“Well, youngin’s, you think you have it rough when you phone dies or the wifi signal is week? Why, in my day, we had to ….............................”
1. FLIP OVER A CASSETTE TAPE
Sooooo, they used to have these things called tapes . Maybe you’ve seen one in the movie Guardians of the Galaxy. They were like tiny VCR tapes. I’m sorry, you don’t know what that is. Anyway, you had this thing that had music on it, but it isn't a CD (you still might know what those are). It was a plastic thing with very delicate ribbon (or tape) inside. When it stopped playing, you had to get up, go over to the player, hit the eject button, flip it over, then push play just to hear the other side? Not to mention the fact that you had to pray that the machine didn't eat your tape. Remember the pencil trick? Don't even get me started on that.
Oh, and you know how your speakers are the size of a pin head? Mine were the size of furniture. In fact, they took up most of my room. Actually, one speaker doubled as my bedside table.
But, the upside is, we were able to put together an awesome list of our favorite love songs, walk over (or have a friend walk over), and hand a beautiful girl a mixed tape in hopes of sweeping her off her feet.
2. USED ACTUAL MAPS
Maps were how we pretty much got anywhere far or got lost trying to get there. You see, we didn’t have those fancy shmancy GPS systems in our cars or phones that feature maps, log traffic, and offer alternate routes which are all conveyed by a lovely chipper voice. No, we had massive papers that seemed to keep unfolding and unfolding and unfolding with tons of tiny lines on them. We had to use our fingers to plot a course that would get us there. There was a key but no one had any clue how soon a turn was coming. And you could lose your place in the blink of an eye, which is why the voice of the person giving directions wasn’t lovely or chipper at all. AND THEY NEVER FOLDED BACK UP NEATLY...I MEAN NEVER!
Oh, and there was no automated voice or pop-up to alert you when you’d gotten off-course. That’s what one toothed gas attendants in the middle of nowhere were for!
3. GOT UP TO TURN THE CHANNEL
Oh kids … you think rolling down the window seems exhausting? Try lumbering over to the television. EVERY TIME you want to change the channel. I kid you not, the channels were located on the set … and there were only 13 of them! And only like four of them had anything worth watching! And sometimes you had to walk to the TV across shag carpets that shocked you as you shuffled! And you HAD to watch all the commercials! And if the show you were watching didn’t get good reception, you had to adjust the bunny ears or just stand there and hold them for the duration of the show, because the TV inevitably worked better when you were touching (or near) the antenna, to ensure that you never got to sit back down.
4. HEAR A BUSY SIGNAL!
There were no answering machines (you probably don't know what that is either), voice mailboxes or call-waiting. You freaking just had to keep calling until someone answered. Also, no caller i.d. You took a gamble when you answered. It could be one of your pimple-faced friends wanting to give you the low-down on who gave who a hickey or it could be grandma wanting to give you an update on grandpa’s sciatica.
5. LOOK THINGS UP IN AN ENCYCLOPEDIA
See, we didn’t have a massive database like the Internet at our fingertips. No, we read things that were made from trees. They called those things books and there was a whole section of them that were considered references. They included things like dictionaries, encyclopedias and thesauruses … thesarii? Damnit, I’ll have to Google the plural of thesaurus later, but you get the point.
We found these reference sections in places called libraries where a man named Dewey Decimal was king. There we didn’t buy books, we simply shared them with other people and got their book cooties. We even got information for reports and school papers from these books. In fact, I once got an encyclopedia set for a birthday present (yeah, we didn’t get fun things back then because knowledge was expensive).
Anyhoo, Nana (my mom) bought it in two installments — the first half and second half of the alphabet. But we couldn’t afford the second half, because like I said, encyclopedias were like a million dollars and do you know what happened? In sixth grade, I had to do a report on Switzerland and I failed because I only had A through M. And no one wanted to drive me to the library because it was so annoying to manually open the locks.
Damn you Jane Lewis for getting Madagascar!