You know, in my day we didn't have this thing you call Facebook! If we wanted to talk to a friend we actually had to call them up! How did we do this?
FIRST of all we didn't have iPhones or even phones that had "apps"! The closest thing we had were 'calculator', 'notes', or 'world clock'... and THOSE WERE THE LUCKY KIDS!!! If you wanted to check the latest sports score you had to go home to use the internet... where your family owned only ONE computer, and you had to share it with ALL OF YOUR SIBLINGS... and the internet speed was measured in Kbps! At 14.4 Kbps that meant you truly understood the difference between a JPG and a GIF image file! ASK SOMEONE MY AGE TO EXPLAIN IT TO YOU!!! We had never heard of "Hi-Def". We were happy just to have "Def". If you ever got disconnected from the Internet (which happened a lot) you had to dial back in! Yes I said DIAL... that's how the internet used to work... using your home phone line (phones used to be a device located in one fixed location and shared by all members of a single family).
Picture this: you're talking with people and a question comes up that none of you have the answer to ("Who was it that played with Kevin Bacon in that movie with those things that lived underground?") In my day... YOU JUST HAD TO SETTLE FOR NOT KNOWING!!! The only solution was to find someone who had actually seen that movie and ask them (and hope they actually remembered). This is how knowledge was passed from generation to generation in my day.
SECONDLY not all of us even HAD cell phones! They weren't some God given right like air to breathe or food to eat! If you were lucky enough to have a cell phone you certainly didn't have one before the age of 18. Back in MY DAY my first phone was a Motorola StarTAC (See below).
Its features included an LED display, flip action, an extendible antenna (for connecting to that 0G network), and was one of the first cell phones that could fit in your pocket! How lucky was I? Notice how the display had TWO full rows? Both of which were 7 digits in length? Manitoba only had one area code back in my day so the 204 wasn't something we had to dial. We also didn't have to worry about how much "data" we had used... because there was no such thing as "data"! The phone's primary (and virtually only) feature was to call other people. Weird right? For those of us not lucky enough to have a phone we had to TALK to one another FACE TO FACE. Do not get this confused with "FACE TIME". It was like that, but without the iPhone. Imagine using Face Time, but then putting your iPhone behind your back and still being able to see the other person because they were in the same room as you.
This lead to all kinds of awkwardness in life (as I'm sure you could imagine). If you were invited to a party you had to tell the person you were not going to be there (or lie about it). Ultimately this would mean future awkwardness when you encountered the person again... which of course was bound to happen given the frequency with which we found ourselves in social situations. To "unfriend" someone you had two options. #1) Suck it up, and tell them "I don't want to be your friend anymore." It might hurt, but the other person knew the truth immediately. #2) Ignore the other person for the rest of your life. This seemed easier but actually took more work in the long run. If the other person was the type who "couldn't take a hint" they might persist in wanting to speak to you... following you around constantly until they had some sort of answer from you as to why you were ignoring them. It could get kind of ugly, and just sad to be honest.
THIRDLY if you wanted to share a photo with someone you had to start way back at actually getting the photo developed. Confused? Well back in my day our phones couldn't take pictures (as you might have gathered from the above). In fact, the concept of "digital photography" hadn't yet made its way into consumers hands (for anything near an affordable price). This meant photos had to be taken whereby the photographer had NO IDEA if the picture actually turned out after taking it! You know all of those blurry shots you take with your iPhone now but delete right away? You had to get those all developed and they all cost you money! And most rolls of film only held 24 photos (36 if you paid more) and often you had to wait until the next day to pick them up! THE NEXT DAY!!! Then (and only then) could you share them with your friends by physically bringing one and show it to them. You would have to have more than one copy printed if you wanted to leave a copy with more than one friend. You couldn't "tag" yourself in a friend's photo. You could only point at a blurry person in the background and say "Hey, I think that's me!"Okay, okay, I know some of you smarter kids out there are doing the math and realizing I was still in school when Facebook became cool. Let me assure you this was a slow process. I was first on something called "MySpace". It was like Facebook but totally lame. Your first "friend" was a guy named "Tom" who it turns out was the dude who created MySpace. My guess is he didn't have many real friends and thus created a social network that forced all users to have him as a friend, thus giving him ultimate bragging rights and a thin sense of self worth. It's like if you joined Facebook to find you had only one friend named "Mark" [Zuckerberg]. Now if your name was Mark and you joined Facebook to see you already had one friends named "Mark" you might freak out right? Now imagine Tom joins MySpace and immediately assumes his account has been hacked and that somehow someone uploaded a picture of someone else and set it as his own profile pic (ya, that happened). Anyways, ultimately and reluctantly I joined the "Facebook" (who I believe I have Tory to thank... but I can tell that story another day). Let me tell you though, that back in my day Facebook forced you to start each status line update with the words "[Your Name] is..." meaning you'd have to do mental gymnastics to form a grammatically correct sentence for anything you might say that would otherwise not begin in the form "Thomas Sontag is _________". One option was to ignore the laws of the English language and have a status read "Thomas Sontag is went to the zoo yesterday". This might catch the attention of a 'Luke Vandenberg' however, so it was generally best avoided. Would you even believe me if I told you Facebook used to limit you to a status line update of only 160 characters? When this was upped to 420 (and the forced "is..." was dropped) we thought it was a Facebook miracle! Now we could not only tell our friends that we were "at the mall", but actually which specific mall (and just maybe there'd be room for us to say which specific store in that mall!) Keep in mind this made us excited because there was no such thing as FourSquare yet, and Facebook didn't allow you to "check in" to places until much later.
Sounds like our lives pretty much sucked eh? Well maybe we had it better than you think? We could lie on our resume like nobody's business as there was no online account to disprove all of our false statements. We had human interaction and got healthy Vitamin C from the sunlight (what you see when you look outside). Sure you didn't have access to every fact on earth at the touch of a virtual button, but you could lie about stuff and so long as you sounded confident enough, people believed you! I think what I'm saying is the past was great for liars and cheats. So maybe things are better off now. I'm sure there's an answer on Wikipedia you can find, or just ask Siri... she sure seems to know a lot more than I do. One thing I do want to know... WHERE ON EARTH ARE OUR HOVER CARS!?!?!?! I realize due to my seizures I wouldn't be able to drive (fly?) one anyways, but I still think they'd be cool!
Oh, PS: I'm feeling great (having just gotten over a bit of a chest cold / cough / infection thing) and having had my last MRI on the 11th of September, I'm expecting nothing but the best results when I go for my appointment tomorrow, (lest I figure the terrorists had something to do with it). Nicole continues to keep me alive (lately with 100% organic homemade smoothies) and work continues to go well for me!
Cheers eh?
--
Tom
PS#2: You might think that on the eve of such a significant day tomorrow I might write a much more serious blog. If you thought that, you don't know me :)
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