Hear me out

I was almost 13 back in 2005, so as a moody preteen I spent most of my time on the computer, mostly on MSN.

I’m not ashamed to say that for my 12^th birthday I asked for a Logitech webcam so when those strangers from the rival school randomly added me I could put a face to the ever so embarrassing name (ox_shell_xo).

I was downloading music on Limewire and listening to the same song over and over.

I was picking my top friends for Myspace and Bebo.

I wanted to be a scene girl – that was the trend back then trust me – and I would dye my hair outrageous colours or cut it in a ridiculous mullet that I thought looked trendy.

Now how is this like 2020?

For starters I’m moody as hell and I’m always on my laptop.

And yep you guessed it my webcam’s had a workout. I’ve put so many ‘faces to names’ on the countless daily zoom calls and Microsoft teams meetings. I have ‘virtually’ met every person in my department and beyond. And MSN may have died of death but Skype IM’s have kept me on my toes. Gone is the ASL/LOL/GTG and now it’s mainly “did you see that e-mail” but I still set my status to BRB. Don’t want to look too available.

As for Limewire (RIP), we’ve all matured and moved on to Spotify, but let’s be honest I bet not all of you are paying for that. I bet it’s the same deal with Netflix where one poor bugger is paying for it and everyone else is enjoying it. It might not be virus inducing but you’re all a bunch of thieves! (I’m the account payer if you can’t tell.) And listening to the same song on repeat?

Facebook/Twitter/Instagram doesn’t really have a top friend function where you can pick your top friends and make the rest of your friends list green with envy. No. What we have this year is this really fun notion where you pick your three favourite households to see over Christmas! Fabulous!

And well, at least this year I don’t have a mullet, but we’ve all seen the E-girls. We’ll talk in fifteen years about those multi-coloured fringes.

And obviously I’m missing the elephant in the room – the outbreak of the virus – but we had one of those back in 2005 too. Bird Flu seems divine now though right?