When We Were Kids

It's sad to think about how things have changed from when we were kids to how our children are growing up now.  I suppose every generation feels the same way as they ease into the older stages of life.  Whereas older generations would sit on their front porch, rocking back and forth, smoking a clove-laden pipe, complaining about how this world is going to hell-in-a-handbasket, our generation has the internet to voice our concerns; it's about as useful as front-porch venting.  Here are a few things that I'm sad my children will most likely never get to experience.

 #10.  Hand-written Plagiarism:  Back when I was in school, you couldn't just copy and paste straight from the internet.  You had to do honest research before you could just rip the words right from the author's pages.  It was easier to plagiarize if you had access to an encyclopedia, but if you wanted to steal from an actual book or peer-reviewed paper, you had to use the index.  Do today's children even know what an index is?  This generation will never appreciate how hard it used to be to cheat.




#9.  Phone Books:  Today, you can look up pretty much any number, instantly, online.  Not true twenty years ago.  If you wanted to call somebody, you needed to know their name.  If it was a common name, you had to know their address too.  Ordering a pizza wasn't as simple as clicking a button on the computer.  You had to look up the number and talk to an actual person.  To make things worse, some places only listed their number in particular phone books.  At any given time, we would have at least three different books and would most likely, need each one.  Plus, trying to figure out how the publisher listed the specific business you were looking for was like trying to figure out what women want.


#8.  Chalkboards:  When I was in school, we didn't have fancy, computerized, white-boards.  We had chalkboards.  And chalk.  If we were called to the board to write out a math problem, you were guaranteed to have chalk-covered clothes for the rest of the day. 

This, of course, assumes that you could actually find a piece of chalk that was long enough to write with.  Then there were the teachers with long fingernails.  Nothing gets the attention of a class like nails scraping a chalkboard.  Be thankful for your white-boards children.

 #7.  The Konami Code: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Select, Start.  When I first started playing video games, we could only do two things, one of which was always jump.  The other was punch, kick, or shoot.  That's it.  The games were so hard, you had to put in a cheat code to beat most of them.  Plus, if we got stuck, we couldn't hop online for tips.  Now, controllers have more buttons than we have fingers and if a game is too hard, you can put it on easy.  You kids have it too easy.



#6.  Television Commercials:   The boy is good enough to use the television remotes (we have 3) now.  In fact, he usually has to set up the t.v. for Me-Maw when she comes over to watch them.  While this has given him much needed freedom and independence, the DVR has given him just as much frustration and impatience. 

He refuses to watch "Live TV" now.  If it's not pre-recorded, he's not watching.  He doesn't know how good he has it.  I've tried to explain to him before how his Momma and I had to watch commercials all the time when we were little and if we wanted to record something, we actually had to watch it while it was on.  This brings me to my next point...


#5.  Saturday Morning Cartoons:  Today, the kids have at least ten different channels dedicated solely to their demographic...and that's just on our basic programming level.  Growing up, we had six channels and two of them only came in if the sky was clear and you said your prayers.

 If that wasn't bad enough, we only had one chance to really watch cartoons--Saturday Mornings.  Sure, if you got up early enough on a school day, you could catch half an episode of He-Man, but the really good shows came on the weekend.

 Magically, it was easy to get up at 5:30 on those days and watch television until noon.  With the wide availability of cartoons now, I can't see how they can be nearly as meaningful.  To be fair, today's cartoons are more educational-based than the sword-wielding, muscular-Swede based toons of my younger days.

 #4.  High-Speed Danger:  Some of my favorite memories are those ones were my sister and I sat in the bed of Dad's truck, bouncing off the side walls as he zoomed down the highway at 60 miles an hour.  Thanks to the gub'ment, there are now laws in place that make this favorite pastime highly frowned upon.  Some even go so far as to call it illegal.  Next thing you know, they'll be requiring kids to wear helmets and knee pads when they ride bikes.  Ridiculous!


#3.  Getting an "F":  Our school system has implemented a new report card grading system.  Instead of the A, B, C, D, and F letters, they use a P (for "progressing towards requirement") and an M (for "meets requirement").  Useless. 

When we were kids, our parents knew exactly how well we were doing.  If you brought home A's and B's you'd get something nice.  C's meant you got a strict talking-to and D's and F's, well, let's just say if you brought one home, it would probably be the last time you did so.  Now, all I know is that my son is either doing the work they expect of him or he's trying to do it.  Very helpful.

#2.  Pay Phone Fun:  As pay-phones across the country disappear, so does an important male-bonding experience---prank phone calls from pay phones.  This was the thing to do after school.  I still remember walking home with my buddy Travis and stopping by the courthouse pay-phone near his mother's apartment.  This is where we raised some hell pranking local businesses and outstanding members of the community.

It may also be the source of breaking up a marriage.  See, we also used to call "900" numbers and try various 16-digit combinations.  I remember one day it actually worked.  We must have stayed on that phone for thirty minutes.  I fear that some husband out there had to explain a 30-minute phone call to his wife.  Now, kids can get online and do all kinds of weird crap for free.  Where's the fun in that?

#1.  Audio-Cassette Piracy:  It goes without saying that music today is nothing like music used to be; I said it anyway.  Over-produced, over-edited, and an over-saturated market leaves today's music widely available at best, and, well widely available at worst. 

When we were kids, we had limited options.  We couldn't download music instantly, we had to go to stores and purchase audio-cassette tapes--all of this under the eyes of censoring parents.   You didn't get to buy any quality music until you could drive to the store yourself. 

It wasn't as easy to share music either.  You couldn't just touch your phones together and swap playlists.  You had to playback the tape and record it onto another tape.  This leaves what is called a generational gap between the original tape and the recorded tape.  Much like generational gaps of today, the later generation wasn't anywhere near as good in quality.

Of course, I guess it doesn't do any good to complain about the next generation does it?