Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Back in my day

The longest day of my life is when I was like 18 or so. It was the day I had my wisdom teeth removed. It did all of them at once. This is the one day of my life I was forced to do nothing but lay back and watch TV in dull by powerful pain. This was still in the early days of the Information Age, before serious portable games, smartphones and the Internet. I've had no days longer since that day. I've had many days that have left me wondering where the day has gone.

It's weird now to discuss a time before the Internet. Sure, it kinda existed before 1994, but not in any way that is meaningful to us today. What makes this kinda ironic is that my generation is one of those generations that is going to be able to talk about how things used to be. Not in some silly way like "candy used to cost 5 cents", but in a real paradigm shift sort, like those old-timers that used to talk about the horse and buggy in times before cars. From those old-timers we get the stereotypical story of having to "walk 10 miles in the snow to school up hill both ways." What will my tale be for my grandkids? I imagine it would be something like like "Back in my day, we didn't have the Internet. I used to have to drive in a car in bumper to bumper traffic to get to a building called a library in order to use my library card just read a book." I'm sure the question from my posterity will be, "What's a car, grampa?"

2 comments:

Jason Hughes said...

I just had all four of my wisdom teeth removed last Christmas and had NO pain!! My doc said I was one of the lucky few, but I tell ya, I was in more pain BEFORE they were removed! Oh, it was hell!

And I'm with you on the "before the Internet" thing--when I was--I think seven or eight, my father got us kids a Tandy 64K color computer. When you're that age, you really don't realize how gutting edge that was, but now when I look back--I was the owner of one of the first ever commercially sold computers!!! That amazes me now to think of it, but back then? It was another cool toy for Christmas, ya know?

Our kids aren't going to believe there was a time when you couldn't call anyone at the drop of a hat, or send an instant message--they'll wonder if we were using smoke signals! LOL!

fcsuper said...

How funny, I had one of those Tandy's too. Used to play F-19 and the original Civilization on it all the time. I was smart enough to get a second disk drive for it so I didn't have to swap disks all the time for those games.