So let’s bring it back to 2006. You get off the school bus and sit at your family’s desktop computer. You pull up AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and immediately start chatting with your besties about how good your crushes hair looked today or what color A&F polos you and your friends were going to coordinate to wear tomorrow.
But before all of this came along, you had to set up your infamous AIM account. To this day, one of the most thought about and personal pieces of your childhood was your AIM screen name.
Do I include my dog’s name?
My favorite color?
I play a sport! Okay! Yeah! I’ll Include that!
I’ll go with BlueEyedDancer
DANG IT. Somebody already has that screen name…
I’ll just add some numbers to the end. Do I do my age? My graduation year (which is in 6 years)? My zip code?
BlueEyedDancer2012. Yay! It worked!
Now I have to add my friends to my buddy list!
Chatting is so much fun OMG LOL JK
Okay so my crush is online, I have to put up an away message so he’ll think I’m actually away so then he can message me. But I’m just gonna sit here while I text on my Motorola RAZR.
As embarrassing as your screen name was, you still remember it to this day and wonder why on Earth you ever thought it was a good idea.
Now thinking back, your AIM screen name seems so embarrassing and is a piece of you that you wish you could forget. Being a millennial, AIM was the start to our social media dependency, and it was the title that our peers knew us as.
Today, kids will never know what it was like to take over the landline while connected to AIM, how important it was to sign off when you weren’t physically sitting at the computer, and that Siri can’t even compare to the good ol’ days of the little yellow running man on AIM.