We humans have a tendency to sink into the “every year and better”, without much thought. We romanticize the past as if we were being paid for it. How many times have you heard this “in our day” from a boomer and exhausted your patience by pretending to be interested in this erotic way in which the boomer ruefulized his youthful years? Probably quite a few. But what's the question now? We're starting to become those guys. We're nostalgic for the 90s and early 00s like everything was perfect back then. As if we weren't whining, wearing the clothes our mother bought us, crying about going to school for yet another day and living Groundhog Day, which started with prayer and ended at noon with the last bell of the day.
Beyond that, those of us who managed to gain consciousness in those years, up until the early 00s, have experienced other difficulties. Issues that children born in those years will never experience. Unless you know someone from Gen-Z who struggles to send a track to their best friend's cell phone with infrared, as if Spotify doesn't exist.
1.
The much-praised CD that was warming up in the player and you had to take it off, blow on it, stroke it gently, to dust it off, pretending you knew exactly what you were doing and hoping it wouldn't stick.
2.
In those days there were no message threads on mobile phones. You also couldn't save conversations. You had to delete your SMS, since the phone only held 10. Yeah, there were no screenshots. Obviously.
3.
There was no internet connection when someone was on the phone. And vice versa.
4.
The LimeWire. The platform where you could download songs, with a certain amount of risk. You see there were quite a few times when instead of the song you wanted, you ended up downloading an audio of Bill Clinton saying on repeat “i did not have sex with that woman”. Or all but the entire audio from a music video. You can see what happened if it had dialogue.
5.
Driving without GPS. Desperate mothers wanting to stop to ask the locals for directions. Furious, proud dads who always thought they could figure it out on their own. And then some dirt road and chaos.
6.
The waits. Today, if you're the first to arrive at an appointment, you start stumbling. Then you just wait, with persistent and irritated glances at the clock. I'm guessing a lot of friendships must have been broken for being late for appointments.
7.
You were trying to play Game Boy in the back seat on a night trip. And you weren't watching. The screen didn't light up. The headlights were your hope.
8.
Times when we remembered telephones from outside. Lots of outside phones. It gets better: THE AZTECS.
9.
VHS. Where you had to go back through the entire videotape to watch the movie again. Honored rewind.
10.
During waits at doctors' surgeries, TV and magazines they were really useful. The boredom was unbearable. Not to mention the frustration of waiting for someone else to finish skimming.
11.
The only way to find out what movie you caught on TV was either to catch the news anchor “announcing” it at the end, or to flip through a magazine with the TV schedule.
12.
In the bathroom your only choices were magazines or a book. Otherwise you ended up reading the ingredients of shampoos, the instructions on tampons, the back of toothpaste.
13.
You called your friends on their landlines and shuddered at the thought of their parents picking up. Do you want to talk about how you asked for a date back then?;
Stavros Voulgaris
