Dial Up. Yeah I know the sound and I know the time it took to load anything with. But it’s something I won’t ever miss having. I would much rather be on a 1MB connection if I had to choose between that or dial up ever again. I also hated how easy it was to be kicked off, if anyone called the phone, you were off it in seconds.
I remember this vivedly and I’m straight.
In high school, I was very awkward socially (decades later I could find out that it’s autism, but at that point it was just called “he’s shy and awkward”). I had a group of bullies who would follow me around taunting me.
Usually, they’d leave me alone if they were alone with me, but there was one exception. One of my bullies loved pretending to come onto me in the locker room. As if being in your underpants changing in front of other guys wasn’t embarrassing enough as a teen, this guy would pretend that he was gay (he definitely wasn’t) and that he was attracted to me.
I remember feeling ashamed of being identified by someone as possibly being gay. (A feeling that present day me realizes wasn’t right, but I was a teenager and being gay wasn’t widely accepted then.) I wanted desperately to prove that I was straight, but had no way of doing that. (See above about being extremely awkward socially - I didn’t have my first date until about a decade later.)