Okay, so when I was a kid, boy oh boy, were times very different. No, we didn't have cell phones. We had a phone in the kitchen with a 20 ft. cord so my Mom could cook dinner and talk on the phone at the same time. It had a dial on it. It was olive green. It was the only phone in the house until I was about 10-years old and then there was one in the living room and my parent's bedroom. Still had a dial on the phone though. We didn't get "push button" phones until I was a teenager.
We never had cable TV in my house growing up. We lived out in the country and cable hadn't been buried out that far yet. We had 4 channels. NBC, ABC, CBS and an independent TV station, now a Fox station. Sure, we could have gotten a satellite dish in the 80's but my Dad didn't see the sense in spending money on TV stations.
I didn't have cable TV until I went away to college. Our dorm was equipped with FREE cable!! I was so excited to have 20 channels!! Funny thing was, we hardly ever watched TV in college and when we did we watched the same stations that I had always watched.
We didn't grow up with computers. Windows were what we looked out of, not icons on our computer. When we needed to do a report, essay, term paper or research, we had to go to the library and look it up in an encyclopedia. In college, we used microfilm. There was a card catalog in the library and we all knew how to use the Dewey Decimal System. I bet if you asked a kid nowadays if they know what Dewey Decimal is, they would say "Who?".
Once we finished our research, we used typewriters to type our papers. My roommate in college had her very own word processor. It was awesome!! It even had an eraser tape!! Bye, Bye White Out!! If she was using it, I had to go to the library and use a typewriter. I didn't like using the typewriters. I had to use White Out a lot!!
I could never have imagined, in my wildest dreams, that 25 years later we would be so dependent on items that were not even available back then. If I leave the house without my cell phone, I panic. What did our parents do in carpool line rather than look at a phone and checking emails? Oh, that's right. They MADE us ride the bus!! How did they know what to do all day long without constant texts from people telling us what to do next? Oh, that's right. They made a "To Do" list and went by that. If it wasn't on the list, it didn't get done until the next day, when a phone call was made letting them know what to do. What if a child was sick and a parent couldn't be reached at home or at work? Oh, that's right. We went to the nurses office and the nurse would tell us to suck it up until one of our parents could be reached or we would be sent back to class. When we got home, if we forgot a book at school, that was just too bad. My parents wouldn't drive back to the school to save my butt. I should have remembered to bring all materials home with me. What if I had left something at home that I had forgotten and didn't bring to school? Same thing. I got a big, fat ZERO on the assignment because my parents wouldn't bring it to me, the teacher wouldn't let us go to the office and use the phone to call home for it and the teacher wouldn't let us turn it in the next day. If the assignment was due on Tuesday, it wouldn't be accepted on Wednesday. No, my parents and teachers weren't terrible people. That's just the way it was. This would not go over well with today's helicopter parents!!!!
A "Tweet" was something that a bird did. A "Post" was something that held up a fence or a sign. A "Wall" wasn't something to write on. (You would get into BIG trouble for that!!) A "Feed" involved eating. "Text" was something in a book that you probably didn't want to read. A "Pin" was something to hem a skirt with. A "Map" was something that was folded up in the glove compartment and you planned your trip by that map and you had better not miss a turn or you would drive 50 miles out of your way and have to stop at a gas station to figure out where you were supposed to turn. A "Selfie", "FaceTime" and an "App" wasn't a thing. We took pictures with a camera and had to wait 7 days to see if they were worthy of being "posted" in a picture frame. We wrote letters. We passed notes in class. We waited for hours by the phone waiting for our boyfriends or a boy we liked to call us. (Back then girls didn't call boys!!) Yahoo was something that cowboys would say. Google was something that you did with your eyes. If you wanted to know the weather, you had better watch the news at 6:00 or 11:00pm and you had to hope that the weatherman was right. We didn't have spell check. We had to learn how to write in cursive. A "Snap Chat" would have been considered a quick talk. If we wanted to hear a song, we had to call a local radio station and make a request. Then we would record it on a cassette tape and hope that the DJ didn't talk over the beginning or the end. A "flash drive" probably would have been someone "mooning" you as they drove past. A "newsfeed" would have been the teleprompter that a newscaster would read on the news, which back then would have been cue cards. Your "inbox" was your locker with a note stuck in the vents.
I'm glad that I didn't grow up in a time when social media was a thing. We had conversations with each other. If we didn't like someone, we just didn't like them. We didn't bash them on a "site" (which was a "place") for everyone to see. We might pass a letter to them to let them know why we didn't like them but the entire world wouldn't be privy to our conversation.
Wow. Life sounds pretty darn primitive back then. Yeah, I'm okay with that. Life was much simpler back then. Being plugged in 24/7 ain't what it's cracked up to be. Just try to take a nap with your cell phone in the same room. Impossible.
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