re: I know I'm young...but how did college social stuff work before cell phones?

quote:

---

Cellphone pics and video straight to youtube? All the stupid shite I did and said while 18-23 and hammered?

---

Yea I agree with this. I was a wild-arse back then but luckly avoided ever getting caught. If we would've had cell phones with pic/video cababilities back then...I'd probebly still be grounded to this day.

quote:

---

Did you just make plans to meet somewhere via a landline and just hope everyone showed up?

---

Life was so much simpler and easier back then. I was in college in the early to mid 90's and we would either:

1. Use landlines to pick someone's apartment to start drinking before we went out.

2. Pick the bar to meet at and different groups would ride with each other and just meet up.

Now sometimes you just never saw a certain person or people and sometimes you couldn't get in touch with them. Answering machines were a big help (think of them as the voicemail on your phone that I'm sure you never use).

Also, we constantly would lose each other as the night went on. There was no avoiding this. I'll never forget the Saturday morning I found my roommate passed out drunk at 8:00 am locked in his truck that was RUNNING at Sport's! Good times.....

The bottom line is we didn't know any other way and it was kind of nice not always being reachable (especially when I was a pledge

)

quote:

---

Answering machines were a big help (think of them as the voicemail on your phone that I'm sure you never use).

---

This is true. You had a code that you could call and check your messages at home. I remember using payphones to call my home phone and check for any messages.

Weird. I would say about half my friends had pagers in the 90s in high school.

Everyone pretty much had a three digit code after the phone number so you knew who was paging you

quote:

---

I had to go to Middleton Library once, and photocopy some magazine article, to win a bet w my roommate that Yvonne Goolagong was an Aborigine.

---

I'm about the same age as you, I only knew one person with a pager.

Also not a drug dealer, as far as I know.

quote:

---

I'm about the same age as you, I only knew one person with a pager.

---

Maybe it was just our group?


I didn't get my first cell phone until 2001 so the pager was very helpful to me.

I routinely turn my phone off for a few days at a time. I still carry it with me in case of emergency, but there is something remarkably calming about not being reachable 24/7.

Its why our parents are all punctual and my generation is full of flakes. Reliability isn't needed anymore.

Also, this reliability is how you truly figure out who your best friends are. These days anyone can cancel on you on a moments notice for the most unimpressive reasons. Don't have to make sacrifices to keep your word.

/rant

I was in college in the 80's. Our fraternity had a large cork bulletin board. If you wanted to "post" something socially, you wrote it on a piece of paper and tacked it up on the board. It was the original bulletin board, or forum. Everytime you passed through the house going to and from class, you checked the board... just like you check twitter, group me, etc. today.

I was in college in the early to mid 90's. Most things have already been mentioned here. The things I remember the most was that feeling of anticipation of what could unfold that night. Since there was a lack of instant communication, when you went out in the evenings or on weekends you didn't know how the night would unfold.

Sometimes you'd end up having the time of your life, sometimes you missed out on some great things that happened because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. A lot of luck was involved in a successful evening. You would hope that you happened to run into some girl you had been talking to in class that weekend, maybe you could get somewhere if you ended up at the same bar at the same time. What always sucked would be to talk to a girl on Monday only to find out that she was at another place with some friends and you just missed running into them.

One rule of thumb to live by was that if you the place you were at was hopping and you were having a good time it was a bad move to go to another bar to find other people or to see if there was something better happening somewhere else. Inevitably if you tried to upgrade the party you would end up in a place that was lame and the night was ruined. Oh, you could try to go back to the bar you were at but 9 times out of 10 things had cleared out and people had dispersed and you had to find which place was busy.