The Spoiled Under-30 Crowd, Part II

Not too long ago, I posted the contents of an article on my blog titled The Spoiled Under-30 Crowd. I had a lot of people over the age of the 30 sympathize with what that article had to say. Since that time, I’ve thought of a few more “spoiled” entries of my own that I’d like to add to the list:

We didn’t have espn.com with real-time scoring updates. If you wanted to know the score of the game, you watched your local news later that night and waited for the sports segment to come on twenty minutes into the newscast.

And we didn’t have school closings posted on the Internet or scrolling across the bottom of our television screens. You had to listen to the radio. And if your school name started with the letter Z, well then you had to wait 10 minutes into the list of school closings just to hear whether or not your school was closed.

And if you wanted to rent a movie, there were no DVDs. Your only choice was videotape. And movies didn’t magically show up in your mailbox because of some queue you had set up on Netflix. You had to get in your car and drive to the video store. And movie rental stores kept all of the copies of the movies behind the counter and only put empty boxes on the shelves. So every time you thought you found the movie you wanted you had to go up to the counter and ask, “Do you have this movie?” only to be told no so you could head back to the shelves to try for another selection.

And speaking of videotapes, we didn’t have digital video recorders like TiVo. We had VCRs. 80 hours of recording capacity? Ha! We were lucky if we had 6. And if you wanted to record two shows at the same time, you got two VCRs. Three shows? Three VCRs.