Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Thankful for... Convenience

Yes, I realize it is both a blessing and a curse, but I still feel led to give thanks for the conveniences in my life. Two humorous items brought this to my attention in the last week. One was this video:



(h/t Susan Isaacs)

The other was an email forwarded by Jeanetta:

THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!!

If you are 30 or older you will 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 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 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 catalogue!!

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! 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 messed 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 either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school,Your mom, your boss, 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'. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels orScreens, 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 off your ass 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 brats!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove ... Imagine that! 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 over 30 Crowd

That list made me giggle quite profusely, especially the part about DJs talking over the intro of a song you were trying to tape. I thought about adding some of my own stuff, like how we couldn't just pull a music video up on YouTube... we had to wait and catch the meeger offerings on Friday Night Videos. Or, something about the old brown cable boxes and the switches on the back of the tv. I also took issue with the call waiting issue. While I agree that you could end up with an annoying busy signal, it was pretty well known that you could request a "call breakthrough" if you had some particularly juicy gossip to share.

So as our nation anxiously mourns the "sacrifices" we will inevitably have to make in these trying times, I like to keep humor like this around to remind me how much of my life is necessity and how much is AMAZING convenience.

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