29 Photos Of Very Specific Things That You Will Only Recognize If You Graduated High School Between 1997 And 2002
1.AOL email and the "You've Got Mail" alert — which you would only check every few days because you rarely got emails:
2.JanSport or Eastpak backpacks, which you would immediately grab when you were doing your back-to-school supplies shopping:
Anything other than that was just uncool. Unless you lived on the East Coast, where you probably owned an L.L. Bean monogrammed one.
3.Sharpies and Wite-Out pens that you picked up so you could customize your backpack:
4.Slip-front binders, 'cause it was the easiest binder to customize — all you needed was to slip in some personal photos and magazine cutouts to totally make it your own:
5.And Trapper Keeper Five Stars, which was like the cargo pants version of binders:
6.These dividers you'd get in order to ~organize~ the inside of your binder (really they just ended up being doodle pads):
7.Day planners that you immediately filled with all your friends' addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers, as well as the wallet-size group photos you and your friends had taken at the portrait studio in the mall:
8.TRL — which made you rush home from school as soon as possible:
9.And The Rosie O'Donnell Show, another after-school TV show you'd watch because she always had the best guests:
10.Pagers in clear cases, which made you feel uncool if you didn't have one like the rest of your friends:
11.Brick cell phones, which you begged your parents to get you by telling them you'd be careful with and that they can "reach" you at any time with it:
12.And, of course, not having a cell phone meant having to deal with those students that hogged up the school payphone like it was their own personal line any time you needed to use it:
13.Portable CD players that you carried around along with extra batteries if you wanted to listen to music:
And LOL to the days of being on the school bus or a car and trying to hold your portable CD player just right 'cause you knew that anti-skip protection was a lie and one pothole or bump would make your CD skip.
14.And also carrying around a CD wallet so you had options of CDs to listen to:
15.Cliffs Notes, which you used to better understand (aka literally fill you in if you hadn't read it) the book you had been assigned to read:
16.20/20 hosted by Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters. And also how every few months, your parents would interrogate you about something they saw that "kids and teens are doing."
17.The Price Is Right hosted by Bob Barker, which you would watch whenever you stayed home sick from school:
18.Just hanging out at the mall whenever you ditched school 'cause there wasn't much else to do and you could spend hours there:
19.Or ditching school on a Tuesday (the day new albums used to be released) to go buy your favorite artist's new record:
20.Hand-delivered party invites that people would pass out in class (usually for drama) or directly to your locker:
21.Sea Breeze or Stridex as your skincare routine (it was all about drying your skin 🙃):
22.Abercrombie & Fitch, which you either LOVED or HATED:
23.~Cool~ store bags that you would save in order to make into book covers:
24.Using Encarta for reports — and always hoping they had something or enough on the subject you were doing the report on:
25.Begging your parents for this exact phone and your own line so that you could talk to your friends without anyone listening in:
26.Batshit wild daytime soaps (looking at you, Passions) you had started watching over the summer and were upset you would have to stop watching because you were going back to school:
27.This exact alarm clock that woke you up to your favorite radio station:
28.AOL AIM, which you immediately get on when you got back from school:
29.And lastly, the iMac, which you dreamt of getting and was goals:
