Wow, that's so amusing and original. People develop the skills they need to get along in the time and place in which they live. This is a surprise?
He sort of touches on it tangenentally with the shoplifting/Internet bullets, but porn. We live in an age where you can watch naked people do depraved shit for free. If you were a teenager in the Old Days you either had to find someone else's stash of old porn, content yourself with bra ads from the Sunday paper, or shoplift it. And then it was like, Playboy. Even if you HAD money, and WERE old enough, there is no way you could get the level of porn we have today. God bless Al Gore for inventing the Internet!
Yes, there was no Internet to keep you glued to a screen for hours without end, ruining your eyesight, making you obese, and absorbing you in terabytes of useless information and malware. If you wanted to send a message, you had to get some exercise and sunlight walking to the mailbox. How horrible. Yes, you didn’t have to worry about MP3’s and being fined millions of dollars for a couple downloaded songs. It was a much simpler, harder life. No Caller ID, but I’m pretty sure they had answering machines to screen calls, which is what I use now anyway. Yes, you didn’t have fancy videogames, which means you had to go outside, harness your social skills, get sunlight and exercise, and live a much healthier life. Woe is you. Yes, you didn’t have a TV remote. You had to get some exercise to change the channel, preventing you from the sedentary TV-watching position for hours without interruption. Yes, you didn’t have microwaves destroying the nutritional content of your food. I’ll bet you didn’t have as much plastic-ware leaching harmful chemicals into your food and drink, either. Clearly, my generation is much better off.
You're going to shit a gold brick when I live to be 500 years old simply because I became polymer based by the time I turned 40. J.
Wow. This thread was meant to be in good humor but I do declare I'm detecting some bitterness here. What gives?
Feh. Like the over 30 crowd isn't livin' large with the new technology. I do live happily microwave free.
47 here.....I've lived with limited indoor plumbing (yes, we used an outhouse) but had a campground-style pump for our sink. Black + white TV (didn't matter-about only half the shows were in color) when I first started watching TV as a very wee lad - and only 4 channels. Wood burning stove for heat. Put in big hardwood logs for over-night and hope you still had hot coals left in the morning. Phone was dial - no push-button. For a while we had a "party line" that about a dozen other families shared. Paved streets? About half of them were, and this was in a pretty big town not far from Chicago. Seatbelts? Give me a break! Bike helmets? What are you, European or something?
Seatbelts...when I was a kid I never wore a seatbelt...ever. There were 5 of us in the house and I was always stuck between my brother and my Dad sitting on the middle, uncomfortable hump that seemed to be in every backseat in every car in the late 70's-80's. Now it's a reflexive habit to wear it, not to mention illegal not to, but it really took getting used to once it was required.
It doesn't take much convincing to get one in the habit of buckling up in a bouncy, short-wheelbase Jeep. A couple of trips riding with me usually does the trick.
Tell me of this......fire! Where is that hump? Cars are the same...how do they function without the hump? Why did they have this hump?
Anyone here remember the old coal trucks that came every saturday and dumped coal down a ramp that led to a coalbin in the basement. ..or remember having to go down there with a bucket and bring it upstairs to thow into the bottom of the bathroom boiler, go through hell to get it lit, then wait seemingly forever for the water to get hot enough to take a bath. ..or remember the old apartment buildings where there was only one toilet on the whole floor. The toilet was in a small closet at the end of the hall where everyone had to take turns using it ..or the old one bedroom apartments that had the shower in the kitchen, and the toilet in the closet. Now THOSE were the days
Even more than that, when I got big enough to do it, I remember having to go down in the basement every night and shovel coal to fill up the stoker. Dad switched to oil heat right after I went off to college.
Eh, growing up in bumfuck Deep South, I got kinda a mix. On the one hand, yeah we had TV (only allowed one hour a day), on the other everyboy carried a pocket knife so it wasn't unusual to be told to go out and cut your switch. Which is a complete mindfuck by the way... You know how long it takes to find one thick enough that you won't get sent back out (and told to double it) but supple enough that you won't get hurt that bad... usually a good 20 minutes of you and your cousins/friends (cuz no one ever gets to switch territory alone, such a feat requires the kind of genius thinking only a group of boys can produce) worried shitless, shuffling around the woods at twilight (don't know why, but you always get into trouble at twilight) dreading what is to come....
How about the old washing machines that didnt have an automatic drain cycle? We had to let the clothes wash until the timer went "DING", take the drain hose and lay it on the floor for the water to run out, take the clothes out and run them through a hand wringer, place them into a tub of clean rinse water, slosh them around and wring them out again, then take them out to the yard to hang on the clothesline..... I can still remember watching the skies grow dark with stormclouds, then being forced to run outside to bring the clothes in before the storm hit. Now all I have to to is take the clothes from the washer straight to the dryer and forget about them till they're done.
This is another reason I dread going home to visit. It is like traveling back in time to the early 1980s. When I got off active duty 7 years ago, the big craze was karate. Karate! For the rest of the United States, the karate craze was, like, the late 1970s. It was just catching on where I grew up in 2002.
Yeah it's still pretty old school back home. A couple years ago when I went around the neighborhood to make my visits when I was home (I got about 3 days of social calls to make any time I go home) I got yelled at by Mrs. Wolfe for making Thomas come to the door to let me in. "If I ever spanked your heiny as much as your momma, you never have to knock on my door, you just come right on in baby." While I love city living, I really will miss not being able to raise my kids in the community feel of bumfuck nowhere.... we used to get kicked out of the house (I literally used to put books in freezerbags and hide them in the woods) for an entire day and told to be back a dark... You'd just get up with all the kids in the neighborhood and make fun, and if you ever did something too bad, someone would see you and beat the shit out of you for being a dumbass. I can't imagine kicking a 10yo out and telling him/her to be back in 12 hours in todays world.
