You're old skool...

So, I was on facebook last night (which, incidentally went down for all of 2 minutes and had me and my friends gasping in horror that we'd been logged out and couldn't log back in again... makes you realise the true extent of our facebook addiction) when one of my exes friends messaged me. He'd added me the other day and at first I was thinking 'do I know this guy? He looks way to young to be one of my friends' when the penny dropped and I remembered who he was. Anyway, he messaged me asking how I was blah blah and I responded saying I was good but that I miss all the going out clubbing I used to do when I lived closer to town. His response made me really offended. It was along the lines of 'Yeah but you're at that age now, too old for clubbing' or something like that. When I replied that I wasn't exactly old he said 'yeah you old skool'. Old skool?! WTF?! I'm bloody 27! That's not old! I am hoping he was assuming I was as old as my ex, who is 32, but it got me thinking, if a 17/18 year old sees me as too old, am I? I discussed the whole thing with my flat mate on the train this morning and I fear the evidence is stacked against me...

• I was born in the era pre-internet. I remember in my childhood there was no such thing as a PC as we know it, e-mail, google, downloads, iTunes or browsing the net. That in itself probably makes me OLD.
• Along the same lines as PC's, I remember having an Atari AND a ZX Spectrum. Yes, we were spoilt as children. Putting cartridges in which make weird electronical noises (is that a word? Hmm well, it is now *shrugs*) and lots of horizontal coloured lines on the screen when they were loading... having boxes and boxes of floppy disks of copied games for the Atari...
• And floppy disks now I come to think of it! No one uses THEM anymore either... I doubt some of my younger cousins even know what they ARE!
• I remember making mix tapes. You couldn't just download your favourite songs and we were all too cheap to buy singles. Sitting in my room, with my tape recorder/radio/boom box (see? OLD) waiting for the song I liked at the time to come on the radio so I could hit the record button. All my tapes consisted of broken bits of half captured DJ intros and overlapping adverts between songs. I also remember that if a tape was broken, a biro would work wonders rewinding the tape back into the case. Sometimes it'd get a bit creased and mangled and play a bit crackly, but if it was your favourite tape, you lived with it.
  
• Similarly, I remember VHS tapes. If you were going to miss something on TV, you recorded it onto VHS with a video recorder. I don't own a DVD recorder, hard drive recorder, or have Sky, so this is something I just don't do anymore! Again, if it broke, you'd just rewind the tape back into the case. And if you wanted to record over a VHS that had been make unrecordable, you just stuck some duct tape over the little snap off bit at the end.
• I remember when you were allowed to smoke on the bus! (not that I did, I started a lot later than that!)
• I remember when there were no mobile phones. If you wanted to chat on the phone, you'd either have to sit on the stairs, or I'd lie on Mum and Dad's bed, because the phone had a cord and you couldn't take it away from where it was PLUGGED IN!
• I also remember having one of those house phones with the rotary dial, where you put your finger in the hole, rotated the dial, and waited for it to click click click click back to the start before dialing the next number (which made me think, was #9 was one of the longest numbers to wait for? What happened if you needed to dial 999 in a hurry? If you had a serial killer in the house, you couldn't exactly wait for all three 9's to dial could you?! You'd be stabbed to death before you got to dial the third 9!)
  
• I also remember pre-mobile phone I had a pager... (my Mum's way of making sure she could always get hold of me). She'd page, I'd go to a phone box. Which is another point, I remember having to USE phone boxes.

So, yes, perhaps I AM old after all... but I still insist I am in my 20's and therefore not old at all. I'm still one of the youngest in my peers which makes you lot all old farts and me the youthful one ner ner...

On to other things... I am off to Stockholm tomorrow! I am all packed, and had a bit of retail therapy last night and bought a new winter jacket to wear for my trip. My housemate calls it a Goonie jacket because it's an Adidas Originals padded jacket in brown and orange with a fur collar. I didn't think of it like that until I came downstairs in it, along with walking boots and woolly hat (the kind with the long ear cover bits and plaits) and she exclaimed 'OMG you look like a Goonie!'...

... and that just shows our age even more... because some of you will be too young to know who the Goonies are... *sigh* I AM old... dear god....

PS. I hope you all appreciate the wikipedia links for those of you too young to know what the hell this post is all about...