In the Old Days

As if having no microwave weren't hardship enough, I didn't count on all the extra dishes, pots and pans needed. Without nuking, you have to use a pan to heat or cook in and then transfer the food to your serving dish. If you nuke, your cooking dish and serving dish are one and the same.
Oh the horror!

And then like a message from above I received a jaunty little email reminding me that I've been through tougher times than this:

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 BOTH ways yada, yada!And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was noway 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 ?? 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 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 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 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 @#*% it all up!

We didn't have fancy things 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, 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' and the graphics sucked! 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. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died!..... Just like LIFE!

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, hard luck! 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!

When it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your a$$ 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 little !!!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 Jiffy Pop 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 1980!

Oh yea, and a seat belt was Mom throwing her arm across your chest every time she hit the brakes.Regards,The over 30 Crowd


If I lived through these tough times, I can do this too!