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The
Washington Post had a contest wherein participants
were asked to tell the younger generation how much harder
they had it "in the old days." Winners, runners-up, and
honorable
mentions are listed below.
Second Runner-Up:
In my day, we couldn't afford shoes, so we went barefoot. In
winter, we had to wrap our feet with barbed wire
for traction.
First Runner-Up:
In my day, we didn't have MTV or in-line skates, or any
of that stuff. No, it was 45's and regular old
metal-wheeled roller skates, and the 45's always skipped, so
to get them to play right you'd weigh the needle down with
something like quarters, which we never had because our
allowances were way too small, so we'd use our skate keys
instead and end up forgetting they were taped to the record
player arm so that we couldn't adjust our skates, which
didn't really matter because those crummy metal wheels would kill you
if you hit a pebble anyway, and in those days roads had
real pebbles on them, not like today.
And the winner is:
In my day, we didn't have rocks. We had to go down to
the creek and wash our clothes by beating them with our
heads.
Honorable Mentions:
In my day, we didn't have fancy health-food
restaurants. Every day we ate lots of easily recognizable
animal parts, along with potatoes.
In my day, we didn't have hand-held calculators. We had
to do addition on our fingers. To subtract, we had to have
some fingers amputated.
In my day, we didn't get that disembodied, slightly
ticked-off voice saying 'Doors closing.' We got on the
train, the doors closed, and if your hand was sticking out,
it scraped along the tunnel all the way to the next station
and it was a bloody stump at the end. But the base fare was
only a dollar.
In my day, we didn't have water. We had to smash
together our own hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
Kids today think the world revolves around them. In my
day, the sun revolved around the world, and the world was
perched on the back of a giant tortoise.
Back in my day, '60 Minutes' wasn't just a bunch of
gray-haired, liberal 80-year-old guys. It was a bunch of
gray-haired, liberal 60-year-old guys.
Back in my day, they hadn't invented electricity. We had
to watch television by candlelight. |