What If.......?

The class reunion we just experienced was possible in large part because of the Internet and cell phones. People became "detectives", scouting across the nation for names not yet located, so that we could send those people invitations.

I got to thinking....what if we had had cell phones (like every teenager seems to have now) when we were in Northeast High classes? And what if we had had computers at home with access to the Internet?

1. Those "notes" on paper that we passed to each other ("Meet me in the cafeteria", "At 1:30 everybody drop their books on the floor"), would have been unnecessary. We would have text-messaged each other, and the teacher could never have caught us with the guilty evidence of paper "notes".

2. The cell phones would have put our social lives on full-throttle speed because we could reach our friends (platonic, romantic, whatever) all during the day rather than using the family phone when we got home or a pay phone (if we had the coins).

3. Access to the Internet would have saved me a lot of trips to Haslam's Bookstore on Central Ave. to find back issues of magazines. I wouldn't have had to deal with Lucy Lanphear in the school library (actually, she never gave me any problems) and I wouldn't have had to deal with the "card catalogue" , where books had complicated classification numbers.

4. Access to the Internet would have meant I could have researched a term paper in a few hours on one evening instead of making multiple trips to the library, looking for books that somebody faster than I had already checked out.

5. Researching a college to attend would have been an Internet project, not a matter of looking over a bunch of college catalogs in the school library or the guidance office.

6. And wouldn't it have been fun to "Google" our friends by looking for their names on the Internet? Back in those high school days, our private lives were known only by close friends, family members, and for the girls, the pages of a personal "diary". Nowadays, our lives are open books, subject to research by anyone from St. Petersburg to Tokyo.