The Over 30 Crowd

froggy

Gold Member
Aug 18, 2009
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If you are 30-something and 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 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 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 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! Stamps were 10 cents!

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 ass!
Nowhere was safe!

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!

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?

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!

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 GOD !!! 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.

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!

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!

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 up
and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no,
what's the world coming to?!?!

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 rat-finks!

And we didn't have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to
use the stove! Imagine that!

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! You kids today have got it too
easy. You're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes
before 1980!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd
 
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 GOD !!! 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.

Freakin Cell Phones.:evil:
 
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 GOD !!! 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.

Freakin Cell Phones.:evil:

How did the world ever get by without them?
 
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 GOD !!! 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.

Freakin Cell Phones.:evil:

How did the world ever get by without them?

Ask Superman. :eusa_whistle:
 
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 GOD !!! 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.

Freakin Cell Phones.:evil:

How did the world ever get by without them?

better actually.

Thanks for the laugh.
I might have to post an over 60 thread.

If I can just find my stone tablets I wrote it down on.
 
This would be funny, except that we're living through the worst recession since 1940.
 
This would be funny, except that we're living through the worst recession since 1940.

Look at the bright side unemployment is just more time to go on Twitter.

In the 30s they had to build infrastructure and national parks to relieve the boredom.
 
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 GOD !!! 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.

Freakin Cell Phones.:evil:

How did the world ever get by without them?
It's not the cell phone, but the utter lack of cell phone etiquette that chaffs my hide. I was at dinner with a woman who took a cell phone call from her kids at the table in the restaurant. I just sat there like the basket of rolls on the table while she carried on with her daughter about life's minutia.

Then, I was at my Grand Uncle's funeral and saw one of my cousins take a call on her Blue tooth while standing beside the casket.

What on God's green earth do these people have to talk about that just can't wait?
 
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

In all honesty, I used to admire many stories from the elders. I wanted to emulate them and work hard myself and be honorable. I just wish they had told me about the part where you work til you bleed and make other people rich and they still smear shit in your face. And never trust family when it comes to money. Woulda saved me some time with the compassion and understanding I had early in life.

My motto is, learn through the long hard road and you never forget and are less likely to repeat the bad parts.
 
Freakin Cell Phones.:evil:

How did the world ever get by without them?
It's not the cell phone, but the utter lack of cell phone etiquette that chaffs my hide. I was at dinner with a woman who took a cell phone call from her kids at the table in the restaurant. I just sat there like the basket of rolls on the table while she carried on with her daughter about life's minutia.

Then, I was at my Grand Uncle's funeral and saw one of my cousins take a call on her Blue tooth while standing beside the casket.

What on God's green earth do these people have to talk about that just can't wait?

Yah, those are times where I honestly have to practice a whole lot of self control. I can feel my face distort in disgust and hope people recognize it enough to realize what they are doing is rude or just plain wrong. People today lack manners badly!
 
How did the world ever get by without them?
It's not the cell phone, but the utter lack of cell phone etiquette that chaffs my hide. I was at dinner with a woman who took a cell phone call from her kids at the table in the restaurant. I just sat there like the basket of rolls on the table while she carried on with her daughter about life's minutia.

Then, I was at my Grand Uncle's funeral and saw one of my cousins take a call on her Blue tooth while standing beside the casket.

What on God's green earth do these people have to talk about that just can't wait?

Yah, those are times where I honestly have to practice a whole lot of self control. I can feel my face distort in disgust and hope people recognize it enough to realize what they are doing is rude or just plain wrong. People today lack manners badly!

Children have no sense of correction these days, (timeout is a joke) the only thing children learn nowadays is to stand up and defy your elders.
 
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!!

I remember the day I realized they had finally done away with the card catalog. I remember for several years after electronic catalogs became the norm, most libraries would still keep a card catalog. Then one day in 2003 I'm in the Flagstaff public library. The power goes out. I ask them where the card catalog is. They look at me funny and tell me there isn't one. I ask them how I'm supposed to find books without it. They told me I'd have to wait for the power to come back on.


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!
Heck I'm not that old but I remember when they were 22. And I remember being instructed on how to write a letter in grade school.


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!

LOL! I was thinking about this the other day. I can remember as kids we would take the VHS tapes that our folks rented for us and make copies. We thought we were so evil! Imagine that, having to PAY to rent something in order to steal a copy! Almost defeats the purpose of stealing it.


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!

I remember that for sure! I hated it when they'd fade it out early at the end.


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?

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!

All this stuff just started to come into use when I was a teenage. CD's were expensive as fuck though, like $20 - and that's in late 80's dollars!








I'm 32. I think the change I've seen in technology over my life has been absurd. My mother actually kept me in CLOTH DIAPERS, that was only 32 years ago. Disposable ones were relatively new and very expensive.

When I started LSU in 1995 - NONE of the students had cell phones. A few had pagers, they were mostly drug dealers. There was still something called "walk through registration", where to register for class, you physically went to a large gymnasium, selected cards from boxes for each class you wanted, and went to a cash register to settle up.

When I left in 2000 practically the entire student body had cell phones and all the registration was done on the internet. I think the technological change I've seen in my short 32 years far exceeds the change my grandparents saw even in their first 60 years of life.
 
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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!!

I remember the day I realized they had finally done away with the card catalog. I remember for several years after electronic catalogs became the norm, most libraries would still keep a card catalog. Then one day in 2003 I'm in the Flagstaff public library. The power goes out. I ask them where the card catalog is. They look at me funny and tell me there isn't one. I ask them how I'm supposed to find books without it. They told me I'd have to wait for the power to come back on.


