ole heads will feel this ....
 

If you are 30 ....

When we were kids, adults used to bore use to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking 25 miles to school every morning ... uphill BOTH ways .. yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hayle 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 age of 30, 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 friggin’ 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 musty-a** library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog and the friggin' duey-decimal system! And if you couldn’t find it you had to deal with the crusty attitude of that old a** librarian lady, who was like 68 years old and had that chain holdin' her glasses down like dem joints was going to fly off, yeah, that lady who felt like she was doing you a favor by being there.

There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter ... with a pen! and a stamp! 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! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

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!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600 and thought it was the isht! With games like "Space Invaders" and "asteroids" and the graphics sucked a**! 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.

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 or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, well that was just too dayum bad!

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 you’re a** and walk over to the TV to change the channel. And don’t let your a** have insomnia, cause at 1 a.m. guess what --> TV went OFF! You got the Star Spangled Banner then America took its a** to bed!

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-bastids!

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 idiot.

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 1975!


Regards,

The over 30 Crowd

Hey TonyB...I'm not 30....but I can identify with some of this stuff;)

Tony as someone that was proudly concieved and born in 1971

let me be the first to say YOU ROCK!!

and as far as the Atari went....some of us had that mess from Radio Shack that played 2 (count 'em) 2 games. Pong and the one you had to shoot at the screen with the big colt 45 controller gun. And that was Pre-Atari.

Picture in Picture on the tv screen for us was Picture ON Picture because we all had that big azz 25" console tv that was broke in the living room with the 15" sitting on top of it.:eek:

But we had names for the remote control: John, Stacy, Derrick, whatever kid walked by the tv was the remote control. Feel sorry for us only kids...after awhile I got stuck on pause.:mad: :mad:

But I still will write a letter on occasion:p

From a person who's proud to be in the over 30 crowd:

THIS TOTALLY ROCKS!!!!

I still have vivid memories of my Atari and Colecovision (until our apartment was broken into and my game was stolen). I used to love playing Donkey Kong.

On Fridays and Saturdays, you would find me faithfully sitting in front of the radion recording the latest hip-hop songs spun by DeeJays Marley Marl, Chuck Chillout and Red Alert.

Ha ha ha ha ha

Well I'm not 30 either, but most of this stuff applied when I was a kid. I remember when we first got portable phones. I was like, "This is so cool! I can walk into my room with it!"

I love you Tony! And though I'm not 30 or older, I can relate to everything you said because I lived down South where you had to make your fun. Nuff said. :cool:

"Yes Grandpa TonyB06 . . . . I know" :rolleyes: ;)

*my impression of a young girl ignoring what my elders are talking about*

"back in ancient times . . . .it was soooo hard" :p

Just jokes. But honestly, I really cant remember life before most of these things. I remember playing a Nintendo (the original and Sega Genisis), call waiting, computer class in Kindergarten, SNICK & Nickelodeon, microwaves. .ect. But I do remember (way off in the 4 courners of my mind)the silver Jiffy pop, and trying to record stuff off of the raido. Im an 80's baby / 90's kid :cool: . . .so does that make me fall somewhere in the middle??

As a future member of the "30 and Still Dayum Fine" club, I can relate to all of the above!
My kids do not believe that we couldn't watch cartoons on the weekdays; only between the hours of 7-11:30. After that, it was straight up clean up day in the house.

I loved this thread!! I'm not 30 yet (I'll be 29 this year) but I remember ALL that. Kids got it pretty easy these days...I didn't get with the video games until I was older!! What did we do after school? You came in, changed from your school clothes to your play clothes, and WENT OUTSIDE AND PLAYED!!

And pinkies up I feel you on those Saturdays...it was straight clean up day in my house too ;)

Not 30 yet, but....
 

Yep, you better not mess up those school clothes! Do you remember going to the neighbors house and asking (yes you had to ask), "Mrs. Jones, can Kelly come out and play?" Mrs. Jones says, "Not today, baby. Kelly didn't clean up her room so she's on punishment." And you walk away feeling like Kelly had just died :D !

I'm not 30 yet, and I identify with most of this stuff too. The only thing I couldn't ID with was not having microwave. That had to suck. :( lol

Tony B is the truth!!!
 

Pinkies Up, it is still like that in my house! I am over 30 and I tell my 11 yr old all the time how good she has it. Every Friday she says, what are we doing on Saturday and I just look at her and she says, man we got to clean up again? She stays on punishment and I don't know what she tells her friends at school but they call the house from when I step in the door from work until after 9pm and I'm like Raven's sleep and you should be too and don't forget she is on punishment! Then she had the nerve to give out my cell phone number and her friends be textin me! I had to put one little soldier in check real quick! Sorry, I had to rant!!!:D

LOLOLOL! And then when your Mom got home, she was ticked off talking about how she had been calling all day and somebody was on the phone so she kept getting a busy signal!!! Ha! That was hilarious in my household - of course we never laughed when she was complaining.

