The Spoiled Under 30 Crowd

[TheDirtyDigger]

Just got this email....sorta funny....if you're over 30.

THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD

If you are 30 or older 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... 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 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

Thirty, 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!

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 catalogue!!

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!

There were no MP3's or Limewire! 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 it off the radio and

The DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% 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 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 Playstation video

Games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600!

With games

Like 'Space Invaders' and 'asteroids'. 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!

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 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 bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat

Something up we had to use the stove ... Imagine that!

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!

Regards,

The over 30 Crowd

(Send this to someone you'd like to make smile,

Whether they are under 30 or not.)

[STL]

I'm still a long way from 30 but I see the irony of it. When you're young you think your completely right. When you're old you still think your completely right.

But there are actually some things that make you think up there.

[The_Damned]

thats gold

[gamblor916]

It's funny cause it's true

[Bartrim]

"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!"

Pure classic

[GoktimusPrime]

Umm... some of that is true, some isn't... I'm about 30 so I'll use myself as an example...

I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet.

That is true. The internet didn't really come along until I was in year 12/1st year uni. But we did have local dial-up BBSes before then. Ahh... Telnet.

If we

Wanted to know something, We had to go to the damn library and

Look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!

That was true when I was in primary school and early junior high school, but I think they'd changed to computer databases by time I was in senior high school and definitely by uni (in which case the Internet was definitely around).

There was no email!! We had to actually write

Somebody a letter, with a pen!

There was email within local dial-up BBSes. email and pmail! (we call them PMs now) But yeah, if you wanted to write to anyone who wasn't a member on the BBS you subscribed to you would have to write snail mail - and back then most people didn't have BBS subscriptions.

...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!

That is true.

There were no MP3's or Limewire! 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 it off the radio and

The DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

Erm... *shrug* I was never into shoplifting as a kid... I did frequently borrow CDs and copy them to cassette tape though. We didn't have CD burners back in my school days.

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!

Yes we did have call waiting actually. Although it would screw me over if I was online because it would kick me off my dialup connection... and back in those days BBSes had limited ports so only a limited number of people could log onto the board at any one time, so if you lost connection you would have to try and reconnect... I would sometimes spend hours attempting to reconnect (I had a program that would automatically redial infinitely until I reconnected... sometimes I fell asleep by time it reconnected and the BBS would time me out and boot me off!). So I would switch off EasyCall (by dialing *10# iirc)... but then of course, people couldn't call in and my parents would get mad because the phone would constantly be engaged when I was online. And then I would forget to switch EasyCall back on again. Oops.

Naturally by time we got internet (dial-up) my parents decided to invest in a second phone line.

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 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!

I still don't have caller ID on my land line phone. And it doesn't work half the time on my mobile because of all the private numbers. I know someone who refuses to answer calls from private numbers on his mobile.

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video

Games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600!

With games

Like 'Space Invaders' and 'asteroids'. 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!

Is this guy really 30 or 45? I grew up with 8-bit Nintendo (Famicom and NES). By time I was in high school, it was Super Famicom/Nintendo. Playstation came about when I was in senior high school, but only in Japan (we read about it in magazines). It didn't come out here until I was in uni.

You had to use a Little book called a TV Guide to find out what

Was

On!

True!

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

That was true for my family, but I knew other families that did have remote controls, so that's not necessarily true. Our VCR had a remote control that could change channels, so we often watched TV through the VCR and changed channels through the VCR remote. Our first VCR was a top-loader with a wired remote control!! Kids these days have wireless! (other families I knew had wireless - our family was like the first on the block to get a VCR so it was very old )

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 bastards!

That's true. But it's still true for me because I don't have pay TV! But of course, we have YouTube now.

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat

Something up we had to use the stove ... Imagine that!

Not true. My family had a microwave straight from the 80s - since I started primary school we had it. Kids of the 80s were the "latchkey generation" - we'd come home after school and babysat ourselves until mum and dad came home after work. The microwave was our cook!

And our microwave was relatively new compared to our neighbours - ours had buttons! Our neighbours microwaves had DIALS! *click click click click click - DING!*
Ours was the first generation of "beep beep beep" touch button microwaves.

Ironically we had a dishwasher too... but I don't have one now, so I've gone totally backwards in that department! (I hate washing dishes)


P.S.: other "old school" things from my youth:
1/ We never had any fancy graphics when we were online. Everything was in ASCII and ANSI! Emoticons were purely made from keyboard strokes. (:
2/ Now people tend to wrap their actions in asterisks, e.g.: *giggle* - in the old days we used <>, so it was like <giggle> and <evil.giggle> - I suspect that HTML might have brought about the change from <> to **

<vague.shrug> B^)

[Pulse]

That's the exact same tone of voice my weird, old neighbour with a shotgun uses to scare us whippersnappers away...

[Gutsman Heavy]

damn kids with their hip-hop music and pac-man videogames!

[kup]

I disagree, particularly for people living in Sydney.

The previous generation had it much easier when it comes to financial security than mine or subsequent generations if they are without support. Back then a 'normal ' home didn't cost a million bucks nor half their wage used to go on just the rent or mortgage.

If you are set with financially stablished parents, that changes it all though but if you don't have that option then bad luck.

However I am not over 30 but I am very close

[1orion2many]

Gok the year he mentioned was 1980 and I don't remeber call waiting or Microwaves in the average household, as far as I can remember Video players were only just starting to come into homes but were like about $1200 so it wasn't for the average Joe. The reason I have such a good recollection of that year is because(giving away my age now)I was in year 8. Kup back in the mid 80's there was a Global recession(I think) and a lot of small business went belly up, unemployment was pretty high at the time as well, if you got a job, any job you were happy. TV was crap in general, here in Perth we had channel 9, 7 and the ABC. I spent more time down the local swamp collecting various animals than I did at home as this was by far more entertaining.