Time Flies

In the last few weeks, I've been going through some boxes of old (and not so old) papers and photos. A lot of it got thrown out or shredded; some needs to be scrapbooked.

One of my friends was over while I was going through some of the boxes. There were letters in the box that I received during college. She seemed a bit surprised that we snail-mailed. Yeah, email was just becoming a household thing back then and not everyone had email when they weren't at school. And phone calls were expensive so we didn't call too much... cell phones were just starting to be something that the average person owned. Mapquest didn't exist so I have at least one hand-drawn map with directions to get me from one place to another left from my one trip to Chicago.

Today, same friend, looked at me in complete surprise when I said something about a cassette tape that I owned in high school (might still have it around somewhere, actually). CD players were fairly new at the time and expensive. I couldn't afford one (until the next year when I had money from graduation gifts). A lot of us still used cassettes at the time.

It's interesting because today I use email more than the USPS to communicate with friends. Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter help facilitate daily interaction with people near and far.

I work in the mobile telecommunications industry so cell phones are a part of my daily existence and my mobile phone is used more often than my house phone (which isn't a traditional landline anyway but rather a voice over IP line). Text messaging is a primary mode of communication for many of my friends.

I'm not sure even where some of my CDs are stored these days. Music, movies, and books are downloaded and stored on a compact little drive that can be played in my car, used at the gym, or plugged in to a stereo at home to play while I work. I actually had to borrow a cassette player from someone last year in order to play a tape that was needed for a dinner party game.