My niece has no idea how stressful AIM away messages were.
By @reeseyy · Nostalgia
She was complaining about crafting the perfect Instagram story and I had to stop myself from laughing. That's amateur hour.
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The sheer pressure of logging off AOL Instant Messenger required more strategic planning than a military operation. Your away message was your entire personality distilled into one block of text, usually paired with some gut-wrenching Dashboard Confessional lyrics. It was the ultimate passive-aggressive tool. You'd craft a message with a vague, dramatic inside joke aimed at one person, but hoping another person (your crush, obviously) would see it and be intrigued. The worst was when you'd set a specific away message for a specific buddy who was grounded, like '~*~*~FrEe My Gurl TifF~*~*~', and then forget to change it for two days while your crush is trying to IM you. Social suicide. We didn't have read receipts; we had logging on and off 15 times to see if they'd changed *their* away message in response to *your* away message. Kids today with their ephemeral stories have it so easy.
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