Growing up without a cell phone

[snopes]

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. They've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, They live in a virtual Utopia! And I hate to say it, but the kids today, don't know how good they '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 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 behinds! Nowhere was safe!

4) 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!

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 stuff 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 cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOSH !!! 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 PlayStation or Xbox 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 butt 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 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!

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! the kids today have got it too easy. They're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1970 or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 40 Crowd

[Ryda Wong, EBfCo.]

36 years ago, I'm betting there were indeed child-safety seats*, microwaves**, and call waiting***

Not to mention, the lack of #3 is hardly being "spoiled rotten"



*It wasn’t until 1962 that seats were invented with the purpose of protecting a child, by Leonard Rivkin, of Denver Colorado.[1] - Wiki page on child safety sheats

**In 1965 Raytheon acquired Amana Refrigeration. Two years later, the first countertop, domestic oven was introduced. It was a 100-volt microwave oven, which cost just under $500 and was smaller, safer and more reliable than previous models.
http://www.gallawa.com/microtech/history.html

***Call waiting was introduced to North America in the early 1970s when the first generation of electronic switch machines built by Western Electric,the number 1 ESS started to replace older mechanical equipment in the old Bell System local telephone companies
Wiki page on call waiting

****

[llewtrah]

Originally Posted by Ryda Wong, EBfCo.

36 years ago, I'm betting there were indeed child-safety seats*, microwaves**, and call waiting***

Never had any of these available when I was young.

Child seats? We sat on an adult's lap. Heck, didn't even have seatbelts in back seats.
The first affordable household microwaves arrived mid-1980s.
Call waiting? Like a lot of folks, I didn't even have a landline till the mid-1980s - I had to walk up the street to a phone box to call people. My parents had a phone since the early 70s, but in those days lots of folks still had party lines (shared between 2 houses) and we'd never heard of call waiting.

Just because something had been invented, didn't mean it was in widespread use.

[Cervus]

You're comparing the US to the UK. Just because you didn't have a phone until the mid-80's, it's ridiculous to think that the majority of the US lived the same way.

[Lainie]

I was born in 1961, and I don't think I ever knew anyone who didn't have a phone. I did have cousins who had a party line into the early 1970s, but they lived in a remote rural area.

Rear-seat seatbelts were common when I was kid, too (although they weren't mandatory until 1968). I remember getting into my grandma's older car and being flummoxd by the lack of them (my father wouldn't start the ignition until everyone's seatbelt was fastened).

[llewtrah]

Originally Posted by Cervus

You're comparing the US to the UK. Just because you didn't have a phone until the mid-80's, it's ridiculous to think that the majority of the US lived the same way.

Can you point out where exactly in my post I suggested the majority of the US lived in the same way as I? Because you seem to be reading into it things I haven't written.

I pointed out that just because something had been invented, didn't mean it was in widespread use - something that is likely to be true there as well as here.

These emails are recycled on both sides of the Atlantic you realise?

[Floater]

Another childhood memory. The town where my grandmother lived didn't have an automatic telephone exchange, so if my mother wanted to talk to her she had to call an operator and likewise if grandmother wanted to make a call.

[Jaime Vargas]

Originally Posted by llewtrah

Like a lot of folks, I didn't even have a landline till the mid-1980s - I had to walk up the street to a phone box to call people.

I never knew the UK was so backwards. I was born in the early 70s and all my school friends' homes had a landline, and while I didn't live in the hills, I didn't live in Madrid either.

[Chloe]

It's not that there weren't phones, but that they were quite expensive. I know a few people growing up who weren't "on the phone" even into the 1980s, but it was pretty unusual. College rental houses usually didn't have phones.

[Jaime Vargas]

Yep, rental homes here usually didn't have phones either. And it probably was much more expensive back then.

I suppose the UK had the same model Spain had, in which you could not buy your own receiver; telephone terminals were leased by Telefónica at a monthly cost added to your monthly bill. Of course when the first buyable receivers appeared and we realised how inexpensive a telephone actually is, we all realised Telefónica had been sucking our money like crazy.

[llewtrah]

Originally Posted by Jaime Vargas

I never knew the UK was so backwards. I was born in the early 70s and all my school friends' homes had a landline, and while I didn't live in the hills, I didn't live in Madrid either.

I think it was the cost (monthly rental plus minutes of usafe) that deterred many people. When I lived with my parents, if my aunts came to stay and wanted to make phone calls they first rang the operator who timed the call and after the call they phoned the operator to ask how much it had cost. They then gave my parents a contribution towards the phone bill. It didn't held that the phone company was a monopoly - if you didn't like their terms, you went without.

Another problem was the availability of numbers (connections into an exchange). Every so often, they added a digit to the start of the phone number or a digit to the exchange number to increase capacity. They're still doing this.

