Reading this article in the paper this evening just reminds me of how far...or how low....we have come as a society.

Growing up we had one phone in the house that we all used until I was 16...we didn't have an answering machine until I was 18 years old in '72....we had to wait in line at the movies or at school after games to use the phone booth....

we thought phone cards were the future...

Now...we complain...and blame it on NUMBERS....if we don't have INSTANT communication with the world...

what is wrong with us?

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...,7510127.story

I'm 46 (a youngster!) and I remember getting up to change the channel on the console TV (doh!)

answering machines? ah, no. dial phones that were hooked to the wall. and we had one for the whole family too.

no computers or internet.

I was 5 when I watched men WALK ON THE MOON!!

that's sort of a tip of the ice berg type list, it's funny to think how much change we get to witness in a short span of time. wonder how we keep our sanity?

And it's funny but if you talk to someone (like me!) who has always had things like TV remotes and answering machines and what not, we can't imagine what you guys used to do without them!

back in the day, we had maybe 5 to 10 tv channels to watch. we'd watch one station/tv show for a while, and get up from the couch and change the channel. we used a TV Guide (a magazine!) to know what was on. no videos (VCRs came out when I started college), we went out to the movies pretty often. we still had a couple of drive in movie theaters when I was young, but they were fading fast.

no emails, we wrote cards or letters to family and friends not close by (or called them).

as for answering machines, since we didn't have them, there was no "screening." no caller id. you picked up the phone and talked to who was calling or you didn't. I remember plans being made and generally stuck to, since you couldn't call on the cell every 1/2 hour to update locations/schedules. It really wasn't all that bad, not being married to a phone and in constant contact with whoever and everybody.

I don't remember time being as jam packed and people being as busy as they seem to be now.

if you wanted a piece of information, you looked it up in a reference book or encyclopedia, or do research at the library, you couldn't just plug it in a search engine and get instant results. we used microfiche and spools of film and card catalogs. and that's 20 plus years ago, not long. just think how it might be 20 years from now.

Yesterday Angie was showing me something in the advertising we got with our new cell phone upgrades.....

now you can get a notice on your TV screen while watching on who is calling you...I bet the time will come we can hit a button and answer the TV...while it goes on automatic pause until we finish the call...

we may never have to burn another calorie by getting up to answer the phone

I know there was color TV before my family even got one but I remember how cool it was to watch Dukes of Hazards in COLOR!! It was awesome.

Remember when Atari pong came out? How many hours would we sit and play that stupid game?

We had 1 bathroom and 3 bedrooms for Mom, Dad and 6 kids-2 of us and 4 cousins who lived with us. Nobody thought anything of it. I remember when the neighbors remodeled their house and put a powder room in and everyone in the neigborhood talked about it-and not in a good way.

Our first answering machine, we actually said "we aren't home now" Or "we're on vacation and won't be back for a week" Please, let's just invite people to break into the house. But nobody did-at least at our place.

My Dad got a new pick up truck that had air vents that brought in the outside air-something new at the time. We went of vacation in that stupid truck and he wouldn't let us open the windows because we had "air conditioning" Please, I'm still bitter about that miserable trip-30 years later. His idea of a vacation was to drive to Colorado and back. As quickly and non-stop as possible. 4 people trapped in a pickup truck-they didn't have back seats back then.