to remember now!We didn’t have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the charcoal stove or eat things cold if it was such a hassle! Kids today have got it way too easy. You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back then or any time before!