Today's Inbox

A friend writes:

In the Old Days, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up they walked twenty-five miles to school every morning,uphill, barefoot BOTH ways—yadda, yadda, yadda. I vowed there was no way in hell I was going to lay that crap 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 don't know how good you've got it. When I was a kid we didn't have the internet. See, 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. You had to buy stamps. Then you had to find a mailbox and it would take, like, a week to get there.

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 asses. Nowhere was safe.

There were no MP3' s or Napsters. If 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 screw it up. CD players? Ha!Just “tape decks” in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and “eject" it when finished and sometimes the tape came loose and jammed up the player.

We didn't have fancy apps like Call Waiting. If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer or a collections agent—without caller ID you just didn't know. You had to pick up and take your chances, mister.

No Playstations with high-resolution 3-D graphics, just Atari 2600 with games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids' where your guy was a little white square. You actually had to use your imagination for that. No multiple levels or screens, just one screen forever and the game kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until, well, I guess you died.

You used a little book called a TV Guide to find the programs. Channel surfing? You got off your ass and walked over to the TV to change the channel.

There was no Cartoon Network either. Only cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying.? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-bastards.

I can’t believe I’m saying this. I sound just like my parents when they said, You kids have it so easy. That was back in the 80's. Before that is lost in the mists of time.