Technology

I thought this was pretty funny…two of our neighborhood girls biking and texting…you get the feeling their moms said, “Put down the electronics and go outside and get some fresh air!”  So they did.  Kinda sorta maybe.

Wouldn’t it be even funnier if they were actually texting each other?

Things really haven’t changed that much since I was their age.  When I was about 13, I was so excited because for Christmas I asked for—and got—a handheld gaming system:

It played games like BlackJack, Tic TacToe, and Echo, and I spent hours on my bed with my feet up on the wall and my Holly Hobbie dolls gathered around me playing that thing. So I can relate to the electronics-addicted biking/texting girls.  Kinda sorta maybe.

My family was always on the cutting edge of technology.  I was also the first one in my neighborhood to have one of these:

We also had a cordless phone!  And I got an electric typewriter as a graduation gift!  My college boasted telephones in each of our dorm rooms…no community phone in the hall!   And when I wanted to talk to my parents on the phone every couple of weeks, I’d call home collect, they wouldn’t accept the charges and then they’d call me back.

I wrote papers on my typewriter and when I made a mistake, I put a little piece of white ink paper into the typewriter, hit the letter again and typed over it in white, then went back and typed the correct letter in black. When I needed to do research I went to the library, looked in the card catalog, worked my way through the stacks, and read books.  I took a roll of film with my camera, mailed it off to the photo place, and received my 24 photos back in about two weeks.  If I wanted extra prints, I had to take the negative to a photo duplicating place and wait another week.  Which I never did because the photo quality on my Disc camera was so bad.

For entertainment, we played Trivial  Pursuit, eating popcorn we popped with oil in a popcorn popper, surrounded by walls covered with Oneida/Snoopy/Michael J.Fox posters, our books stacked on genu-wine milk crates we “borrowed” from all of the local stores (one time a wild rumor circulated campus that the police were coming to check dorm rooms for “borrowed” milk crates and anyone that had them would be fined $50 a milk crate…crates were immediately ejected from all of the dorm rooms and littered stairways, lobbies, hallways, and front lawns of dorms!)

That’s me on the left in pink!

We cooked Ramen noodles in hotpots, and later a few fortunate girls got giant microwave ovens in their dorm rooms.  We received real letters from people and we sent real letters back.  We wrote notes in notebooks using pens and highlighters. When we wanted to see a movie, we went to a theatre (seriously…no one even had VCR’s then). When we wanted to see what our “friends” were up to, we headed down the hall and asked instead of checking out their Facebook status. We walked to class using our own feet, none of this fancy flying skateboard crap kids have nowadays.

Sorry.   I think I got carried away and suddenly started channeling Back to the Future.

Anywho, I do like technology, and I really wish I would have had it to help me out with research and papers and socializing.  I’m glad my kids will have access to so many more resources for entertainment and information.  The eighties were a good decade, and I wouldn’t have had them be much different if I had a chance.  Except for maybe cell phones.  And Red Box.  Ooh! And blogging!  And Angry Birds, Instagram, Google, and iTunes.  Also digital cameras.  And no perms.  Geez, I hated getting perms. 

Dude, the eighties stank!  We wore jelly shoes and our mixed cassette tapes were always getting ruined and our “digital” clocks clicked at us every time a minute changed and our eyeglasses were huge and there was only one flavor of Oreos! 

How did we survive without mint Oreos?

The end.