I actually heard these words issue, unironically, from the lips of my lifemate. "Back in my day..." whilst complaining about how technology was too easy to obtain for either Mayhem or Chaos.
Love, you purchased every single one of those things for our kids. You did it with a song in your heart. You did it with an eager spirit. And now you're complaining that the kids are too casual with them and don't know the first thing about basic tower maintenance.
Secondly: Things weren't that fantastic back in your day.
Third - YOU'RE THREE YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME, HOW DARE YOU TURN INTO AN OLD FART?
I'm starting to feel like Senior Technophile Georg, who lives in a cave and appreciates 10 000 new things a day. I love that technology is both available and cheap. I love that we can just watch things on Netflix whenever we want.
So I thought I might devote some of this blog to the horrible paucities I had "back in my day":
- Technically four stations if you count the static-fogged echo of Channel 2 from NSW [I used to watch some shows twice during Daylight Savings Time]
- There was no google. If you wanted to find out something, you had to physically travel to a library and look it up, and then hope that the library had it.
- If a thing existed, you had a 80% chance of not knowing about it because the media never talked about it.
- You got more out of newspapers than you did from the TV.
- America was a magical place full of cowboys and cops who fought for what was right.
- There was only AM radio.
- If you wanted anything specific, you had to travel for ages to go to the shop that might stock it.
- If you wanted something more specific than that, you had to learn how to make it.
- There was no parcel tracking, so ordering overseas was a huge gamble.
- You had to phone for pizza, and if you lived in the boonies, they'd tell you to fuck off.
- Searching for anything required, at a minimum, ringing people up and finding out if they had it or knew someone who could help.
- If you knew a thing existed, but didn't know how to get it, you were shit out of luck.
- You had to wait for US movies to be shown in Australian cinemas.
- You had to wait for US TV shows to be shown on the aforementioned maybe-four stations. Assuming that any of them wanted to air them in the first place.
- If you wanted to watch a movie after it was no longer in the cinemas, you had the TV running the Midday Matinee.
- Sometimes, if you wanted a thing, you had to go to the shops that might have it and, when they didn't, ask if they knew someone who might have it all over again.
- Computers were sold at Chandlers only [and you had to go out of your way to get to them].
- Chandlers didn't sell parts for the computers.
All in all, I think I prefer today to my day.