ETA: Of course, your Mom could call the operator and have her "cut in" on a call and then she would amazingly appear on the line with you and whoever you were talking to. Yes, it happened to me before. LOL. Those were some crazy times. :)

And if we wanted to play, we actually had to get up off our butt and sweat a little outside. We actually had to go outside the house most times.

These kids today all coooked up in the house all evening after homework. GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY. Dang!

SC

OH Snap! I forgot about the emergency cut-in, that was some bull :D

Who remembers when the tv channel would go off? I mean OFF, like regular broadcast hours are over and the screen made that weird noise. There were no shows after regular broadcast hours

Saturday Morning cartoons were the bomb! And how could I forget WWF(at that time) Superstars, came on at noon here, but it was the only wrestling I knew. Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage and Elizabeth(who I wanted to be so bad!) I used to beg to order Wrestlemania! And that was the one and only pay per view wrestling event for the YEAR!

oh heck yeah, (SC, are our moms twins?) She'd come home and wonder "what fast-tail girl I was on the phone with" that she couldn't get through. :eek: My mom cut in on me more than once. ...which, by the way, is hayle on your telephone mack. :)


...by the way, I appreciate that I ROCK, and the kudos and all, but I got this via an e-mail, and just wanted to share it with my GP peeps. It's not an original creation.

WHY was I just talking about this with someone the other day!

I still write letters from time to time. :)

Me and my brother used to live in Vogel's record store, the one that was in Bizmarkie's video, LOL

Sometimes I still get the urge to buy the TV Guide.

YES! And I remember 'Love, American Style' used to come on like 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning and wake my azz up.

Cartoons were so important back then, because you only had a certain time that they were on. Man, the good old days, LOL

OMG!!!! I had blocked this out cuz you KNEW your tail was in trouble if they had to do that!!!:eek:
How about being told that you had to stay in or out during the summer cause you was letting all the cool "air" out the house...:rolleyes:
Lil OOhSo comes in a million times for a juice box or snack...man we had to keep the same cup ALL day and we had set times to come in and eat...not at our leisure...when I tell her about what I didn't have or how I grew up she asks why me and her Nana were so poor!!!! (lil spoiled so and so..:rolleyes: :p )

YES! :mad: :mad: :mad:

Wasn't it though? Crazy! LOL.

I turned 30 today, and reading this made me a little sad... I feel old. :(

Oh yeah. Once it was so serious that the adults locked us outside. Then it started raining and they still wouldn't let us in. So we snuck in through the window, and do you know grampa's belt came off? Just for trying to stay dry? I mean dang.

Black and white TV only.
Rotary phones and party lines.
Broadcast day ending with the national anthem.
No cable at all.
One TV and one phone and everyone fought over both.

:D

I could remember when television would go off. Man, you knew you were in trouble when you heard the Star Spangled Banner and you were not ready to go to sleep.

As for the telephone, I know what it is like to have to answer telephone and take your chances with whomever it was that was calling at the time. Let's just say that I only answered the phone one time saying "my mommy said that she is not here" and I never made that mistake again.

I thought having a pen pal was the greatest thing. I mean loved to meet people with the hopes of having someone to write. As a kid, I loved getting mail.

I remember when there was no cable, but my aunt had HBO and Prism. I remember sneaking and watching Eddie Murphy's Delirious and being scared out of my mind watching Tales from the Crypt.

I remember being told that I was running up the electric bill because I was looking in the refrigerator. I also remember recording music from the record player and the song would make those cracking sounds when you would play it back.

On Saturdays, after the cartoons went off, I loved watching roller derby. Heck, I wanted to being in the roller derby. Then soul train was my everything when I was in junior high and high school. Heck, I went to junior high, now there are only middle schools where I live.

Man, those were the days...

Was your memory of this circa 1990-1991 perchance? Because I remember that show coming on Comedy Central at 6 a.m. while I was getting ready for school (my HS senior year, btw) :D

Happy Birthday!!

Anybody used to illegally turn on the t.v. when you got home from school, and your mama would touch the top to see if you had it on?:cool: :eek:

Good times...good times...
 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! :D

I "joined the club" last year (will be 31 in Sept.). Like everyone else, this post brought back memories, some fond (i.e. Saturday morning cartoons) and some not (i.e. moms listening in on calls, Sat. as clean up day, etc.).

These chilluns today just don't know... :o :( :rolleyes:

I can't imagine how I EVER lived without caller i.d. From bill collectors, to people I don't want to be bothered with, ex-boyfriends, etc. We had to answer that phone back then and not have a clue who was on the other end!

The "tv-going-off-song" had to be the saddest sound in the world for a night owl like me.

