Parental rant

[Toecutter]

IF you are 30 or older you SHOULD find this funny!!!

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 ..

up hill 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

kids about how hard I had it and how easy

they've got it!

But now 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.

If 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 MP3's or Napsters! If you

wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike

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 screw it all up!

And talk about hardship? You couldn't just

download ****! You had to steal it from your

brother or bribe some homeless dude to buy

you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11!

Those were your options!

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!

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 school, your mom, your boss,

your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent,

you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and

take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games

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 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!

When you went to the movie theater there was no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat 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 15 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 *** and walk over to the TV to

change the channel and 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-*******s!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat

something up, we had to use the stove or go build a

frigging fire ... imagine that! If we wanted popcorn,

we had to use that stupid JiffyPop thing and shake

it over the stove forever like an *****.

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!

Regards,

The 30+ Something crowd!

 

[Bustanut joker]

:clap: :clap: **** that sounds just like me talking to my kids! I didn't think I was that old yet :huh: Ah well Space Invaders kicked arse! Phonix was killer too!

:lol: :lol:

:jester:

 

[Rogue]

YOU LUCKY *******! We had pong and no cable!

 

[twowheelnut]

Though we did have the ole RadarRange, the black and white Magnavox TV only got channel 3 on VHF and my brother chucked the UHF knob at me once and it fell into the fire. Dad wouldn't let us mess with his tools so we couldn't use the pliers to adjust the UHF knob to the only other channel we could get.

But we did have Bob Steele on WTIC radio every morning!

Oh, and school was 5 miles away. Mom would make sure that we were bundled up in the winter before she kicked us out the door as we trudged through knee deep snow. Now the little ***** get chauffeured in leather clad Rovers and ***** that dad didn't spring for the rear seat mounted DVD monitors!

 

[Luke]

I used to walk miles through the woods to go to school and back.

And it was uphill, face to the wind both ways!

 

[donaldb]

God I'm old!! Mom would take me to school for grades 1-6 but she worked so I walked home about a mile+/- at 6 years of age, had to cross several streets, knew all the short cuts, even walked w/my neighbors kids/friends. Nobody thought anything about it, mom would even give me a little x-tra change from time to time so I could stop at the five and dime and buy some form of crap, usually a balsa glider plane or somthing similar.

Anyway, (quick jump to present day) friend of mine is dating a local girl, she has 3 boys from previous marriage, oldest is now freshman at Ole Miss, they have been dating a little over a year now and he told me several months ago that none of the three boys knew how to pump gas! DAM* how do kids make it in life these days?

 

[twowheelnut]

My step son, who turns 19 this June, was raised and lived in this area his whole life. He can't tell you the street names from anywhere to his dad's or our home. Sad.

 

[OrangevaleFJR]

My kids' friends think it is really cool that I bring my kids fishing. One said, "that must be kinda cool to do stuff outside."

:huh:

We had no pong, but Eric Walker did.

We had ping pong where you actually have to hit the ball with a paddle! (practice for paddle shifting???)

We grabbed our fishing poles and were gone from sun-up to sun-down. Parents had no clue what we ate, where we got it, where we were and they didn't have to worry about it because nothing happened, just like most likely nothing would happen to kids if enough of them had any freedom today.

There are exceptions, sadly, but for the most part I think we've stripped the freedom from our kids due to paranoia created by ratings driven scare TV news.

 

[Toecutter]

My step son, who turns 19 this June, was raised and lived in this area his whole life. He can't tell you the street names from anywhere to his dad's or our home. Sad.

He just needs to do more walking. Get him a DUI for his birthday.

One time I stopped to offer assistance to a stranded teenage male motorist. He used my cell phone to call his father. Apparently, they chatted about possible overheating. At one point he asks his dad, "Which knob does the water go on?" <_<

 

[JimLor]

Just back from the VA DMV where we got my daughter's license reinstated - she, at my INSISTANCE voluntarrily (sp) surrendered it a year and a half ago because she had a habit of backing into other cars. Happy for her she got it back, but now it's back to worrying day and night about her in a car...not to mention the insurance payment! Love both my kids dearly, but they can drive you to drink, distraction, and the state nut house!

 

[FJR DaveH]

Jeez, judging by the posts some of you guys are too old to be riding a bike! Now let me get back to watching the indian on tv until the programs start.

 

[JimLor]

Yeah, rode about 150 yesterday somewhere south of Fredericksburg, west of Rt 1, north of Richmond - at one point I stuck my legs (one at a time) out in front of me and holy crap, my left hip joint friggin spasimed (sp)! Damn that hurts!!!!

 

[redgum]

Kinda figure kids have it tougher these days:

1. They gotta support an aging population of baby boomers who know what the good life is and expect to enjoy every minute of it from the luxury of their early retirement and very long life spans

2. Baby boomers own everything, I mean EVERYTHING, so everything has got real, real expensive. 20 something and want to own your own home....dream on unless you're luck enough to have ritch parents who died and left you everything or landed one of the few highly paid jobs as a top notch computer geek...

3. The pressure is on from the moment you hit high school. Gotta study more if they want a job, no more leaving school at 15, most won't get to first base without the piece of paper. And don't expect to get into a good university with a score of 75%, no way 90% plus or you're a backsliding bum arse

4. Even if you want to fix anything (like the car or even the toaster), there's so many black box electronic components that its an exersise in futility

5. If you want to do anything, I mean anything, they gotta pay for it and most of that money goes to some baby boomer who owns the companies that produce most things you want

6. Take a year off before you turn 20, figure out what you really want, bum around the world cutting your own path on just a few cents a day? No way, aren't many countries will accept the idea of vagrant hippies and besides, everything’s got so expensive 'cause of the baby boomers (see 2 above)

7. Fashion? Yep ya just gotta have the latest gadget, the latest label, the latest style or you're one big nerd and banished from scene, social death, the end of life with meaning!

8. etc etc etc

Geez...am I glad I'm a baby boomer...

True story: My nephew, a computer geek with a good income, bought his first brand new car. I said "flip the hood and lets see what you've got." As you'd expect, there's a mess of pipes and plastic covers. He points to something and tells me what it is. I said "...no that's the engine..."

 

[twowheelnut]

True story: My nephew, a computer geek with a good income, bought his first brand new car. I said "flip the hood and lets see what you've got." As you'd expect, there's a mess of pipes and plastic covers. He points to something and tells me what it is. I said "...no that's the engine..."

You mean he knew where the hood release was located? That's amazing!

 

[toophast]

Getting old Blows...