Maniac Monday – How did I survive?

/ bensbitterblog

It was a little more burnt than this.

I was at my sister’s house for dinner the other day. My wife was out of town and I was trying to single parent for the week. I made the easy stuff, like Mac N Cheese and the Chicken Alfredo from Costco. So, I decided to allow my sister to have us over for dinner, because that is just how good of a brother I am.

The conversation started getting a little stale, so somehow it steered toward the technology gap between what I grew up with, and how my kids started out. I was telling them that the internet didn’t exist when I was growing up and they asked how we figured out the new meme, or did homework. I told them we had to write papers on PAPER, and had to do reasearch wtih these things called encyclopedias.

I also mentioned that we had VCR’s, which were revolutionary, because if you didn’t realize, before that, you had to watch a movie in the theater. If you didn’t, you would never see it again. Thus, when Star Wars came out, everyone saw it time and time again, because they knew when it was gone, they would never see it again.

Our kids were blow away by all this information.

It got me wondering how the heck I survived my life growing up.

How did I survive?

I might as well have lived in the dark ages. My parents made me go outside. Didn’t they know I could have died…of boredom? There was TV and cable and video games and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs around when I grew up. Why did they have to wait so long to invent tablets, internet, online gaming and 80 inch TV’s and YouTube.

Why did I have to suffer all these things when I was young? It just seems like they were doing all this on purpose to conspire against me from the beginning. I was stuck with reading, and playing outside and riding my bike when I was young.

And what’s up with AGB just inventing the phone and not inventing a smart phone?
Did he really think we would want to actually talk on the phone? He knew texting was much faster, but he was too lazy and decided that someone would have to invent texting like a hundred years later. Ugh the worst.

Anyways, it’s questions like this that make my monday’s maniac.

By the way, we got a few questions from people, but not enough to justify a Q&A bitter post. If you have any questions for me, leave them in the comments and I might consider answering them in another post. The best part is that I will link to your blog, so you might get someone to your blog. So if you have questions about how to be more bitter, lazy, or better at eating pizza and sitting on the couch, I’m the expert.

ARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH

Bitter Survivalist Ben

37 thoughts on “Maniac Monday – How did I survive?”

  2. How did we survive? How did we make it to adulthood? 😛

    I did grow up in The Dark Ages! Yes, we bumped into things and tripped a lot! HA! 😀 But we were never bored!

    A friend’s young daughter saw a phone booth recently and said, “Oh, is that what they used so they could call people in the 1990’s?” HA! Then her little sister said, “Why didn’t they use the phones in their pockets?”

    HUGS!!! 🙂

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    • I know. Now I want to go back to the Future and give my younger self some tech and make myself a billionaire just for having a tablet and a phone. (Too bad it won’t work, because the internet will not have been invented yet.)

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  6. “How did you get your memes?!” What a great question. Yes, that was the biggest hurdle back then.
    My kids are the same. I suspect they don’t quite believe we didn’t have internet and think we’re trying to pull a prank on them.

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  7. I had a fantastic childhood without all of the gadgets of today. I don’t think I got bored too much. I always have loved hiking and reading, though, so I could find things to fill the hours. I actually think I was blessed to have been born before the tablet and phone craze.

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    • Although I don’t ever get bored like my kid does, I do struggle when the power goes out and I have no gadgets to look at. I think it would be really easy to end the world by simply taking away all electricity. I wouldn’t survive a week.

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  8. I often wonder how I didn’t get a head injury when I was young, because there were no bicycle helmets, and how did I not get thrown through the windshield with no seatbelt, and how was I able to walk downtown all by myself to see a movie? I don’t think my parents cared for me at all! 😉

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    • I know right? I remember at the age of 8 or 9, just leaving, riding my bike down to 7-11, playing arcade games and playing baseball for many hours at a time. Not even a possibility anymore.

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  9. I love when the kids in my class are all, “Ms. Evans, what’s a walkman? What’s a card catalog? Wait, there’s a difference between encyclopedias and dictionaries? What are those round plastic things that play music called? I’ve seen those before…” Ugh… I feel so freakishly old.

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  11. Hours riding bikes around the neighborhood, birds chirping, men mowing lawns, ice cream trucks that didn’t charge $4 for a freaking ice cream and then look at you like you were the cheap ass for being shocked. Good times.

    Even when we did get the vcr, my parents mostly bought movies from thrift stores, so we were rarely ever caught up unless we went to the drive-in, which was cool.
    Questions: What are some of your writing habits? How do you find the bitter and make it also kinda sweet? Has your style changed over time?

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  13. Let me start the week by making you a little more bitter (I think I still can) by telling you Bell sure did invent a phone, but not the first phone. That was Antonio Meucci.

    *I am so neurotic I can’t help it*

    Anyway, to make you LESS bitter: imagine all the things your kids will be bitter about when they’re in their forties and the World has invented even more, faster and easier ways to write papers, communicate and retrieve memes 🙂 Their kids will be amazed by all the things your kids had to live without! Muahahaha!

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    • Yes, I relish in the bitterness my kids will have to face, but just imagine my grandkids telling me how miserable my life must have been. Sheesh.
      Sorry about the faulty phone information. I will now have to be bitter with Antonio Meucci too. I will just put both of them in the pot of bitterness together.

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  15. I remember when my high school friends who were planning on going to engineering colleges got their first pcs. They had a program called “Mr. Chips” that carried on a virtual conversation (through typing, of course, not speaking). The program had literally dozens of canned responses to certain triggers in what they typed. Cutting edge stuff indeed! J.

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  16. I’m young/old enough to have dealt with VCRs and I miss them. Heck, I miss books. When I was doing my degree the over reliance on the internet was ridiculous. All of my textbooks are pristine because no doubt I ignored them in favour of Google.

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    • VCR’s as terrible as they are now, were a revolutionary step in the movie business. Sure BluRay’s and 4K players don’t make my eye bleed, but they were just a step up. And now you can’t even find them to rent anymore. You either have to buy them, or search on your cable to digitally rent them. No wonder people like streaming services so much now.

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  17. Only the strong survived the days of yore. The skinned knees, elbows, and face from flipping the bike off a poorly constructed ramp, tanning with baby oil for that 3rd degree burn look, and the sting from the wiffle ball bat because you mouthed off to your sibling… and they call the WWII the greatest generation, huh!!

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