I'm sure I had a few Space Ghost: Coast to Coast Away Messages that confused a good deal of my friends. "Sleeping the sleep of the just (plain exhausted)" was a favorite, as was "Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to class I go." People would also throw up song lyrics, poem quotes, or complete non-sequiturs in lieu of actual information about their whereabouts. Getting creativeĮnlarge / I'd like to say my friends and I used better song lyrics than this in our Away Messages, but that's probably a lie.Īway Messages could be customized for the situation and saved for later use. A lot of the early Away Message use in my group of friends was merely functional: "Away at class," or "I'm asleep," or "I'm hanging out down the hall, come join us!" People soon began using their Away Messages as a form of creative self-expression. You could also set up an Away Message to go up automatically if your computer was idle for too long, in case you stepped away from the computer without thinking. If you sent a message to someone with an Away Message up, you'd get an instant response notifying you of that fact. Users with Away Messages up appeared with a little yellow sticky note next to their screen names on AIM's "Buddy List," showing that they were online but not actually around. In the days before we were all tethered to an Internet-enabled device 24/7, we used Away Messages to let others know that we couldn't respond to an Instant Message, while still leaving the computer online in order to receive messages that could be viewed later. Using AIM also meant mastering the etiquette of the Away Message. Carrying on multiple conversations at once, multitasking between chatting and "surfing the web," and pausing long enough to compose well-thought replies (but not so long that the recipient began to worry) were all brave new frontiers in communication through a much-too-heavy CRT monitor. It's hard to remember now just how freeing it was to be able to communicate instantly without the formality of an actual phone call. I brought up AOL Instant Messenger, opened the menu, and chose "Edit Profile." That's where I shared links to the Post's top four stories at the time and warned my friends not to miss the important postal news amid the other stuff going on (I also included a semi-apologetic note that I hoped the lighthearted joke would be a welcome distraction on such a dark day). I wanted to quickly share this lighthearted observation with my circle of friends, and in 2001 I only had one easy, surefire way to do that online. While the first three stories were blaring headlines about the terrorist attacks, I remember clearly that the fourth was a news brief about the threat of postal stamp rate increase, the last trivial story published before all other news got pushed aside indefinitely. For me, it was a headline about stamps tucked into the chaos.Īs I started to absorb the horror of the day through TV and online news sources that Tuesday morning, I noticed an odd inflection point highlighted on the Washington Post's list of "Top News" links. Many people remember specific, weird things about September 11, 2001. Aurich Lawson / Getty reader comments 97 with
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