srah blah blah

Signs (today) that I am old

Twice today I found myself talking about the way college was "back in my day." Yes, it's official, turning 26 has turned me into a grumpy old coot. I'm not ready! Where has my youth gone?

First, there was an email sent out to students reminding them that they are responsible for reading their university email at least twice a week. It would seem that students are coming into the school with so many email addresses that they tend to neglect their university email altogether and miss important announcements. BACK IN MY DAY, I was one of the only people I knew who had (and used) email before they went to college. Email exploded with popularity once we got there and had an exciting constant T1 connection, but it was the early days of Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail and the like, and everyone had dial-up at home.

Next, I revealed during a conversation with a student that when I studied in France in 2000-01, when I worked in France and 2002-03 and when I did an internship in France in 2004, I used to send rolls of film home with my visitors in order to take advantage of the cheaper developing costs in the US, then my parents would scan the pictures or (later on, when the technology really got going) have them burned onto a CD. Yes, BACK IN MY DAY we wasted a lot of money by buying film and we couldn't see the pictures until they were developed, so we wasted a lot more money developing pictures of, like, the inside of a backpack. I've never lived abroad with a digital camera! I would like to! I wish I had!

And then we walked uphill both ways to school in six feet of snow, because we couldn't afford to feed the dinosaurs because we only made a nickel a week working in the mines. AND WE LIKED IT THAT WAY!

srah - Friday, 1 September 2006 - 5:13 PM
Tags: back in my day, digital cameras, email, old, technology