What Decade Are You Living In, Ma'am?

[Bella_Vixen]

A tv used to be able last a few decades now you are lucky if it lasts five years.

I bought my 27-inch color TV for $300 in 1999 (just in time for my obsession's All-Star game), which was a damn good price at the time.

Still works great

[Becks]

Still works great

AND still has the original remot control.

[DrugstoreJulie]

Well.......I did the maths a while ago, and I worked out that in England the comparative petrol price was actually $11 to the gallon.

$8,30 here, I am SO glad I don´t drive

[ShockQueen]

I got an e-mail a while back about how times have changed just since the 80's! I put it up on my website, but it seems appropriate to share it here:

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... through year 'round blizzards...carrying their younger siblings on their backs... to their one-room schoolhouse... where they maintained a straight-A average, despite their full-time, after-school job at the local textile mill... where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

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 well past the age of today's kids & teens, I can't help butlook 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 don't know how good you've got it! I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet! Forget broadband...we didn't even have DIAL-UP! If we wanted to know something, 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 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's usually talked over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

And talk about hardship... you couldn't just download porn! You had to steal it from your brother or bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were your options! 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 Boxes 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" and the graphics sucked ass! 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 was 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, you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no on-screen menu and no remote control! 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 little bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves! if we wanted to heat something up... we had to use the stove or go build a friggin' fire... imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid JiffyPop 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!
****************************

Now I know there are some here who grew up in the 80's who can really relate to this, but I laughed for hours after reading this gem!

[Midnight12]

I understand your frustration but you also should know that the elderly like to reminise and talk about their glory days and how things are so much cheaper back then than they are now. go figure. the hard part is putting up with them but the fact that they do appreciate those than can tolerate them does often go rewarded. I'm not saying you should suck up, I'm saying that for most elderly people once they hit that certain age their memory goes backwards -in my theory- and their physical state deteriorates. This means that most if not all cannot get out daily and often only ONE day a week. my point is that their ONE day out is what they look forward to, so they take delight in pissing off cashiers. the hard thing is to kill them with kindness. I say this because for four years of my life it was my job to take care of my grandmother that could drive but always wanted to bitch about everything....so I know how you feel sorry that happened

[Andara Bledin]

Um... we didn't have to wait for the weekend for our cartoons. We had to either get up early before school or run home to catch them after school.

I hated getting home so late that I'd miss that afternoon's episode of Robotech and realize that I would have to get up early the next morning (I don't do mornings) in order to catch the replay of the episode.

And there should be a note about no DVDs. If you wanted to see a movie you had to either catch it in the theater, or wait forever for it to come out on video and rent it. And even then, you'd get it home and half the time you'd have to rewind it because the person who had it before you was a jerk and didn't rewind it themselves.

And there was no skipping scenes. You'd have to sit and fast forward or rewind through scenes to get past them. No menu to take you straight where youy wanted to be. And forget all about alternate audio tracks, or commentaries, or being able to choose between subbed or dubbed for foreign stuff like anime (not that there was much anime at all back then).

^-.-^

[Bloodsoul]

What happened to all the "classic" action movies from twenty years ago, too. I watched "Invasion U.S.A." with Chuck Norris a couple of days ago and am wondering where did all of these films go to?

Atleast now I know my rotary phone does indeed still work, not like those new-fangled ones with all their fancy buttons.