28 Essential "Life Skills" That Millennials Had To Learn Growing Up That Are Totally Useless Today
1.Being able to run to the bathroom during a commercial break and make it back before whatever you were watching came back on.
2.Knowing just how much frosting you could put on each Dunkaroos cookie so that you wouldn't run out before finishing your cookies.
3.Being able to find the hidden image in 2.5 seconds when looking at a picture from a Magic Eye book.
4.Knowing how to program your VCR — and possibly being the only person in your house who knew — so that you'd never miss a show or TV movie you wanted to watch.
5.Knowing the trick of how to gently pull the Chuck E. Cheese tickets you won from the Skee-Ball machine so that you could pull out a lot more than you actually earned.
6.Being able to leave the perfect message on your friend's parents' answering machine so that they could call you back.
7.And being able to sense if someone was listening on the other line if you were talking on the phone.
8.Being able to read the back of the same damn cereal box during breakfast every day and not get bored.
9.Being able to be as quick as a ninja when secretly passing notes in class.
10.Being able to pretty quickly figure out the lyrics to a song (if they didn't come in the CD's liner notes):
11.Being able to look at the name and the size of a LimeWire MP3 and know whether it was real or not. An MP3 named "uGOTItB@d_Ush3R(REAL_not_a_blend).mp3" that is only 1.5MB...probably not real.
12.Being able to just escape ~everything~ by looking at the Windows Media Player's visualizations while listening to music.
13.Being able to eat and enjoy an entire plate of Bagel Bites despite the fact that the first one you ate gave you a "third-degree burn" on the roof of your mouth.
14.And being able to eat and enjoy your entire Kid Cuisine even though — no matter how long it was microwaved — one of the sides would be still frozen in the middle.
15.Being able to taste the difference between regular ketchup and green or purple ketchup, even though they were the exact same thing you could TASTE the difference.
16.Knowing how to blow just right into your Nintendo cartridges in order to get them to work.
17.Being able to sleep through your Furbies talking randomly in the middle of the night. That one took a few frights before you got used to it.
18.Being able to pick a random movie to rent — because Blockbuster didn't have the one you wanted in stock — in less than five minutes and based on the just the cover art.
19.Somehow being able to see and make out lots of little details in the VHS movie you were watching on your 13-inch tube TV.
20.Being able to learn the choreo to a music video by just watching it a couple of times on MTV.
21.Knowing an encyclopedia's worth of random trivia because you watched a bunch of music videos you NEVER would have watched* otherwise on Pop-Up Video .
*I'm excluding Jewel from "music videos you never would have watched otherwise" because "Who Will Save Your Soul?" was such an amazing song and a great video.
22.Knowing that if you were watching something you weren't supposed to to set your "last channel" button to Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network on your remote — while keeping one finger on the button — in case your parents walked in:
23.Knowing the skill of how to take perfect selfies with a non-front facing digital camera or a flip phone.
24.Being able to quickly do T9 texting — and without looking, too.
25.Knowing how to do HTML code — but just so you could customize your Myspace page.
26.Being able to peacefully zen out whenever you needed to clean your mouse.
27.Being able to turn your desktop computer on or off without even bending down.
28.And lastly, being able to adjust your eyes to decipher what was going on on the scrambled channels:
Obviously, these aren't serious — so don't come at me in the comments about "how this doesn't apply to just millennials!" But tell me what millennial "important life skill" should have made this list?
