Young man, pay no heed to the siren’s call of 90s technology!
It’s not worth the cost for some sweet eye candy (and I mean that literally…)
“Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding*!”1https://twitter.com/briannekimmel/status/1076677576314310656?lang=en
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” I muttered impatiently to myself.
“Keeeeyyy errrrr beeeep ong dee ong waaahhh urrrrrr!”2https://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/1u5qam/keeeeyyy_errrrr_beeeep_ong_dee_ong_waaahhh/?rdt=33107
“You gotta be kidding me! I gotta start all over again??” I exclaimed in impertinent disbelief.
“Urrrr EEEE urrr NNNGGGG CRRRRcrrrr KEEEEEEE grrr nnnnnng!”3https://forums.nasioc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2598943
“What the hell are you doing?!? Connect already!” I seethed, but quietly so I didn’t wake up anybody else in the house.
…then out of the darkness came a digitized voice…
“Well, since you asked, let me show you exactly what I’m doing…”
On my computer screen flashed this overly-informative diagram:
I rubbed my bleary eyes and took a good hard look at it. I rubbed my chin as if deep in thought and pretended to understand what it all meant–but I didn’t have time to waste so I just faked comprehension as best as I could so we could get on with the show.
“Oh…okay, I see now. As you were then, Mr. Dell, as you were…” I said humbly.
In response, my Dell computer with its blazing-fast 1440 baud modem simply replied:
At that sound, a chill of excitement and anticipation went down my spine. If all went well that night, by dawn we all know what kind of pictures I would be in possession of…
“Candy, candy, candy!” I half-bragged to my elementary school classmates.
“No. Friggin. Way! Really?” one my buddies was clearly in disbelief.
“Yes friggin’ way!” I replied. “Come hang out at my house after school, and I’ll show you all the pictures I have of people eating candy on my computer.”
“So, like, do you have alot of these pictures, or what?” he gave me a side-eye look, suspicious whether I had the goods.
“Well, okay, not alot alot…maybe 15 or 20?” I confessed. “It also depends on how you count…I got a bunch that are mostly foreheads, maybe eyes too–can’t really see what they’re actually eating. I mean, do you know how long it takes to download a single picture at 1440 baud?”
“No, not really,” he admitted as well.
“Um…neither do I because I keep falling asleep before the picture even gets to their hairline…”
…And thus was the blessing and the curse of coming of age at the same time as the internet.
Oh! The promises the world wide web held for us sugar-deprived youngsters who had a healthy sweet-tooth streak in us. Like most kids, we rarely were able to get a first-hand sugar fix, but then along came AOL and with it, the allure of being able to vicariously watch someone else enjoying some gratuitous simple carbohydrates. When you’re that young, there’s a certain thrill in dreaming about one day, when you’re all grown up, what all different kinds of candies and other goodies you’ll be stuffing your face with–whenever you want, wherever you want!
Of course the down side to all this was that if you hoped to get anything besides plain text from the internet, you had to have patience that certainly no 7-year-old I knew4I never said I was 7 years old… possessed.
“Um…does your dad actually know that’s what you’ve been doing with your AOL subscription?” someone else just had to chime in and bring our little party crashing to Earth.
“Look, that old man eats junk food all the time–” I attempted to deflect the question, but no one was really buying it.
“So, he has no clue. Hmmmph. Figures.”
“Uh…yeah…so I sorta kinda snuck his credit card out of his wallet to sign up for all the interwebs stuff. Don’t worry, though, we signed up for AOL for a month or so last year when we first bought my computer–I told that Boomer that it wouldn’t work at all unless we paid a monthly fee, and he totally bought it!” I was back to half-bragging again.
“Yeah, dude, I’m sure this will end well…”
“Son, what in the hell have you been doing on your computer?”
So…Dad apparently gotten his credit card bill, eh?
“Uh…candy?” I timidly replied.
“Candy?!?” he replied incredulously.
“Well, actually just pictures of people eating candy,” I said, somehow even more timidly.
“Son, there is a charge on here from something called ‘AOL’ for almost $200!” he said, admirably holding himself together given the situation.
“Oh, snap! Did you just say $200? It was supposed to be $9.95 a month…for the first 5 hours, at least.”
“And after that? Hmm?” he inquired impatiently.
“…and $2.95 for each additional hour…”5https://money.cnn.com/1996/11/01/technology/aol/ I barely eeked out.
“When the hell did you have that much time–wait, no, it doesn’t matter. There’s an important life lesson to be had here,” he said, seemingly cooling off a bit.
“Oh yeah, what’s that?” I let out a sigh of relief.
“For $200, I could have just taken you down to Mrs. Bulky’s on Amarillo Boulevard and buy you waaaay more candy than your little mouth could ever eat.6For the historical record, no, my father did not offer to take me on a a questionable candy store shopping spree. That would just be some downright irresponsible parenting… So much, in fact, that you might not be able to eat candy for the rest of your life… But I digress. Really the point is, my boy, if you need a candy fix, you don’t have to go behind my back. In fact, your old man is something of a junk food connoisseur himself…”
“Awesome! So, I’m off the hook then?”
Dad looked at me like I was crazy.
“Oh, hell no, you’re not. You know what you’re step-mother–and mother!–thinks of candy: ‘it rots both the teeth and the mind!’ Yeah, even just finding salacious pictures of candy anywhere in the house will really set her off–whew, lemme tell you!”
“Wait, wha–” I attempted to protest.
“Yeah, and you think she didn’t see the credit card bill? I’m going to have to sit here with you and watch you delete every one of those ‘goody pics’ off of your computer,–or she’s going to be up my ass about this for lord knows how long.”
“Oh, c’mon, man!”
“Oh. And you’re grounded for 3 weeks…”
You gotta be ----- kidding me…
Content created on: 19/20/21 January 2024 (Fri/Sat/Sun)
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