AOL Instant Messanger!
Any child of the '90s can remember the excitement and the feeling of waiting with bated breath as your computer grunted and screeched to connecting with the internet. You sat at your computer, keeping your fingers crossed that no one picked up the phone and disconnected you, and ALSO keeping your fingers crossed that your crush was online too.
You finally get online, your sister is socked away in her room playing a Barney video, so she won't try to pick up the phone for at least 25 minutes. You may have been super cool and had TWO AIM screen names. They may have been dewdropfairy09 and SugarPlum1986. Whatever.
First order of business...scour your list of AIM names and see if your bestie is on. Second order of business, creep on all the people with their away messages and see what peeps be doing.
Third order of business is to examine your AIM profile. I was CONSTANTLY changing and updating this with various inspirational quotes, song lyrics, countdowns to important events, etc. Once you updated the content, you obviously had to update the fonts and colors to make it pleasing to the eye. For whatever reason, I was all about the Dave Matthews Band lyrics...specifically "laying under the table and dreaming". Whatever dude.
I love you DMB!
Ok, so no one is online that you want to chat up, so now, it's time to craft the perfect away message. I'm likely not going anywhere. Rather, I will just sit at the computer and creep on folks as they sign in and out of AIM. Some top away message options likely included:
"sHoWeR! Leave me something to come back to!"
"Don't tell me not to live, just sit and putter. Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter. Don't bring around a cloud to rain on my parade..."
What? No one else quoted Barbara Streisand's greatest hits on the AIM. Oh ok...
"School, home, homework, snack, dance, home, shower, dinner, bed"
"Love all my girls! **insert various initials here**"
"Crushing sooooo hard. AH!"
FINALLY! Your crush signs on to AIM. Now, it's just a matter of getting the nerve up to message him first, or wait to see if he messages you....
And then, things suddenly start to slow down...you stop to listen and realize you hear the ending credit song from some Barney show or whatever your sister was watching at age 8...and you then realize that you have been kicked off the internet by your 8-year-old-Barney-watching-sister. And now, it's time to flip a table...
Editor's note- my sister didn't like Barney until age 8. She was probably only 6 or 7 when she gave that up.
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