(Woo hoo! It’s 5:20! When we, uh…sit around the campfire and eat smores?)
Anyway, as I continue to ponder my slow descent into old age I thought that it would be interesting to list some of the things that were a part of my life growing up but that a high school or college student today would have no clue about. Here it goes.
· Floppy disks: And I’m not talking those 3.5 discs either. We are talking about the 5.25 discs that could actually bend. The ones that held all of about three pages worth of data on them and that you would punch a hole through to make double sided.
· Rotary phones: I wonder if you could even find one of these anymore. I don’t even think most voice mail systems ask if you are on a touch tone phone.
· Long distance being expensive: The first girl I ever fell for lived several states away from me (what a surprise, I know.) This caused a rather significant issue in the early nineties as calling someone long distance was not for the faint of heart. You could rack up a pretty major bill in no time flat. Now I would just use my nightly minutes on my cell or IM. Just not the same.
· An actual handwritten letter: Do you know that I actually wrote girls letters back in the day? Pen and paper letters and they wrote me back? Those really must be the last of their kind. No one would sit down and write by hand anymore. Kind of a shame really.
· Typewriters: Actually, I don’t miss the dread of trying to type out a form and failing miserably because the paper was never aligned and the spacing was always off.
· Mix tapes: Ok, the concept of the mix tape has survived and thrived. Now you have mix CDs or special playlists for your beloved’s iPod. But it is not the same as having to sit down with a stack of CDs, a cassette tape and painstakingly measure out track lengths so as not to have the tape end in the middle of a song. It was a job to make one of those.
· Wide World of Sports: An entire generation has grown up without the dulcet tones of Jim McKay or the wonder that is watching bobsledding from Austria on a random Saturday. Plus nothing could beat the annual Harlem Globetrotter appearance. Losing this show is one of the ways that ESPN has ruined sports.
· Card Based Sports Games: Ok, this might just be me but let me explain. Part of my love for sports comes from the immense library of sports board games that I had as a kid. Mainly Avalon Hill but a few Strat-O-Matic games as well. These games had cards for every single player and rules that could be either simple or so incredibly complicated that even a young EC couldn’t figure them out (I still have no clue how stamina was supposed to come into play in Status Pro Basketball). In the days before computer games this is what I spent my afternoons playing. I ran games, kept detailed stats and memorized entire rosters. I’m sorry but playing Madden just isn’t the same.
· Life without cable: I grew up in the time before cable. Even when we did get cable we did not have it in any room other than the living room until college. I really wonder how kids cope with having everything they could ever want at their fingertips. How do you keep an imagination in such a world? What is the equivalent to staying up late at night to watch a British show on PBS just for the possibility that it might be interesting (or show a boob?)
Wednesday Night Music Club: Let’s rock it out with LCD Soundsystem.
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