In Continuum.

The next major technological leap was probably the pager, something which was considered to be a luxury good of the rich kids. My father had a pager long before anybody else, and I remember his pager had an ugly gold chain attached to his pants just in case it slipped out of his pocket. The way the little black box vibrated almost always scared me to no end, and the numbers on the pager usually made no sense whatsoever. Still, my father seemed to know the meaning of those indecipherable numbers, which I later found out to be phone numbers - go me. It was something that only a businessman needed back then, somewhat like those big leather suitcases or a small bag of toiletries for traveling. Somehow, the younger generation also acquired pagers, and more and more students started bringing those to school. Receiving a page from someone in class was like somebody's birthday party or something, it was something that caused quite an uproar to be honest, something which I never caught onto. I mean, the pager was unable to send a lot of messages, and it was ridiculous to see a student with a pager hanging from their waist back then. It was one of those technological "breakthroughs" which I scoffed at, but still secretly desired one just for the sake of it.

Toys also evolved in a manner that I wouldn't have imagined back then. It began with all those plastic toys that I had of robots and cars, and maybe the Legos and the Play-dos. Then everything turned electronic all of a sudden, and everybody had a digital pet in their pockets at school. Pixelated monsters dancing around on a small black and white screen that passed motion every once in a while, and you had to play games with it or it'd die from boredom. This digital monster needed to be fed too, and a whole bunch of basic maintenance that you needed to be mindful of, and that distracted a lot of children from their school work back then. It was so bad that the teachers started confiscating these little digital monsters from the students, but not from me. I was a little late in the whole pocket monster thing, and I got my own pocket monster a few weeks later after the incident. By then, however, everybody has already moved on to fighting monsters that were able to shoot boxing gloves, plungers and piles of animal poop at each other. Technology has once again invaded my life, and the geek that I was became a great believer of science more than anything.

Apparently, having a pager in your pocket wasn't enough any longer. Most of my classmates realized how ridiculous it was to have a pager in your pocket, which was also why the new and improved cellphones from Nokia suddenly became so popular. Cellphones grew smaller and smaller over the years, but then nobody liked the flip phones from Motorola, because the battery would fly out whenever somebody tries to flick it open with his wrist. Nobody liked the earlier models of Nokia either, because their casing were likened to that of a beetle shell, and most people didn't like the idea of putting a titanic insect to the side of your face. So when Nokia dished out the 3210 model, everybody was shell-shocked by how amazing it looked like. It even had games on the cellphone, something the other cellphones didn't have. Snakes became an overnight sensation, and everybody was trying to complete the game by filling up the entire screen. Those adventurous ones began to try writing their names with the snake, and I remember Timothy writing "TIM" with his pixelated snake at the back of the stage during our rehearsals. 

I think it is about time when I mention the history of computers in my home. I remember the white boxes in my bedroom that were actually computers. They were ugly white boxes that looked like they belonged in an office rather than a ten year old's bedroom. But there they were, taking up more space than my bed and making funny noises all the time. I was allowed just fifteen minutes a day on the computer back then when it was still running on Windows 3.1, and the fact that I managed to clock fifteen minutes a day on that beat up computer is a feat by itself. I remember this racing game that involved a red convertible, and I had a pixelated girlfriend with me. She'd yell at me if I crashed the car into one of the numerous obstacles on the road, anything from a cactus to a rock, from a truck to a cliff. Of course, if I get to win the race I'd be rewarded with a kiss, and that was the end of that. 

My time on the old beat up computer was significantly increased when I started playing Duke Nukem 3D, the first first person shooting game I've ever played in my life, and it was a game that I played when my mother was not around because it involved shooting aliens and monsters until they turn into pulps, not to mention the fact that the F3 button allowed you to pay the pixelated strippers to take off their bras. It was an awesome game which I completed a dozen times over, and it is still a game which I'd like to play again till this day, for old time's sake. Anyway, that was until the internet came along and my time on the computer was greatly reduced by the presence of the sister. I remember the irritating sound of dial up, the way it screeched and moaned just to connect to the internet which was only faster than a dying slug. Anyway, the internet was constantly interrupted by somebody calling the house phone, but that certainly did not stop my sister from hogging the computer for the most part to chat with her friends on IRC and ICQ. We had a lot of fights over the computer, another evidence that technology is bringing the world further apart. 

I had my own share of time on the IRC too. My nicknames were Williefan, PsYkOoOoO, and for about ten minutes - Hotbreasts86. I just wanted to see how much attention I'd gain in a channel full of horny teenage boys. It was an experiment that I did with a friend of mine, and we counted about fifteen hits in less than thirty seconds, people asking for my age and location, and if I had a picture of myself or not. Anyway, as for the other two nicknames, don't ask. 

Fast-forward the time a little bit, and my sister and I finally got our hands on our own computers and laptops. My sister is still stuck in the stone age with her PC, while I have moved on to the better side of the fence with my Macs, after coming face to face with the Blue Screen of Death too many times. I grew sick and tired of using everything spat out by Microsoft, which was why I threw myself at Macintosh when the opportunity arrived. My sister, however, is still an avid fan of Windows simply because she is not willing to change. Once in a while, however, you see her banging her fingers on the keyboards because her computer would fail on her like a bad knee in a marathon. Just a few nights ago, she was spotted dragging a vacuum cleaner out of the storeroom because she wanted to vacuum the insides of her old beat up desktop - who does things like that? There she was, breathing in the balls of black dust while cursing under her breath, all the while looking for the RAM inside the computer unit and hoping that the computer wouldn't crash on her. 

"Such things won't happen to a Mac", I said.

"What did you say?", yelled my sister over the thunderous sound of the vacuum cleaner.

"I said that your PC is in a good shape!" 

"Oh, yeah! Isn't it?"

I'm such a bastard, and a geek at heart. I guess technology has controlled our lives more than we'd like it to. Still, it is interesting how whenever a new product is being introduced into the market, no matter how new or fascinating the product is, humans almost always revert back to the first time they saw fire burning down a tree. I swear, if we cover ourselves with thick furs and make noises like monkeys, aliens wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between now and the stone age. Deep inside, we are all geeks. But some of us are just slaves, like me.