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!
Heck I'm not that old but I remember when they were 22. And I remember being instructed on how to write a letter in grade school.




LOL! I was thinking about this the other day. I can remember as kids we would take the VHS tapes that our folks rented for us and make copies. We thought we were so evil! Imagine that, having to PAY to rent something in order to steal a copy! Almost defeats the purpose of stealing it.


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!

I remember that for sure! I hated it when they'd fade it out early at the end.


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?

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!

All this stuff just started to come into use when I was a teenage. CD's were expensive as fuck though, like $20 - and that's in late 80's dollars!








I'm 32. I think the change I've seen in technology over my life has been absurd. My mother actually kept me in CLOTH DIAPERS, that was only 32 years ago. Disposable ones were relatively new and very expensive.

When I started LSU in 1995 - NONE of the students had cell phones. A few had pagers, they were mostly drug dealers. There was still something called "walk through registration", where to register for class, you physically went to a large gymnasium, selected cards from boxes for each class you wanted, and went to a cash register to settle up.

When I left in 2000 practically the entire student body had cell phones and all the registration was done on the internet. I think the technological change I've seen in my short 32 years far exceeds the change my grandparents saw even in their first 60 years of life.
I once had a Professional Surveyor license. Mine was the last class to take the tests for the license without electronic calculators. I used, and still do occasionally, a slide rule.
 
And TV was black and white, and there were only 4 channels.


And the TV had tubes, so it took 5 minutes for the tv to warm up so you could watch your favorite programs.



And you know, they just don't make TV like Dark Shadows anymore.

And phone numbers had words. When I learned our home number, it was ATlantic 1 -5327.

And classes are so small these days. Teachers are whining when the classes are over 20 kids. For most of my school career, 32 kids per class was the norm.

They went to middle schools after I was done, but I was in k-8. And we walked to school every day. My kids had school almost two miles away, across the freeway. they bussed all the time. Of course, first day of school, I walked them there. But we stopped at starbucks halfway for something sweet and something hot.

And coffee shops. What you got was a plain donut, and a cup of joe. If you got really fancy, you could add sugar or cream.
 
YOu guys had drills incase of a nuclear bomb, we had drills in case we had a school shooting. :D
Nothing really ever changes, it just different if that makes sense.
 
And classes are so small these days. Teachers are whining when the classes are over 20 kids. For most of my school career, 32 kids per class was the norm.

But in your day they weren't afraid to hold kids back a grade. Nowadays they want to push everyone forward even when they aren't ready so by the time you get to 6th grade your sitting in a class full of students learning at between a 2nd and 6th grade education level. Its very difficult to teach to such a wide range of abilities. A class full of 32 students all at the same level is far easier to teach I would think.
 
And TV was black and white, and there were only 4 channels.


And the TV had tubes, so it took 5 minutes for the tv to warm up so you could watch your favorite programs.



And you know, they just don't make TV like Dark Shadows anymore.

And phone numbers had words. When I learned our home number, it was ATlantic 1 -5327.

And classes are so small these days. Teachers are whining when the classes are over 20 kids. For most of my school career, 32 kids per class was the norm.

They went to middle schools after I was done, but I was in k-8. And we walked to school every day. My kids had school almost two miles away, across the freeway. they bussed all the time. Of course, first day of school, I walked them there. But we stopped at starbucks halfway for something sweet and something hot.

And coffee shops. What you got was a plain donut, and a cup of joe. If you got really fancy, you could add sugar or cream.

I remember Dark Shadows, and party lines on the telephones.
 
And TV was black and white, and there were only 4 channels.


And the TV had tubes, so it took 5 minutes for the tv to warm up so you could watch your favorite programs.



And you know, they just don't make TV like Dark Shadows anymore.

And phone numbers had words. When I learned our home number, it was ATlantic 1 -5327.

And classes are so small these days. Teachers are whining when the classes are over 20 kids. For most of my school career, 32 kids per class was the norm.

They went to middle schools after I was done, but I was in k-8. And we walked to school every day. My kids had school almost two miles away, across the freeway. they bussed all the time. Of course, first day of school, I walked them there. But we stopped at starbucks halfway for something sweet and something hot.

And coffee shops. What you got was a plain donut, and a cup of joe. If you got really fancy, you could add sugar or cream.

I didn't realize they had words until I saw Butterfield 8 with a Elizabeth Taylor. :lol:
And our class sizes were usually around 30, but I was in grade school during the last half of the 80's.
 
My school district was set up with small, neighborhood schools. Mine was Taft Elementary. I walked there (three blocks) and came home for lunch!

In 7th grade, they released the kids from St. Al's (Aloysius) and turned them loose with two schools (Junior High) formed from nine different elementary schools. Those Catholic girls start much too late. And those kids were wild!

I remember home milk delivery. I remember when most of the homes here were heated with coal rather than natural gas. Everyone had soot 'tornadoes' on their front porch during a breezy day.

They had a caboose on the end of trains and sometimes you could get a wave from the crew.

There were smudge-pots lit along road construction sites. Little black tin spheres that burned kerosene. They were a little bigger than a bowling ball.

What locally produced kids show did you brother Boomers watch in the afternoon? My favorite was always "Paul Shannon's Adventure Time". Paul played the Stooges!
 
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My niece was having a problem with her mother and we took her in for a few months. She was 17 at the time. I went grocery shopping and while I was out she sent me a text asking me to purchase some "Lunchables". I (for some reason) did not hear the notice that I had a text message. hell no one ever texted me before. She couldn't believe that:

1. i didn't buy any Lunchables.

2, I didn't get her message for 3 days.
 

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