Going vintage

This blog post was inspired by a teenage book of the same name that was terribly trite that I don't think I'll be bothering to review it for my blog, yes it was that bad or it possibly wouldn't be if I was still 16. Though you wouldn't know it by how I behave I'm sadly well past 16 and I thought why tarnish my reputation as someone who reads good books with one terrible book.

Anyway the plot of this book centers on a girl who realizes her boyfriend is cheating on her online and decides to recreate her grandmothers teenage years, forgo all technology and go vintage so to speak and It got me thinking. There really was no need for her to go all the way back to the 1960's for this.

I was 16 in 1998 (yes, I'm that old) and I lived without most of the technology the main character chose to go without. In 1998 the only people I knew with mobile phones were business men and I didn't know them as such but I knew of them and I had no desire to have one of my own, sure none of my friends owned them and what could I do with a mobile that I couldn't do with a house phone. When you wanted to get in touch with friends you called them at home and if they were out you left a message and tried later. I can't say we minded because there wasn't exactly anything to compare it to.
We would arrange our meetings well in advance (outside of school) and you'd need to be punctual because there wasn't exactly any way of letting your friends know you were running late once they had left the house. I used to meet my friends outside a local clothes shop every Saturday at 3 but we had one friend who so notoriously late for everything that was told we met at 2 just to give her some sort of chance at arriving on time. On the few occasions that I was late to town I'd find my friends by checking our usual haunts. Fortunately Clonmel is pretty small so it was a pretty easy feat. God only knows how people in bigger towns or cities managed.

That was the year we got our home computer but we had dial up. The most frustrating way to use the internet and you would have check no one was on the house phone before connecting which usually took at least 5 minutes and about the same time every time you went onto a new website, not quite the 1960's but not too many miles off when you consider no one I knew used social networking. To be fair I don't think it had made its way to Ireland yet so you would visit the limited number of websites you knew how to find, until one of your parents would shout at you to disconnect so you could make a call.
If my friends had photos of me I would only get to see them once they took the film in to be developed and I could only share them with other people by physically carrying them around so privacy settings were an unheard of worry.

When you don't have a mobile you might give a guy your home number but you tended to be a lot more selective about it so there was no time wasted wondering if your text was too needy or keen or why that guy didn't text when you really hoped he would. You couldn't look him up on facebook and you wouldn't know if he was talking to other girls because without social networking the only way to find that kind of thing out was real life stalking and I can't say that was ever my thing. The bad thing was that you never knew for sure but the lack of information meant you were less likely to drive yourself crazy wondering.

My parents were either very committed to being old school or else not big on tv but we were one of the few families that still had three channels back then which probably explains why I read so much as a teenager.

Now I'm not trying to paint my teenage years in some sort of golden haze, I think the late 90's is far too recent for me to get away with the likes of that. It can't have been all bad considering I'm still rocking the same haircut. So all I'm saying is that even though I appreciate from a style point of view it made more sense to emulate the 1960's, she really didn't need to go back that far.

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