"a bit of paper in the student accommodation shop"

TV What Did Teenagers Do Before The Internet?:

"Much to my 18 year old sister's horror we only had 4 TV channels, no internet and no mobiles. Like, yaaaaawn. We had one landline in the house, so calling friends/long haired boyfriends meant arranging a time to ring and hours of huddling up the stairs halfway to stop family overhearing. Oh, and a large phone bill to impress the rents. No mobiles, so no texting, no options out of meeting and no impersonal dumping/flirting/lazy socialising. I mean, can you imagine? If you wanted to finish with someone you had to actually at least call them, or meet in person to do the deed. These days a simple Facebook status update with do. And it's so damned public." [via]

I make a point of never forgetting that when I was in the computer labs at university in 1995 and a mobile phone rang, everyone else in the room would collectively turn their heads, sometimes whole bodies, towards the source, a single look in their eyes that said:

"How can they afford to have one of those?"

Contacting home for me was still queuing up at the phone box at the end of the road. Looking for a house in my third year required a list of telephone numbers scrawled down on a bit of paper in the student accommodation shop and a pile of ten pences. Sometimes the only way to contact a friend was to go and knock on their front door. Oh and few people had a computer in the house, let alone one hooked up to the internet.

Gosh, I miss those days.