ASL: Who Remembers?

I’m taking it all the way back today.

I remember in the early 200s when the reigning thing was going into random chat rooms and starting conversations with strangers whose usernames and avatars were attractive enough. Those were the days when you could not be on the internet and the home phone at the same time. Those were the days you actually had – and used – home phones. When you wanted to connect to the internet, you’d sit by your computer and listen as your computer made weird, alien sounds, all in the name of connecting to the world wide web. Then fifteen minutes later, after the page loads, you’d finally find someone in the chat room that seemed interesting enough and you’d send him/her a message to say hello, and the next line would be, ASL?

Age. Sex. Location.

It was only after the stranger divulged this information that you’d decide if you wanted to move forward with this chat or not. I used to be a chat queen back then. I even got my first official boyfriend – a boyfriend I actually agreed to date, not one that was thrust upon me without my consent. This official boyfriend was the one I broke up with because he was talking about his momsy too much. See the video if interested.

Anyway, I used to hop on any chat room I could find. Well, specifically Nigerian ones because I missed Nigeria and I needed to connect with my people.

After I got tired of the chat rooms – and after dial-up internet was soooo year 2000 and DSL was now the thing to have – I moved on to online groups. But before that, I started sending out emails to a ton of people at the same time. I would ask them questions like what they thought about this issue or that issue. It was basically like email marketing, what you’d do with MailChimp et al now, but I was doing it with a special Yahoo email address I created.

I encouraged dialogue. And it worked. People were responding with their thoughts and opinions. Problem was that some people did not like receiving 100 emails from people they didn’t know. I don’t know if BCC did not exist then or if we didn’t know how to use it or if we just didn’t care. Either way, enough people must have reported me because Yahoo stepped in and shut my account down.

Screw you, Yahoo, I said. And then I moved on to MSN Groups.

Over there at MSN Groups, I created Talk Naija, and I, of course, was the head moderator (there was a name for it that I don’t remember now. Admin, maybe). My name was NaijaSpice. Don’t laugh.

Talk Naija was fun! I connected with so many people. We had threads upon threads on all types of topics. And of course, there were beefs (aka virtual fights). Like the one between Funmie and the girl that was dating her ex. As Funmie’s friends, we jumped on and fought with her to “finish” that babe. But just look at the yeye guy we were fighting for. Total waste of our time. But we were young and foolish, and that was our time.

I made so many friends on Talk Naija – or TN as we fondly called it. Like Heanyi. You people know him as FoxyP now, but he was just Heanyi to us. He used to live in New York, and he moved to Maryland after we had a Talk Naija get-together in Maryland and he felt like Maryland was more fun than New York. Speaking of the get-together, it was the funniest thing. We did it in the basement of a TN member (and I’m still friends with him!) He’s now married with two kids. Good times. The get-together was so disorganized, but we loved it.

Eventually, MSN closed all their groups – thanks to the big, bad Facebook. It was after this that I started blogging. And the rest, as they say, is history.

You should leave a comment below. Tell me your ASL.