Patience is a virtue. That’s what they say, right? If that’s true, then we are raising a whole lot of vicious children. Our Kids Will never have to wait for anything. OK, maybe that’s not fair – I’m guilty of getting annoyed by the microwave not working fast enough sometimes – but compared to our childhoods, kids today don’t have to wait for anything.
Remember what life was like in the 90s when we actually had time in the space between wanting something and getting it?
Our kids will never understand these five things that used to be totally annoying to wait for.
Our Kids Are Frustrated By Waiting For Two Day Shipping.
Remember when six to eight weeks was the standard? You didn’t order anything if you needed it within two months – and in some cases, you had to add the time it took to mail in your order.
My kids are frustrated by two-day shipping. If it takes a week, all hell breaks loose.
And they even get to check where their packages are online. When we were waiting those two months, we just assumed the universe had our packages safe somewhere, and they would appear by magic at some point.
Our kids will never have to wait for dial-up internet.
First, you have to wait for whoever in the house is using the phone to get the fuck off it. Then you have to connect to the internet, requiring listening to your modem perform an abstract little robot song.
After that, you need to wait for pages to load. Want a plain text page? That will be thirty seconds. A photo? You might want to go make a sandwich in the meantime. A video? I think I’m still waiting for that twenty-second clip of the Backstreet Boys video to load.
I was so thankful when high-speed dial-up became a thing and I could download that song in forty-five minutes instead of two hours.
They will never have to wait to see how they look in a photo.
Our kids have Instagram. It has “instant” in its name. Didn’t love that selfie you just took? That’s okay, you can take forty-seven more, choose the best one, and delete the rest.
We had to wait a week to discover we looked like a horse.
Sure, sometimes we planned for this and took multiple photos – who of us doesn’t have albums filled with essentially the same photo of their cat? – but we still had to wait to see it. And there was no deleting.
Throwing out photos was just wrong. Every photo we took before 2001 is absolutely in a drawer somewhere.
Our kids will never have to wait to make playlists of their favorite songs.
Want to make a mix of all your favorite songs? Now, you can just click a button. When we were kids, we had to sit by that radio, with the pause button on, just waiting for our favorite song to come on.
Repeat until the tape is full.
If you haven’t woken out of a sound sleep upon hearing the first two notes of your new favorite song in order to slam that pause button like your life depended on it, were you even a teenager in the 90s?
Our kids don’t understand live TV
Missed an episode and forgot to tape it? You get to wait seven months for it to hit reruns. There was no binge-watching, you watched one episode a week and you liked it, dammit – and only if your parents weren’t watching Unsolved Mysteries.
There were commercials. You either had to wait through them, or run to the bathroom to relieve yourself after, again, holding it while you waited for a commercial.
There was no pausing live TV or DVRing things to watch with ease later. At best you could record it on a VHS, and then wait to rewind it to the right spot. TV used to be about twenty percent entertainment and eighty percent waiting.
The next time your kids are bitching that the Wi-Fi is slow or their order won’t be here for three days, treat them to the cautionary tales of waiting in the 90s. Or worse – make them watch a commercial.
Oh yes!!! This is so spot on!!! Before we had a VHS we had a Beta Machine. I remember walking to the video store and picking out a movie and the gal behind the counter would have to call my mom to ask if I could rent a PG movie. Also in order to call someone you had to make sure you had dimes and hope the pay phone on the corner worked.