Lisa O
Being a teenager in the 1990s meant figuring stuff out the difficult way. Smartphones didn’t exist yet. You couldn’t text someone to change plans at the last minute. Everything just took more time and required actual problem-solving. All those annoying limitations probably made people tougher, but nobody thought about it like that back then. Things felt more genuine when they were harder to get.
One Phone Line for the Whole House
Your entire family shared a single phone line. If someone was using it, you were out of luck. You’d sit near the phone waiting for your sister to finish her hour-long conversation. Picking up to check if it was free would start an argument. Making plans with friends meant coordinating around everyone else’s calls. The busy signal became the soundtrack of your social life. Sometimes you’d give up and just walk to their house instead.
Burned CDs That Skipped
Burning a CD took forever, and there was no guarantee it would work. You’d spend an hour selecting the perfect songs and arranging them in order. Then track four would skip no matter what you did. Cleaning the disc with your shirt made it worse. You’d play it in your Discman, and the music would stutter right during the best part. Eventually, you’d just accept the flaw and work around it.
Hanging Out at the Mall for Hours
Saturday afternoons meant the mall. Everyone just showed up there. Five bucks in your pocket was enough to walk around for hours without buying anything. That food court smells of orange chicken and Cinnabon, which hits you right away. Running into classmates happened constantly. You’d end up following them to whatever store they were heading to. Sitting on the benches by the fountain and people-watching made time pass easily. None of it felt pointless.
Blockbuster Late Fees
That movie rental sitting on your TV stand would haunt you. Three days late and counting. Walking through those doors to return it brought actual dread. The employee scanned your card. The fee came up on the screen. Everyone in line could probably hear it. Then somehow it made sense to rent another one right there. Blockbuster had the system rigged perfectly.
Writing Everything on Scraps of Paper
Phone numbers ended up on random scraps of paper—the back of a receipt or the margin of your notebook. Sometimes you’d write an address on your hand and hope it didn’t smear. Everything got stuffed into pockets. Most of it disappeared before you actually needed it. Teachers handed out the class schedule on the first day of school. Lose that, and you were basically winging it until June.
Dial-Up Internet
The phone line was occupied the second you wanted to go online. That modem screeching lasted forever. Two full minutes just to connect. Your mom would pick up the phone downstairs and boot you off completely. Pages loaded so slowly that leaving the room made sense. Come back in five minutes, and it may be finished by then. Going online back then was genuinely frustrating.
Pagers
The pager would go off and display a series of digits. That was the entire message. No clue who it was or why they wanted you to call. Tracking down a payphone became my top priority. People would use 911 as if something serious had happened. Then you’d call back, and it was nothing. The whole setup made no sense looking back. Spending quarters at a payphone to hear “oh, nothing important” was peak frustration.
Getting Lost Without GPS
Those paper maps never folded back correctly. Getting lost meant pulling into a parking lot to figure things out. Cars honked if you stopped too long. The guess you made about which direction to turn was usually wrong. Gas stations became the go-to for help. Workers would point and say, ‘Turn at the big tree,’ or something equally useless. Still lost after that conversation.
Making Mixtapes
Sitting by the radio waiting for one specific song to play took real commitment. The second it started, you’d hit record. Then the DJ would talk through the whole intro and ruin it. Waiting another week for the song to come around again was a normal occurrence. Putting together a tape for someone meant actually thinking about song order and volume levels. The effort behind it mattered more than the tape itself.
AOL Chat Rooms
Random strangers from anywhere could end up in the same chat room as you. Screen names got picked based on whatever sounded cool that day. Conversations went in strange directions fast. Age and location were whatever people claimed them to be. Someone typing that they loved the same music as you seemed trustworthy enough. There was no verification for anything. The anonymity made talking easier, even when nothing was real.
Watching TV Shows Live
Missed the episode, and that was that. No streaming existed—there was no way to watch it online later. Summer reruns were your only hope for catching up. Programming the VCR to record never worked right. The entire class would be talking about what happened the next morning at school. Avoiding spoilers became an actual challenge. TV required showing up at the exact time it aired or forgetting about it.
Disposable Cameras
Film rolls came with 24 or 27 pictures. You couldn’t waste shots on stupid stuff. Taking the roll to get developed took weeks sometimes. Getting those prints back was always a strange experience. Half of them would be completely blurry. Someone’s thumb would be blocking the lens in another batch. You’d stand there at the counter, looking through them and remembering things you’d forgotten had happened. They all ended up in a shoebox somewhere.
Passing Notes in Class
Notes got folded into small squares and passed down rows. You’d hand it to the person next to you and hope it reached the right person. Sometimes a teacher would intercept it and read it aloud. The entire class would laugh while you sank into your chair. The system was unreliable and risky, but it was how you communicated during class that mattered. Getting a note back made it feel worth the potential embarrassment.
No Last-Minute Plan Changes
When you made plans, you had to stick to them. Meeting someone at the movies at seven meant being there at seven. You couldn’t send a text saying you’d be fifteen minutes late. If you missed each other, there was no way to rectify the situation. You’d wait around, wondering if they had forgotten or if you had the time wrong. The next day, you’d find out they showed up an hour later.
Y2K Panic
Computers were supposed to fail when the year 2000 arrived. News channels wouldn’t shut up about it. Planes might fall from the sky, according to some reports. Certain people went out and bought emergency supplies as if the end of the world were imminent. Watching the countdown on New Year’s Eve felt legitimately tense. Midnight arrived. Nothing broke. Everything kept running the same as before. All that panic for absolutely nothing felt strange afterward.