There was NEVER any sleeping late on Saturday mornings cause you didn't want to miss your cartoons.

I think the worst thing I can remember back then was missing out on a well-paying assignment with a temporary agency. They told me they called all day and couldn't get through cause my line stayed busy! :( :(

Even though it comes on boomerang why can't they put on the Buggs Bunny Road Runner show back on from 9-11 on Saturdays?? sigh...thems some good cartoons..these kids don't know what they are missing.:(

...naw, laylo, this sound like your folks was gettin' they love on and wanted yall out the way!! :)

Do You Remember...
 

...finishing up your chores on Fridays after school so you could sleep in and chill all day on Saturdays? But at 7:30a your parents would beat on the door and say, "FIND SOME CHORES TO DO!" Man, I hated that!! :mad:

Anybody eat a BIG bowl of Captain Crunch with those Sat. morning cartoons? Sometimes, you pour your big bowl of cereal only to find out you have a drop of milk, so you make a substitute (you know what sub. I'm talking about, LOL) :D

[QUOTE=TonyB06;1419211]If you are 30 ....

HELLO!! I'm not 30 yet (got three years to go) but a lot of this I can relate to.

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 musty-a** library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog and the friggin' duey-decimal system! And if you couldn’t find it you had to deal with the crusty attitude of that old a** librarian lady, who was like 68 years old and had that chain holdin' her glasses down like dem joints was going to fly off, yeah, that lady who felt like she was doing you a favor by being there. Almost every day during my summers, if my butt wasn't in a summer camp, I was at that musty a** library. Good times. The books where you could pick your ending were the BEST!

There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter ... with a pen! and a stamp! 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! Didn't everyone feel special when you a letter from someone?! How special is it to get a freaking email?!

There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! Man, why do I still have my tapes that I used to tape over and over and over again. It used to be so POed when the DJ would talk at the end or the beginning. Also, I could spend hours in my room listening to old LPs. Great times.

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! I remember getting into trouble prank calling 911. One of the five whoopings I ever got in my lifetime.

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600 and thought it was the isht! With games like "Space Invaders" and "asteroids" and the graphics sucked a**! 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. Okay, I know I'm not 30 yet but does anyone remember the Strawberry Shortcake Atari game. Loved that mess!

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 or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, well that was just too dayum bad! I remember I was too short to see some of the scenes from Purple Rain because of the wack a** seating. Yes, I was 5 years old watching Purple Rain...and what?!

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! We were to poor to have TV Guide. We used the newspapers' TV Guide. I swear I must have seen "Zapped" or "Porky's" a million times on HBO/Cinemax back in the 80's. You would swear that was the only movie they showed.

You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off you’re a** and walk over to the TV to change the channel. And don’t let your a** have insomnia, cause at 1 a.m. guess what --> TV went OFF! You got the Star Spangled Banner then America took its a** to bed! That's why I have to wear glasses right now. I learned at a very young age...sit in front of the TV!

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-bastids! They need to bring back Woody Woodpecker, Chili Willi and Droopy. "You know what...Now you've mad me mad!"

I would wake up at 7 every Saturday morning just so I could get my cartoons in before Momma started making us clean up the house. Pac_Man, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Bugs Bunny, CBS Story Hour, WWF Friends...now those were classics!


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 idiot. My sister and I burned the mess out of some popcorn. Ah...memories!

JiffyPop? Now, y'all had it easy! I have never had JiffyPop in my life. I can still put a pot on the stove, heat up the oil, and pray that the bag of popcorn kernels doesn't spill or leak so I can pop my corn over the stove. I hated standing over that stove, but I loved adding that butter or cheese flavoring in the packets. :p

Those were the days.... :cool:

There's nothing better than stove-top popped corn! My paternal grandma used to get a huge pot of popcorn and pour it into a brown paper grocery bag for me and my cousins to eat from, lol.

I could not agree with you more!! :D

^^^ I didn't appreciate those cartoons until I was a teenager, and my older brother (RIP) watched some with me and was rolling from laughing so hard. Most cartoons are not as funny as some classing Bugs, Daffy, or Tom and Jerry. They used to come on starting at 6 AM. Now, they've replaced cartoons with mostly news and infomercials. What crap! I'm :( for the kids...who can TIVO any cartoons they want.

TIVO??? What was that? If you want to watch something, you better be home to catch it, or you might have to wait a whole lotta weeks for the rerun. ;)

Girl, yes!

Had salt all over your hands and you were walking around licking salt off!

Anyway, I just got this today and this is similar to what TonyB posted at the beginning of this thread.
************************************************** *******

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in icepack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA's ystem.

We all took gym, not PE, and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Keds (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

...see that ain't the way I heard it. I heard that little Donny Reynolds was doing his tricks on the front stoop because he was trying to impress you so he could walk you to the local Walmart. ....but that's just what I heard. :)