Well, Back in My Day

News that I missed, courtesy of The Babylon Bee:

CHANDLER, AZ—According to sources, local 13-year-old Braidlen Zandercrunk made the horrible mistake of complaining about the slow Wi-Fi speed in his house right in front of his Dad. Witnesses heard him say “UGH! This game is taking FOREVER to download!”

“As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I saw my Dad out of the corner of my eye and I knew I had made a terrible mistake,” said the exasperated Braidlen.

His Dad casually walked over, sat down next to his son, and took a deep breath.

“YOU KNOW, SON, back when I was a kid we didn’t have nice iPads with backlit screens with millions of free games to download. I didn’t have Wi-Fi! I had something called a Game Boy! Do you know how we got our games? We had to go to this place called a STORE and pay 8 weeks of allowance for a cartridge that only played one game! Man, you kids got it easy. The screen was black and white, and it had no light so you had to play while holding a flashlight in your teeth or by holding up the screen to passing street lights while you sat in the way back of an Oldsmobile station wagon! Do you even know what the way back of a station wagon was like back then? The seats were backward! You faced backward son! You had to stare down the headlights of the car right behind you while looking at a dark screen. And don’t even get me started on batteries. We didn’t have lithium-ion back then! You had to go to the store again and get 4 AA batteries which gave you about 8 hours of battery life even though the Game Boy package said they would give you 20, which was a total lie, and when your batteries ran out, do you know what you’d have to do? You’d have to wait for your Mom to go to the store and get more batteries so you could play your game again. And half the time she’d forget, so you’d have to take batteries out of your Walkman in order to play your Game Boy! Do you even know what a Walkman is? It’s how we had to listen to music back then. They used things called ‘tapes.’ it was crazy. We couldn’t just go on Spotify and listen to whatever we wanted to. Sometimes you kids just don’t know how good you have it. You know– in our games, you couldn’t just save it and walk away whenever you wanted. You had to get good at them until you were really skilled– not like today where you can just turn the thing off and it automatically saves your place. And if we got stuck in a game? Guess what! NO INTERNET! We had to go to a store called Electronics Boutique and secretly look at a big walkthrough book without buying it and then sneak out! Yeah, things didn’t come easy back then, I’ll tell you what! And have you ever heard of Hamburger Helper? We had to eat that every single night. We didn’t have all this fancy gluten-free hypoallergenic stuff you kids have to eat now. It really built character, I’ll tell you what! You know, I–“

Go here to read the rest.  I recall how my kids would simply roll their eyes when I told them that I grew up without computers and watched a black and white TV with three channels, four if the atmospheric conditions were right, and my kids generally treated those stories of my youth as if I had informed them that I had enlisted at 18 with the legions to stave off the Carthaginian menace during the Second Punic War.