In typical procrastinating fashion, while “working on my problem set,” I installed the newest version of AIM on Ryan’s newly purchased/reformatted harddrive. I knew, going into this, that it had been some time since I last heeded the “Upgrade to AIM version 1043.3781″ message that does, or does not, sometimes still pop up when logging into AIM. Given such, I was expecting a newer version, some changes, some new improvements, and I was perhaps even a bit excited to see what the good folks over at AOL had been doing. However, I did not realize that one year of not upgrading AIM in my time frame meant 500 light years in AOL’s software development time frame.

This newest version of AIM is too much. I felt lost, confused, intimidated even. The buddylist window is much too big, too cluttered, too busy, too complicated and hard to understand. My brain just can’t process that much information anymore, nor can it learn all the functions of the much too fancy buddylist window version 5.98918203857. I felt like an old, outdated grandma trying to learn to use the radio, and failing miserably.

This was all rather very depressing. Holding on to IM for dear life this past semester was maybe a subconscious way I was trying to hold on to that feeling of “I’m still just another college kid.” Unfortunately for me, pretending to be a college kid doesn’t even get me in the door anymore with AIM marketing. They have long since moved on to reeling in the new, the fresh, and the able-brained teenyboppers-hooked-on-the-internet generation.