Fw: Hard Times

Hard Times

If you are 30 or older you'll appreciate this....

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 ... through year
'round blizzards ... carrying their younger siblings on their backs ... to their
one-room schoolhouse, where they maintained a Straight-A average despite their
full-time, after-school job at the local textile mill ... where they worked for
35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death! 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... 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 MP3s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music,
you had to go 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 f@#* it all up!
You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn! You had to
bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were
your options! We didn't have fancy shit like Call Waiting! If you were on the
phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal! 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 boss, your mom, a collections agent, your drug dealer, you didn't
know!!! You just had to pick it up and take your chances, mister! We didn't have
any fancy Sony Play station videogames with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had
the Atari 2600! ! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the
graphics sucked! Your guy was a little square! You 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 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! If a tall guy 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 20 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 ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon
Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning ...D'ya hear what I'm
saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little bastards! We didn't have
microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up ... we had to use the stove ...
imagine that! If we wanted popcorn....we had to use that stupid jiffy pop and
shake it over the stove like an idiot forever.
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!

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