1.Running errands with your parents — or going to your sibling's events — was boring AF because you had no cell phone or Game Boy to pass the time with.
2.And if your mom or dad was late picking you up, there were very few ways to contact them, so you just waited, and waited, and waited...
3.They didn't play kids' programming around the clock like they do now, so once cartoons went off at 8 a.m. you were stuck watching random shit like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
4.You were so bored that you passed the time by looking through the phone book for people with weird last names.
5.If your family had a computer — a big "if" — it wasn't exactly awe inspiring.
6.There were home video games in the '80s, and some people wax nostalgically about them, but let's cut the crap. They were TERRIBLE. This was gaming the first half of the decade:
7.And this was gaming the second half:
8.Whenever you talked to your friends on the phone, your mom or dad would yell, "Get off the phone! I'm expecting a call!" because you didn't have call waiting.
9.The Cold War was still going on, so you were convinced you would die in a nuclear war — especially after The Day After aired.
10.If you wanted a toy, you couldn't just pester your mom until she ordered it on Amazon. You had to do 50 chores and act like a choir angel to convince her to get off the couch and drive you to the toy store.
11.Even then there was no guarantee they had what you wanted in stock, so you usually ended up with a knock-off of the toy really wanted.
12.There were a lot of awesome movies for kids, but a lot of them were, uh, casually racist and homophobic.
13.Speaking of movies, you couldn't buy movie tickets online, so if you wanted to see the hot new movie like, say, Goonies, you had to line up and wait...and wait...and wait for the box office to open.
14.Watching movies at home wasn't great either. This — for most of the '80s — is what a video store looked like. Check out that selection, people!
15.You were (cough, hack, wheeze) subjected to a disturbing amount of second hand smoke — at home, at restaurants, in cars, you name it.
16.And while adults were cool with you inhaling second hand smoke, they obsessively warned you — again and again and again — to "Just Say No!"
17.Getting anywhere new was a total hassle in those pre-Mapquest/GPS days, so your parents were always getting lost and pouring over these.
18.Back then you couldn't just say, "Alexa, play 'Thriller!'" To hear it you had to pull out one of these behemoths.
19.Of course, you could also listen to music on tapes, which were 100% reliable and never (OK, always) got ruined like this.
20.If you wanted to "download" a song, you had to wait for it to be played on the radio, and then quickly hit record on your boom box.
21.And if all of that weren't enough, for part of 1985 you didn't even have Coke! They literally took it off the market and made you drink some crap new formula.
