Growing up without a cell phone

[Canuckistan]

Originally Posted by erwins

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

Which is probably proof that sarcasm and satire don't always translate well into print.

[Dropbear]

Originally Posted by Canuckistan

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

What points you to spoof rather than genuine? (I'm not being snarky - I'm genuinely interested. In part because I often write and say things that I think are obvious irony and people take me seriously)

Dropbear

[Canuckistan]

I'd say all (except, perhaps, for No. 3, which doesn't seem to fit in quite as well with the rest of them). No. 4, especially:

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!

Oh, the hardship we had to endure when stealing music!

ETA: No. 9 is pretty good, too:

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!

That last sentence got a good laugh out of me the first time I read it.

[Tarquin Farquart]

Think of the horror... not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there's TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please!

Oh em gee! These sounds, like, so teenage!

[Skeptic]

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!

Yep, I really miss the good old days...

(2011) QUEENSLAND drivers take a bow – the state was last night on the verge of its lowest road toll since accurate records began almost 60 years ago.

Nearing midnight, Queensland had recorded 247 deaths in 2010 – better than the previous low of 251 recorded in 1952. The toll last night was 84 deaths down on the 2009 toll.

I remember growing up in the 60s and 70s, and the state road toll was routinely over 500.

Glurge like this really makes me puke.

[Avril]

Originally Posted by Wild Redhead

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.

I acknowledged that not everyone had them in the part of my post you clipped out of the quote, but the OP claim was that they didn't exist, full stop.

[DawnStorm]

Originally Posted by erwins

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.

Same here.
I don't see the point of these pieces: gloating? A wish to return to some imagined good old days? My mother remembers the following, and not with great fondness: using a washboard; hauling wood to the cookstove; swimming in a creek; getting whooping cough and scarlet fever. She also has some memories of seeing her mother die from asthma because there was really no way to treat it back in the late 30s.
I look back on my own life, and remember how it was before the internet, home computers, etc, but it isn't with anger or gloating, it's with a sense of man alive, look at what all that's happened within my lifetime!

[Lainie]

My mom is a great antidote to things like this. When someone whines about how a loaf of bread used to cost 40 cents, her immediate response is "And how much money did you make then?"

[Wolf333]

My father does that in the opposite direction all the time, Lainie. He claims that they were able live fairly well on $10K in 1969, so $20K should be more than enough now.

[Floater]

I remember when my parents bought their first TV. I must be getting old.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[Lainie]

Providing, or not providing, a phone would be up to the tenant here.

I did know some people in the 70s and 80s who were on metered local phone plans, where they were charged a reduced monthly fee but then paid for each outgoing call.

[Jaime Vargas]

Originally Posted by Lainie

I did know some people in the 70s and 80s who were on metered local phone plans, where they were charged a reduced monthly fee but then paid for each outgoing call.

That was the standard here until the late 90s. And they only changed it when the market was liberalized (until 1998 telephony in Spain was a monopoly and Telefónica was a public company) and Internet use was becoming widespread (companies started offering flat rates for Internet use, and only after a couple of years they started offering flat rates for local calls).