Well, maybe not completely, but I just realized my 20th high school reunion is next year. Here’s things that make me feel old and awful.
– Smartphones? Nope, but a lot of my friends had pagers! A pager, for the younger readers, was a small device that people could send numbers to. You would see this number and then find a payphone. You would wait for the crack dealer or prostitute to finish his or her call, then you would call the number, only to realize your “pals” had texted you a girl’s number when you called and made an ass out of yourself.
– Satellite radio? Nope, a CD player that skipped when you hit a bump. Every guy in my class was blaring one of the following: Metallica, Black Album; Guns N Roses, Appetite For Destruction; Hank Williams Jr., (Any CD with Country Boy Can Survive) or Death Row’s Greatest Hits. Not a lot of lady killers in my class (I was playing Pantera, so not me either).
It wasn’t all bad, though. Some things were better then. Need a boost? Forget $6 coffee, Mt. Dew was .99. Craft beer for $15 a six pack? Nope, Busch Light 30 pack – $8.99. Cigarettes were under $2 a pack (I think they’re $40 a cigarette now, someone that smokes help me out) and I filled up once in 1996 for .67 cents a gallon. Of course, I made $4.25 as a stock boy, similar to what I make doing comedy now, so not much has changed there. Maybe I should have stuck with the stock boy gig.