1. You begged your parents to get you a pager so that they could contact you whenever they wanted — but really it was for your friends to hit you up.
2. Also begging your parents to get you a TI-83 graphing calculator, which you basically just used to play Space Invaders with.
3. Cramming yourself into one of these desks — that made the LOUDEST screech whenever you moved them.
4. Having desks and/or the inside of text books that looked like this:
5. Communicating in class with your friends or crush with these:
6. Rocking a JanSport backpack, which you, of course, one-strapped and would customize with patches, a Sharpie or Wite-Out pen.
7. Having computer lab that looked like this. Also having NO internet connection.
8. Carrying around important school projects on floppy disks.
9. Reading Cliffs Notes instead of the actual book and praying to God that the teacher would ask mostly questions that were covered in the Cliff Notes’ summarization.
10. Carrying around but never using your spell-checker and electronic organizer.
11. Having TVs mounted in the corner of the classroom. And, if your teacher was cool, they’d let you watch Jerry Springer or The Price Is Right if the class was well behaved.
12. Being able to buy sodas with your lunch…
14. Having vending machines all around the school.
15. Having to wait to use the one pay phone that the school had ‘cause some kid was taking their time talking to their S.O.
16. Having this CD play at EVERY pep rally:
17. Having photos that looked like this taped to the inside of your locker:
18. The smell of these scents and sweat permeating the locker rooms.
19. Burning the inside of your mouth with Binaca.
20. Having to use the school library to do research on an assignment…
21. …or, if you were lucky, Encarta.
22. Making sure you had a No. 2 pencil with you whenever you had to take a Scantron test.
23. Setting up your very first AOL email address, which you checked every few days.
24. Making perfectly fitted brown paper bag book covers for your text books — which you would then customize with drawings and stickers.
25. Carrying around all your assignments and notes in your Mead Five-Star notebook — which you organized with colored tab dividers.
26. Having oh-so-pretty Gelly Roll pens, that got stolen or “lost” within the first week of school.
27. Changing up your pencil game with these ~cool~ ones:
28. Making sure to have colorful pencil grips, which was more of an accessory (did it really prevent your hand from cramping?).
29. Having that ONE big eraser which never really erased.
30. Feeling super stressed anytime you needed to write something on the overhead projector.
31. Handwriting your important reports in cursive, with either black or blue ink. And making sure you had clean, non-dried out Wite-Out with you to correct any mistakes.
32. And finally, having to find a way to fit your portable CD player into a pocket.
