Mid-Shore Life

by John K. Johnson

We all have one (or more) friends who send us every stupid email in the world; every dumb joke, every cause - real or not, every outrage (again, real or not).  Most of us delete 99% of these emails and get on with our lives.  Me, I tend to read them, scream at them, research them and send them back to the original sender with the results of my research telling them just how WRONG the email was.

However, every once in a while, you get one that is worth your time, you read it, you enjoy it, you share it with your significant other, or forward it to you email list - or you post it on your website!

THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!!

 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 &*^% I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my 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 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!  Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us..  As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our butts!  Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3' s or Napsters!  If 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 would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players!  We had tape decks in our car  We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished and the tape would come undone.  Cause - that's how we rolled, dig?

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, your bookie, your drug dealer, 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 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!

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 butt and walk over to the TV to change the channel!  NO REMOTES!!!

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 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 or before!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd