Every Sunday and Wednesday I get to spend time with the Young Women in my ward. When I'm with them, I generally feel like I'm maybe five years away from where they are. Sometimes I feel like I'm their age. But every once in awhile I'm get a jolt of "oh erin, how foolish are you? You could be their mother!" (We have mostly Beehives so at my age of 32, yes, I could certainly be their mother.)
One thing that really ages me is the fact that I didn't have an email address until college. That's right: college. The girls think this is hysterical. Never mind that most of these girls don't even check their email that often; they're too busy with Facebook (the main reason I joined) and other stuff to bother. But still. They at least have email addresses.
Let's remember my first email address...Picture it: the University of Utah, Fall 1995. I had just moved into the dorms and my floor mates and I were quickly getting acquainted. I think it was the Saturday before classes were to begin when we all decided to trek to the library to get our email addresses. I was so proud of that email address, in all its awkward glory. Seriously: erin.lastname@m.cc.utah.edu. Can you believe that domain name?! What a mess! And we had to telnet to Pine in order to access our email. No web-browser-enabled email back then. And if it were web-based, it would be accessed using Netscape. Awesome. My Young Women have probably never heard of Netscape.
The best thing about this new-fangled email was the fact that we floormates just forwarded dumb forwards back and forth between each other. Jessica would send something to all of us, then all of us would forward it back to all of us, including Jessica. It was great.
We had a great year, that freshman year. I met Carrie, who introduced me to Gina and Lori, who would become my roommates for the next three years or four years. Good times.
Seriously, when I look at my graduating Laurels, I am so jealous of the fun times they have in front of them! They are just so lucky to already have those email addresses.
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Our YW are lucky to have you as a leader, Erin. I didn't get my first email until college and I still use that same email address today---my college didn't have email accounts for students in 1992 so I set up a hotmail account. Wow, I just realized that would mean I've had the same email address for 17.5 years.
ReplyDeleteha, that is funny. i didn't even think that would be weird - not having email until college. :) kids these days.
ReplyDeleteI'm impressed you remember that email address!!! WOW, as for Netscape, I just read it was one of the technology by-gone's of the past. Sad, so sad.......;(
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