Hard Life in the 80's

Stolen from www.joedahlquist.blogspot.com

-----------------------------------------------------------When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tediousdiatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; whatwith walking twenty-five miles to school every morning .. uphillBOTH ways .. through year 'round blizzards. Carrying their youngersiblings on their backs ... to their one-room schoolhouse, where theymaintained a Straight-A average, despite their full- time,after-school job at the local textile mill .... where they worked for35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving todeath!And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no wayin hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids abouthow hard I had it and how easy they've got it!But now that...I'm nearing the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around andnotice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, comparedto my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it butyou kids today you don't know how good you've got it! I mean, when Iwas a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to knowsomething, 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 andput 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 tohitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or youhad to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'dusually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!And talk of about hardship? You couldn't just download porn! You hadto steal it from your brother or bribe some homeless dude to buy you acopy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were your options!We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phoneand somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it! And wedidn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, youhad 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'tknow!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games withhigh-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like"Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! Yourguy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screenforever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harderand harder and fast er and faster until you died! ... Just like LIFE!When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadiumseating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or someold broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, youwere just screwed!