Found somewhere on the net: a small collection of quotes from people describing how much harder life was for them when they were young compared with the easy time the yoof of today have:
In my day, we couldn't afford shoes, so we went barefoot. In the winter we had to wrap our feet with barbed wire for traction.
In my day we didn't have MTV or in-line skates, or any of that stuff. No, it was 45s and regular old metal-wheeled roller skates, and the 45s always skipped, so to get them to play right you'd weigh the needle down with something like quarters, which we never had because our allowances were too small, so we'd use our skate keys instead and end up forgetting they were taped to the record player arm so that we couldn't adjust our skates, which didn't really matter because those crummy metal wheels would kill you if you hit a pebble anyway, and in those days roads had real pebbles on them, not like today.
In my day, we didn't have no rocks. We had to go down to the creek and wash our clothes by beating them with our heads.
In my day, we didn't have hand-held calculators. We had to do addition on our fingers. To subtract, we had to have some fingers amputated.
In my day, we didn't get that disembodied, slightly ticked-off voice saying 'Doors closing.' We got on the train, the doors closed, and if your hand was sticking out it scraped along the tunnel all the way to the Silver Spring station and it was a bloody stump at the end. But the base fare was only a dollar.
In my day, we didn't have water. We had to smash together our own hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
So.......... what was it like in your day?
― C J (C J), Friday, 20 September 2002 10:41 (twenty-three years ago)
This is approaching the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch, which probably said as much as needs saying on the subject. Mind, it were all fields round here when I were a lad.
― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Friday, 20 September 2002 16:50 (twenty-three years ago)