How can I be in my thirties and already referencing The Olden Days? I always imagined I’d be much closer to my superannuation before I could freak out younger people with nostalgic stories that began “I remember when….”.

Sometimes I wonder how we survived The Olden Days. How we got anything done. Because I’ve been considering some of the hardships endured pre-nineties and frankly? It’s frightening.

I’m not just talking about the lack of Twitter although obviously, there’s that. The inability to update friends and strangers of your thoughts and movements in 140 characters nine times a day is a deprivation almost too awful to contemplate. How we maintained our collective will to live, I can’t imagine.

Unbelievably, there were some things even worse than a lack of social networking sites and high-speed broadband. Many, many things.

It’s lucky then that I spent most of my time during the seventies and eighties being a child. All I really had to accomplish on a given day was scamming a lift to school and trying to avoid getting a detention when I got there.

My parents however? Everyone’s parents? They did it tough. Because if you were an adult in Ye Days of Olde, you had to be approximately one million times more organised than we adults are today. Socially, domestically, financially. Things were not convenient back then, not at all.

The infrastructure of life was in no way designed for flexibility and certainly not for spontaneity. You had to think about things, plan things, commit to things. In advance. And then you had to STICK TO YOUR PLANS. I’m getting twitchy just thinking about it.

The post-nineties world suits me far better. Me, who likes to be able to change an arrangement up to one minute before it’s due to start. Me, who feels claustrophobic about being locked into anything I can’t get out of with an apologetic text. Me, who prefers to control the method of communication and the circumstances around it.

Still, it’s worth reflecting on some of the heavy burdens that were carried back then, if only to make us more grateful for our bluetooth. So for anyone born after 1980 and for those of us who care to reminisce, here are some of the major challenges of The Olden Days:

LOUSY TAKE-AWAY If you didn’t want to cook or eat in a restaurant, you risked starvation or fatness. Take-away choices consisted of McDonalds, KFC and an early style of Chinese food made almost entirely of MSG.

NO SOCIAL NETWORKING This is not entirely true. Social networking did exist but it had to be done in person. Yes, I know. IN PERSON. Even more astonishingly, it had to be done ONE PERSON AT A TIME. None of this communicating with ten or 10,000 people at once. Not unless you had a megaphone and were leading a protest march.

NO FREE BABYSITTING Without Nick Jr or ABCKids or DVDs, kid-suitable TV was rare. Pretty much all you got was a small window of cartoons in the morning, The Curiosity Show in the arvo and an hour of The Wonderful World Of Disney on Sunday nights. I guess there was a thing called “The Neighbourhood” (this was a place not a TV show) where kids could amuse themselves with other local kids called “Neighbours” (again, people not TV characters). And things called “trees” which were apparently suitable for climbing.

INCONVENIENCE STORES Opening hours in The Olden Days were ridiculous. 9-5 during the week with late night shopping on Thursdays until 9pm. Weekend shopping was limited to 9-12 on Saturday mornings. Sundays were utterly shopless. Nothing. Nil. Nada. Your only Sunday entertainment option was to go to church where afterwards, it was at least easier to find your car than at Westfield.

NO PARKING METERS What on earth did everyone do with all that small change? It must have been very tiring to walk around with such weight in your pockets.

NO COWARDLY BREAK-UPS When you Just Weren’t That Into Someone, your options for ending the relationship were drastically limited. No SMS, no email, no changing your relationship status on Facebook. Other than writing a letter, you had to do it with your voice. Live. In person or over the phone. Imagine that.

NO ATM FEES This is because there were no ATMS. Instead, you had to stand in long queues clutching passbooks and withdrawal slips with the 400 other people who needed money for the weekend. You couldn’t even amuse yourself with your phone while you waited because your phone was at home attached to your wall with a cord.

NO CALL SCREENING Without mobiles or call display, answering the phone was a highly exciting and risky game of chance. ‘Who might it be?’ you wondered as you approached a ringing phone (and it really did make a ringing sound, children, it didn’t bleep). A wrong number? A crossed-line? An obscene phone call?

On that subject, and in conclusion, can we all please give a resounding high-five to technology for moving all the obscene callers off the phone and on to Internet porn. That’s a win for modern life right there.