Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I hope everyone enjoyed a lovely holiday. New Year’s Eve just isn’t what it used to be. When I was a kid all I wanted to do was stay up until midnight. As a teen and young adult all I wanted to do was go out with my friends to some fancy party. As I hit my 30s I enjoyed a quiet night in with friends and family. Nowadays I just spend the evening in disbelief about how fast time is moving.

It’s 2014! I mean, are you freakin’ kidding me? It seems like just yesterday we were preparing for the doom and gloom of Y2K; remember how the world stopped turning and computer systems blew up and there was mass hysteria? No, me either. But it could have happened and the important thing is that we were prepared.

I remember talking about The Year 2000 in elementary school when it seemed like the distant future. In fact I distinctly remember calculating that I would be old (36) in The Year 2000, older than my mom was at the time. Old! Talk of The Year 2000 was rivaled only by talk of The Metric System, which we were threatened with on a regular basis. It’s coming! Any day now! Thank goodness that as a whole, Americans are too stupid and/or stubborn to get with the rest of the world and convert to metric. The hell with everyone else!

All the stuff we thought would happen by now; flying cars and colonizing distant planets is cliché. The thing is, we couldn’t have imagined concepts like tablets and smart phones and internet scams. We had never, ever received a letter in the mail from a foreign dignitary who needed our help reclaiming $10 billion dollars from his home country.

It took me a while in the 80s just to adjust to the concept that phones were no longer hard-wired to the wall, and that we owned phones. Had to go buy them, in fact. Answering machines were state-of-the-art technology. Microwave ovens were pure magic.

I certainly never guessed that one day, in the year 2014, I would be talking about the good old days like a geezer, albeit using my laptop and internet connection to link to my personal URL.

The future is now. Happy 2014!

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14 Responses to Happy New Year!

  1. Pam Waits says:

    Ah, Y2K is a distant memory. I worked in the Y2K Program Office for United Airlines. Our motto was to make 12/31/99 a night like any other. No planes fell from the sky, so we succeeded. Can’t believe that was so long ago in a galaxy far far away…

  2. bethteliho says:

    Happy New Year, Jill 😉

    Head over to my blog when you get a chance, got some sunshine for ya! xoxo

  3. Lisa says:

    I still use aol for email, i have a landline with an answering machine, i fax regularly, i handwrite letters and can’t text with my thumb… How old am i ?

  4. Deb says:

    Happy New Year! I remember when we had to replace our rotary phone with a touch tone phone and how my friends and I would try to make up songs while talking to each other. Simple pleasures…

    • Jill Foer Hirsch says:

      And we could still make prank calls because there was no *69 or caller ID. We used to call the drug store and ask if they had Prince Albert in a can…

  5. mimijk says:

    Ah Jill…you haven’t hit geezerhood yet – I’ll let you know when it’s time to pull out the rocking chair..

  6. katecrimmins says:

    I remember when I actually LIKED to answer the phone. As a teenager (just a few years ago) I spent HOURS on it! Now I let it go to the message center and beg everyone to email or text me. Hope your year is fabulous and filled with scathing posts!

  7. The Regular Guy NYC says:

    Happy New Year Jill! May you have a safe and healthy 2014!

    Those last 14 years did fly by since 2000.

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