Texting, Old School

Texting, old school.

Fold it over, and then again. Fold the crease backwards, turn it over, then flip, flop to the top.  Make sure the edges line up, so that your final tuck leaves you with a right triangle. You want a right triangle, not an obtuse triangle, because that would throw off the physics needed to achieve the delivery!  The masterful shot, that would get the message to your intended recipient! You had to hold it upright with your left finger and then you’d flick it, football style, like a kicker in mid-field, hoping to put it between the poles!  But lookout! If you missed, there was most definitely a “privacy issue”, a “breach in security”, an, “identity risk”. The “firewall”, was the teacher.  She could keep that message from getting through! With her hair in a bun and a her plump little fingers, dusted with chalk, ready to grab you up by the arm, leaving a hand imprint all over the sleeve of your blouse, to drag you to the Dragon Lady’s office, The Principle!  Or, if you were going to get in really deep water, she would take it, and begin the inquiry herself!  She would ask who wrote it, and, of course, when no one answered, she would unfurl it, noting the electric green penmanship, her eyes scanning the desktops to see where the offending pen might be resting in its carved cradle.

This usually resulted in the punishment of writing the preamble 100 times on the chalkboard after class.  I did that a lot, so much so, that I have it memorized to this day.  It goes like this:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Yes, we had our urgent questions, our code language, and our silly symbols too. The need to communicate has always been there. Maybe, back in the caveman days, they had to slip each other a stone tablet? I don’t know, but for me, that was texting – in the 80’s – Old School.

Texting in the 80’s