A lot of my friends when I was pre-teens didn't have phones, but it wasn't a problem for us kids as we just walked round to see them. The thing that really amazed us kids was watching Dallas on TV where households were shown to have multiple phones - and not just extensions on a single number! When I moved into my own home in the early 80s it was a few years before I could afford the monthly line rental and phone usage bills. So I walked to a phone box with pocketful of 10p and 20p pieces if I needed to make a call.

Where I worked (a large company), starting in the mid-80s, our use of company phones was monitored and each month we got a printout and had to account for all external calls. We had to pay for personal use of company phones unless we could justify the call (making a doctor appointment etc). Right up until the mid 90s there were payphones in the company and we were supposed to use those instead. Which illustrates that cost was the big factor in phone availability.

[JoeBentley]

I've never understood glurge like this that seems to consist of some big long list of why things were harder back in 19XX, and then jump straight to some foregone conclusion that made the people from that time better and/or tougher.

[Lainie]

Originally Posted by llewtrah

Where I worked (a large company), starting in the mid-80s, our use of company phones was monitored and each month we got a printout and had to account for all external calls. We had to pay for personal use of company phones unless we could justify the call (making a doctor appointment etc).

I had employers who did that, around the same time frame, with long distance calls. We were encouraged to minimize personal local calls, but apparently the expense for those wasn't enough to justify the effort of documenting the purpose of the calls.

Which highlights another thing I don't miss about the "good old days": expensive long distance calls.

[TB Tabby]

Seen one, seen 'em all.

[Simply Madeline]

Originally Posted by snopes

If you are 36, or older, you might think this is hilarious!

Regards,
The Over 40 Crowd

Did it take 4 years to write this? By the end, all the 36-year-olds are over 40!

[Wild Redhead]

Sometimes I turn off my cell phone just so I can re-live the good ol' days.

[Spud Sabre]

WAHH! I WANT MY NOSTALGIA! PROGRESS BAD!



I have no problem with a piece remarking on the differences between growing up in the 70's or earlier and nowadays, but the BS ideas of "playing outside is an unheard of concept to kids today" and "kids today wouldn't be able to survive in a world where they have to change the channel without a remote", among others are annoying and condescending.

[Avril]

The first mobile phone call was made in St. Louis on June 17, 1946. The first call using modern cell technology was made in New York April 3, 1973.

By my calculations, if you are 40 today, you were born in 1971. Ergo, from the time you could use one, there was such a thing as a cell phone.

Now, they were like suitcases for a long time and children didn't have them until very recently. But that was because cell phones effectively got rid of the cheap way kids made calls on the go--with a payphone. If phone booths still dotted the landscape everywhere, I suspect more parents would put off getting their kids phones.

[erwins]

What I don't get about these pieces is the anger. Sometimes I think wonderingly back at the fact that when I was a kid, we didn't even have an answering machine until I was at least a pre-teen. Phones weren't even modular until around the same time, so you got the phone that came with the house unless you went to the phone company and leased a different one.

So in my lifetime, I've gone from there being no reliable way to even know that someone had called while we were out to having call waiting, voicemail, and cell phones.

And it is amazing sometimes to think about (I was just talking to friends about this the other day when my smart phone was not working) the fact that if you were wondering about some fact when you were out with friends, you'd just go with the consensus, or you'd just keep wondering.... Now, you can find out the answer to practically anything within minutes of asking the question.

Like I said, I don't get the anger that goes with this. It's amazing how some things have changed. It's sometimes wonderful, sometimes annoying, but why be angry at kids who've never known any different?

And of course, the old "our parents beat us and no one cared" is just a variant of the "I didn't wear a bike helmet and I didn't die" idiocy. You may not have, but lots of kids did--and still do because idiots like you make it out to be unimportant or coddling rather than lifesaving. The fact that child abuse had a lower profile years ago is a tragedy, not something to be proud of, or flippant about. Kids died, kids suffered, kids were grievously injured and scarred for life. That child abuse gets more attention now is not a luxury for kids these days.

[Wild Redhead]

Originally Posted by Avril

The first mobile phone call was made in St. Louis on June 17, 1946. The first call using modern cell technology was made in New York April 3, 1973.

By my calculations, if you are 40 today, you were born in 1971. Ergo, from the time you could use one, there was such a thing as a cell phone.

You forgot to add in the part about being able to afford to buy the phone, not to mention trying to find a carrier and afford to subscribe to the service.

http://inventors.about.com/cs/invent...tin_cooper.htm

Following the April 3, 1973, public demonstration, using a "brick"-like 30-ounce phone, Cooper started the 10-year process of bringing the portable cell phone to market. Motorola introduced the 16-ounce "DynaTAC" phone into commercial service in 1983, with each phone costing the consumer $3,500. It took seven additional years before there were a million subscribers in the United States. Today, there are more cellular subscribers than wireline phone subscribers in the world, with mobile phones weighing as little as 3 ounces.

I still have my answering machine and my original message is still recorded on it.