Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.
I’m what they call “internet old”. I’ve had an email address since 1996. Yahoo! Mail didn’t even exist in 1996 (they started in 1997). I was a member of a Bulletin Board System or BBS in the Portland area. A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, was the “chat rooms” and message boards of back in the day.
The guy I had a crush on for a couple years in high school was a total computer guy. Although my Dad has been working on computers (He’s a Senior IT Specialist for IBM) for as long as I can remember, I’d say it was my crush on this guy that really got me interested in working on/fixing/playing on computers. For a while he didn’t show much interest in me. We were pretty good friends, but I definitely wanted him to be my boyfriend.
Here’s the history with me and we’ll call him AJ* (names have been changed to protect my sanity). We were friends, but I was always the one to call, and go over to his house to hang out. So finally one day I got sick of it. I knew that if I was going to get over him, I’d need to stop making the effort. If he wanted to hang out with me, HE’D have to make an effort. So probably for about 6 months I don’t think we talked at all. Sure, I’d still try and login to the BBS and see if the was online, or if he had emailed me, but there was never anything.
Then one day I got home and my Mom informed me that AJ* had called! Being the high schooler that I was I couldn’t just CALL him back! I had to find out why he was calling first. I immediately went onto the BBS and sure enough there was an email from him! The email said that he missed hanging out with me, and that he was sorry for being a jerk, and that he’ll call me up again! I was ELATED! You can see from the fantastic images of my journal from back in the day, what a completely insane teenager I was.
Since we didn’t go to the same high school, passing notes (which back in my day was the preferred communication of choice with your friends/crushes) was impossible. Luckily email was there to rescue the day and eventually got me a date to Prom! AJ* ended up asking me to his Prom about 3 weeks after he started emailing me again. A geeky match made in high school heaven.
Our first email exchanges helped shape my current carreer!
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