You kids don't know how easy you have it
I just got an email from my mother. It’s supposed to be a funny, technology-based update to the “I used to have to walk to school uphill in the snow both ways” speech that our grandparents gave our parents. Unfortunately, the email is already dated, with references to Napster and the original Sony PlayStation.
So, I want to tell all those kids out there–the ones born after 2005–that they’ll never know how hard we Gen Y’ers had it. I hope this website is still up when these kids are old enough to read. I think I need to do this FJM style.
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!!
Children of tomorrow, you don’t know how bad it was. We used to have to LEAVE THE HOUSE, go to the library, search the digitized catalog, and then go find the book on the shelf! We couldn’t use Google’s vast eBook database to search the text of every single publication on earth. We had to FIND THE RIGHT PAGE.
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!
First, I should admit that I thought people stopped writing letters shortly after the First American Civil War. Second, children of tomorrow, do you realize that we used to have to set down at our computers to write emails? We couldn’t type them on our smartphones as we rode our hoverboards to the spacepark.
There were no MP3′s or Napsters! 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 would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!
Back in my day, we used to have to search by the individual song that we wanted and hope that someone else on the peer-to-peer network had it. We couldn’t search the vast landscape of the entire Internet for full albums and TV seasons, and we couldn’t use torrents to download from multiple people at once. Downloads sometimes took HOURS. And we could only fit 2,000 songs on our iPods, which couldn’t always remote control your house.
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!
Get a load of this: Some phones only had 2 lines when I was growing up. And they showed just the phone number and name of the person calling. Not a customized holographic photo like your phones do now.
We didn’t have any fancy Sony Play station video gameswith high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like “Space Invaders” and “asteroids” and the graphics were horrible!
The video games we had when I was growing up were like Neanderthal tools compared to the shit you kids have today. 3D images had to be SIMULATED on a two-dimensional flat-panel HDTV, and you had to hold a controller full of buttons in your hands and different buttons corresponded to the various actions you could perform. And only 4 people could play at a time, instead of 32 like you’re used to.
When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating!
I have to take a moment to fill you in here, because this must sound very foreign to you. Before the advent of 4320p ultra HD and petabyte Internet streaming, people used to have to go to a place called a “theater” where new movies were shown for a fee. You didn’t pick them from the on demand list, you had to show up for a scheduled showing of the movie, and the floors were very, very sticky.
You never would have lasted 5 minutes in 2000, kiddo. And you’d only be able to download half a song in that amount of time.
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