Do older men tend to get cranky, rude as they grow older? I met other people on different forums which most the guys tend to be dam rude for any reasons. They would personally attack a person online for no reason. In contrast, I notice that most of the younger guys don't have this personality characteristics. <img src="/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

What, no link?

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That's becuase we remember when were your age. And we did it better. We made it ourselves. If we wanted a website, we wrote it out, tags and all, and then wrote the ftp client ourselves to get it on the server. And we had to dial into the server directly. None of this point and click java-powered drivel, I'll tell you what. You call those hyperlinks? I'll show you a hyperlink! All you kids, soft, soft in the head....

Spell check? No wonder you can't spell. I remember when a spell check was ten minutes swearing at the dot matrix, then waiting an hour for it print your fourty pages, and then you had to go through with a pencil. And do you think that pencil made suggestions? No, you had to have a dictionary, and if you could figure out what word you thought you'd typed, you had a real problem on your hands. And there was none of this GUI snot- we were real geeks, we used command lines and booted our apps off of floppies!....

You've been pampered your whole lives. Why, back in the day, we had to pay for our email by the character- now, you can email an entire song! And it isn't that midi stuff, it's the real song. That's not right, there should be a law....

Get off my lawn, you freaky looking hoodlums! Or I'll sick the dog on you! *waves my cane so vigerously the shaft flies off, reveiling the sword blade inside* Kerberos, attack!

(In computer years, I'm ancient)

HA HA HA, that was hilarious. That reminds me of an e-mail i I recieved a long time ago:

[cut and paste]

Dear Kids of America:

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year 'round blizzards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way I was going to lay a bunch of [censored] like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it. But.... Now that I've reached the ripe old age of forty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! Compared to my childhood, you live in a freaking Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it!

When I was a kid we didn't have The Internet -- we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves! And there was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter -- with a pen! --and then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there! And there were no MP3s or Napster! You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the record store and shoplift it yourself! Or we had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up!

You want to hear about hardship? You couldn't just download porn! You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were your options! We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, you didn't know! You just had to pick it up and take your chances!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked! Your guy was a little square and in order to have any fun you had to rely on your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win, the game just kept on getting harder and faster until you died! When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! A tall guy sat in front of you, you were out of luck. And sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 20 channels and there was no on screen menu! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! And there was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Did you hear what I said you lazy little freaks? We had to wait all week for cartoons! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980! .....But I don't want to lecture you.

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But yeah, I kinda know what you mean. There've been a few notable "mature" people on some forums I've visited, and they've had this real attitude, and take any type differing opinion as a personal attack on themselves. Ironically, it seems more common with ex-armed forces gentlemen than others, at least in my experiences. Must be something about it that make them that way. Although there are plenty of young people who have a similar attitude, so I wouldn't say it's a result of age.

Why do you think that movie is titled "Grumpy Old Men"?

20 channels! ! We had 1 channel from the antenna on the roof & if we had an ice storm, someone (me) had to climb up on the roof and straighten the antenna & point it back in the right direction while listening to shouts from the ground!

Yes, and the more I live by myself the crankier I get also. Ironraven is right, you are babied in this day and age.

As for me when I was growing up:

Our family finally got a color tv when I was .......12!! It still had 13 channels on it. We usually got 3 stations about then, if lucky. Cable tv as a kid? Nope. I learned to type on a "Royal" brand manual typewriter. They didn't have PC's in my high school, or any kind of computers. We still had rotary dial phones and were still tethered to the wall by them. I could go on and on, but why would I want to sound "cranky?" lol

Actually, the reason people get crankier as we get older is a lifetime of accumulated frustration & discovery that the world sucks. I have LS-120 disk drive that I hadn’t used for high capacity disks in a long time. It works ok with std floppies. Now, for no apparent reason, it won’t read the LS-120 disks. When I tell my antivirus program not to scan Word or Excel templates, it does it anyway. The roof in my breezeway leaks. The light switch in my bathroom doesn’t work & the sink leaks.

I owe the gubmint a total of $900 because my employer screwed up my withholding (didn’t withhold, actually). The contractor who was supposed to bury the wire in the backyard 18”deep underground actually buried it 1”. The backhoe operator from another company discovered it when he was prepping the area for a pole barn foundation. I got Voip (telephone over the internet); now the Internet “goes out” frequently, something like 33 times since April, taking my phone with it. (These are only the ones I remembered to record.)

After 55 years of frustration, I am a grumpy old man. I could go on & on about it, but it would take another 55 years to explain it. Now, I have diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic pain and several other disorders, plus operations on my back, both knees, & wrist. When I was a lad, I was led to believe that no matter what was wrong with you, doctors could fix it. Now, I find out that it is a miracle if they can fix anything.

There are older people who are not cranky, grumpy & permanently pissed off. The only explanation I have for that is that they must be brain dead.

By no means am I old, hell if I was 80 I still would not be old. But the kids today are soft, my wife wanted to get a bike helmet for our oldest when she started to ride a bike, I was lucky if my bike had brakes and a seat!
Kids now days get a scratch that you need a spoting scope to see and they think the world is ending, the ambulance should be called and rush them to a trama center when I was a kid I was lucky to get a band-aid for a severed limb or finger(came real close a couple of times on the finger)
My 10 year old thinks she needs a cell phone! so she can talk to her friends, I told her try not haveing a phone as a kid, even better try being a teenager and haveing to walk almost a mile to your uncle's house so you can try and get a date.
And seat belt laws? where were they when we were kids? my folks always had old cars that had the good old metal dash you could just wipe the blood of of when they slamed on the brakes and you bounced your head off of it.Then they would get on you for getting blood on the dash becouse you were not sitting in the seat.
As for cranky, I know why men get cranky as we get older.
It's the getting up before the crack of dawn six days a week to go to a job that you dont like to put food on the table, making sure that everyone has all that they need for school,band and any other activety that they do and you pay through the nose for. And do we ever get a thanks dad? or a thanks honey? nope not a one. I would call my Dad now and tell him thanks for all he did and all he gave up for us kids, but he is cranky and would kick my backside if I was to call this late.

i love these replys! hilarious! funny, i remember when learning to ride a bike meant at least one good blotch of skin coming off. my first experience learing how to ride a bike? peddling as fast as i could thinking my dad was still holding on to the seat, then looking back seeing he was about 100 feet back, and then somehow flipping over the handlebars. ahh, good times. <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />