Oh, Brother!

1994-1998, were all about the Brother; The Brother word processor. Mine had a keyboard and a screen. I can still see the orange glow of the letters on the screen. I can still hear the sound of a ten page paper printing for an hour and a half. Who did I know that had a computer in their dorm room? No one!! I believe I encountered three people who owned computers down the road, including one of my roommates. I also recall trying to use it and having no freaking clue as to what I was doing. Internet? Email? I know some of my friends emailed, but I was not about to sit in the computer lab and nerd off like that! So crazy!!!! No kidding; we took classes about the Internet back then. Who knew how valuable they were! My two interactions with the internet were both inappropriate and dumb. First, during a winter intersession, my friend Rachel and I took a class for about two hours a day. It gave us plenty of time to rest up so we could go to Pizzeria Uno most nights out of the week and eat pizza potato skins. It was the winter and we needed to bulk up just in time to get ready for the summer. Acting like seventh graders in heat, we wondered, if we typed in certain words, what would we find? Let’s just say I don’t think there was much of a Firewall back then considering a huge male aspect of the anatomy appeared on the screen. AND THEN FROZE. Our fits of laughter suddenly turned to fear. We had not yet learned about the Control-Alt-Delete!!!!!! Like a scene from a movie, the male instructor began walking our way. Fortunately, we hit every button combination possible (off) and the image disappeared. Email? What the hell what? We called each other, wrote letters, or just did not communicate at all. Friends who had cell phones had huge biceps; the phones were gigantic. My parents had lent me their phone since I would drive back and forth. It had a carrying case and the Da Vinci Code was needed to even get it to turn on. There were still pay phones, but since we did out laundry without the ease of using a card that had money on it, we needed every quarter we could get our hands on. Despite the trick with the clicks and hammer (if you did it you need no explanation), you sometimes just had to pay for a load of wash. Wow. These times have certainly changed.