The best part about school growing up was after-school, when you'd log onto your computer and "do homework," or as any '90s kid knows: get on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). You'd leave AIM on for hours, sometimes with an away message that subtly described why you were too busy to receive messages. Sure, your parents would get mad that you'd leave on the computer for hours and tie up the phone line, but we all knew it was totally worth it. Keep reading to relive everything you used to do on AIM.
Crafting an away message would take hours.
The lyrics, font, color, and everything else you chose needed to send the right message.
Posting the most emo lyrics as your away message.
Your away message would have the lyrics and "brb, dont' talk 2 me," but you knew you were hoping someone would.
Rushing home from school just to sign onto AIM.
You never wanted to sign on too late and miss all the gossip, or worse, your crush.
Remembering to always use 0 and a lowercase i in sentences.
You weren't cool if you didn't follow the style guide of all caps, 0's instead of o's, and a lowercase i in anything you wrote for your profile or away message.
Spamming SmarterChild was the best thing to do.
You could spend hours talking to SmarterChild and laughing at every single response.
Organizing your buddy list into the right order.
Obviously, you needed separate lists for your best friends, crushes, and regular friends.
Creating the perfect Dollz to express yourself.
You had one for each of your moods and all your friends.
Writing every detail of your day in your away message.
Obviously, you were out but you wanted everyone to know just how busy you were and with whom.
Training your ears to all the AIM sounds.
Any time you heard the door close, you'd immediately check to see if it was your crush signing off.
Coming up with the most creative screennames.
First, you started with something innocent like twothumbsup456 but slowly graduated to using upper and lowercase letters and x's.
Smirking at people who tried to use other messengers.
We all gave Yahoo and MSN a chance, but nothing compared to AIM.
Printing out AIM conversations to show your friends in school.
Sure, one conversation was 10 pages long and your parents would yell at you for printing it, but you needed your friends to see what your crush wrote.
Learning every new slang word to keep up.
No one said bye or k; it was all about g2g, ttyl, brb, lol, rotfl, and of course, a/s/l.
