Kids today got it so easy...

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 BOTH ways...yadda, yadda, yadda. 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 catalog!!

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 Napsters. 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!

And 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!

And we didn’t have fancy 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 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” and the
graphics sucked ( No Swearing )! 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!

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as
stadium seating. All the seats were the same height so 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 and no remote control.
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 ( No Swearing ) 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 brat-bastards!

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

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!

Damn right we do, but can you really blame it on us? Blame the men over in Japan who make microwaves and computers

689 words, nice Nessa


"And 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!"

I liked that one

I agree with you Nessa but think of this from another way: Our kids will have even a better life then we had and there kids will have a better life then they had and so on. The story continues since from every generation things change. From the way we think to the way we act under certain circumstances.And things will change again since the technology will continue to evolve so you can bet we have a worst childhood then the one our kids will have.

I think about that too guys, It's just so strange , you know? When I'm stupid crazy old and going to visit my grandkids. Omg what will I be thinking of thier futuristic Matrix like toys and god only knows what else. What will be obsolete by then? I guess the world evolves and we must evolve with it.

That makes me think of our first computers.

When I was a little kid, we had a CoCo III and my brother who was around 10 years old used to program small games and other stuff, then save them on a special tape who's made for this stuff.

Then, after we moved to our current home, we got an old 8086 computer who was running under an MS-DOS who looked like this and who came first without any mouse, so we had to use the keyboard to move our cursor. I was around 11 years old.
Then we had a 386 with MS-DOS and an old Windows 3.0, who came before my Pentium 120 (Windows 95) and Mom's Pentium 133 (Windows 95 then Windows 98). So we lived the archaic pixelated graphics who are very very far away from Windows Vista and Mac OSX's graphics and modern GNU/Linux distros' 3D effects such as the cube.
And even on Mom's old Pentium 133, there were a few programs, such as console game emulators who needed to be lauched via an MS-DOS console.
AND YES, WE DIDN'T HAVE MSN MESSENGER ! Our first instant messaging software was ICQ. Mom and my brother used to have an ICQ number
We also had no blog, no Facebook, no Youtube, and my Pentium 120 had no internet connection for 5 years (I got my modem when I entered the cégep because some homeworks needed researches on the Net). We got connected to the Net for the first time in 1998, with an old 56k modem, and we got high-speed connection in 2004.

Having lived these old times, it doesn't bother me to use the console for a few actions from time to time under GNU/Linux (for installing packages for example, it's much faster with a command line than by passing by the graphical package manager), even if the progress made GNU/Linux much more accessible to non-techies today than 15 years ago, with graphical distros such as Ubuntu, Mandriva, OpenSuSE and Fedora where almost everything can be done graphically.


And about video games, we had an Atari 2600 as well, then we had an 8-bits NES, then a SNES. We still have them.