Back in the day, who would have thought that the world of tech and gadgets would advance so rapidly and incredibly. The early phones and computers could only do so much and were valuable for only just little tasks. Back in the day ( I'm talking about 2001) when mobile phones were first introduced into my country, every tom, dick and harry wanted to own one but with the price tag attached to new phones, only a few people could afford it.
I remember coming home from school one day to a notorious sound that greeted my ears. I got to know later on that it was the popular nokia phone ringtone. Apparently, my mum had just bought hers and she was still trying to grasp the hang of it. Being overly curious, I volunteered to "help" her access the menu but truth was, I wanted the thrill of holding a mobile phone so I could brag to my friends in school.
Mum took it a notch further when she declared me as her personal phone manager, in charge of using the phones for business after school hours and at weekends. It was a thing then for people without phones to visit pay phone centers, pay a little amount and make phone calls to their hearts content....well as long as their pockets doesn't cry 馃榿.
I remember using the phone as my personal device and my best site was the games menu. The nokia 3310 only had one game which was the snake game. For those who don't know this game, it's a game that involves directing a snake to eat food and while it eats the food, the snake grows in size. The trick is to not let the snake touch itself. Believe me, this game was fun then and I would usually compare high scores with other kids who played the game as well.
When I was finally given a Motorola phone few years after, my happiness exploded. I was already in my final year in secondary school about writing my O'level exams. I recall exchanging contacts with my peers who had phones and then I moved it up a notch by joining the reigning chat platform called 2go. This chat app was so addictive that I would stay up all night chatting the hours away. The major things I and my 2go friends chatted about centred around good old gossip of boys, weirdos and teachers we didn't like. It felt safe chatting about it since we didn't have the guts to say shit to their (teachers) faces.
Attending a private secondary school opened me up to many facilities not found in public schools. One of them being a fully equipped computer room. Once a month, we were allowed to visit the computer room and learn some practical stuffs on the computer, provided there was power supply. My first introduction to a personal computer was not friendly as the computer teacher made sure to bombard us students with loads of rules.
"Don't touch this and don't touch that"
"Don't eat or drink while you're with a computer system"
"Make sure all connections are in place before booting the computer" ....bla...bla..bla
Don't get me wrong, I know that all those instructions were needful but he made the computers seem overly special, like they had to be reverenced. The only thing I did with the computer was to play typing games on it and those were special times
Thanks for reading. This is my entry to the #digital-lifestyle community, #digi-prompt 009.
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