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

****

[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.

[Mad Jay]

Originally Posted by Simply Madeline

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

Maybe they got distracted by phone calls

[Amigone201]

Originally Posted by snopes

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!

And yet, that's exactly what you're going to do. Not that it got any less annoying, you just decided that your desire to do it outweighed kids' desire not to hear it.

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!

You didn't have phones?

Stamps were 10 cents!

And your income was what?

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!

Yeah, that was way better.

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!

Once again, cuz that's way better. Like the time I had to wait around for an hour for a ride home from school while my mother yammered away in blissful ignorance, while I talked to a busy signal? This was between 9 and 10 at night, on top of that. Yeah, I wish we could go back to those days.

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!

"Please?" Please what? It's obvious that you have some problem with texting, but you seem far too inarticulate to enlighten us as to what it is.

And are we really supposed to believe that not having the convenience of a cell phone is somehow better than having one? For...what? Nostalgia's sake, I guess?

You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

That's true. Annoying people seldom have any idea how annoying they are. They do project a lot, though.

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!

Well aren't you just a ray of sunshine? Look, asshole, nobody's stopping you from firing up your Atari 2600 emulator and using nothing but that. I bet if you look really hard, you might be able to find a 5150 emulator (although I can't imagine why you'd want to!).

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!

That would really depend on how your family operated, I would assume.

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!

Your head probably hit the dashboard a lot, didn't it?

[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.

[Dasla]

I'm 41

I definately had a car seat. I have memories of being in it. I have always been small for may age so maybe I was in it a bit longer then others I may age but we definatly had them.

I still use a hard copy tv guide.

I had no vidoe games at all, the kids next door did though and my brother got a commodore 64 in the earily 80's, which he got as our first computer (for school work) but was really more of a games machine. We also had a microwave, also from the early 80's.

Here's one that these old farts couldn't cope with(and whatever age they are all these people are old farts). I don't have a car...if I want to get somewhere I have to work or catch public transport (the horror!!) or bum a lift. At first this was for personal reasons and now it is for medial reasons reasons.

[khisanth]

I dunno. I read a lot of self-deprecating sarcasm to this. Compared to the glurgy stuff that touts the 40s or 50s, this just feels different...

Especially when they talk about stealing music yourself or that you didn't know if it was the collection agency calling. Usually the emails detailing how fantastic X generation was don't include those details because they were moral paragons who would have rather starved to death than owe money.

Whining about how you had to wait for cartoons alllll weeeeeek, not like "kids these days." I can't even imagine saying that to my nieces and nephew swithout laughing, and I'm pretty sure they would making fun of my "hardship" as well.

It's really arguing about stuff that was less convenient than now whereas the previous ones it was about hardships. It's not that the author didn't have a TV, it's just that it had no remote and fewer channels, and less cartoons.

These are some of the things that feel a little over the top about the writing. And yeah, ending it with a bit about getting smacked in the head? It reads like humor to me, not a serious diatribe against youth.

[wanderwoman]

I'm a little older, and when I was a kid we didn't have car seats, nor seat belts.

Here is what we had for babies:

http://www.hakes.com/images.asp?Item...95&ImageNo=001

This hooked over the back of the front (bench) seat to put the baby in perfect launch position.

And once I opened the car door going down the road and was very lucky I didn't just fall out and die!

Yep. The good old days.

[Aureal]

Is this author really supposed to be over 40? I'm not quite 30 and can identify with a lot of it. Atari? Yup, played that at my babysitter's as a little kid. And a tape deck in the car? Wow, this person had a luxurious life- I had nothing but a radio for music in my first car.

[Cervus]

Half of it is stuff that 30-year-olds can identify with. We didn't have internet access until I was well into high school; some kids in my high school had pagers, but no one my age had a cellular phone (as they were called then). In elementary school I was one of the rare kids whose families had a computer, but we didn't have a printer, so I had to type my reports on a typewriter. We went to the library and looked in the card catalog or the encyclopedias for information.

My parents got a microwave as a wedding present in 1980, as well as a TV with a remote. Neither were new inventions.

What we didn't have, though, was a nasty, better-than-thou attitude like this person. Their generation (and mine) are the ones who invented the social media world we know and use today. And I don't know a single person who seriously believes the world was somehow better before the internet.

[Avril]

They don't think the world was better. They think they are better, because they survived a worse world. And that's really, really stupid.

Bad things still happen. There are still children all over the world, and, indeed, the U.S., without internet (and thus without email, iTunes, etc.), cell phones, or fancy video game systems. We have laws in place but nonetheless children are still beaten, and die in car accidents. I'd like the writers of this sort of tripe to have to confront the faces of the poverty-stricken children of a dangerous neighborhood, and see if they still want to sing their song about "kids these days."

[Dear Babby]

Originally Posted by wanderwoman

I'm a little older, and when I was a kid we didn't have car seats, nor seat belts.

Here is what we had for babies:

http://www.hakes.com/images.asp?Item...95&ImageNo=001

This hooked over the back of the front (bench) seat to put the baby in perfect launch position.

I was in a seat like that. I think the idea was so the toddler could be high enough to see out. No one thought of safety needs. ~ Shudder~

Instead of having the horsey head, mine came with a play steering wheel. That was broken off. Leaving a gougy metal piece. We we sooo lucky not to be in accidents like that. I'm sure others were not.

[Canuckistan]

Originally Posted by erwins

What I don't get about these pieces is the anger.

What anger? I thought this was a spoof of the chain emails that actually were nostalgic for the good old days.

[erwins]

Obviously that's not the way I (or several other people in the thread) read it.

[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.