Furbies

My biggest beef with the furby is its appearance. Can we just take a minute and look at this thing? Whoever thought it would be a good idea to combine a "robot" with your Grandmother's Pomeranian was on some sort of mind-altering drug at the time and should consider giving A&E a call to set up an intervention.

Admittedly, Tiger Co. made enough money during the 1998 holiday season off parents in a desperate attempt to keep up with their whining kids' desire for the latest tech-gadget toy (see the Tamagotchi) to sustain them until they were bought out again. We have to hand it to them that they sold a product whose main attraction was that it blinked and spoke "furbish."

For everyone (except those who chose to add the toys to their collection of collections among novelty plates, porcelain child figurines, and beanie babies) the excitement of these things wore off in approximately 17 seconds. Even 3rd graders realized that their classmates with a furby on January 6th were the losers who would later become the kid you just wanted to shut up in sophomore year English class.

The furby was there when we were teetering on boredom with matchbox cars in our Happy Meals and longing for an encore of Howie Mandel's brilliance in Gremlins.

Now how do I get it to shut off?

Pagers

So you just walked out of the latest New Kids on the Block [Pearl Jam, Will Smith, Alanis Morrissette…] concert, mabey sucking down some tang, rushing home to try to catch that last episode of Baywatch, when all of a sudden the car is filled with a piercing screech. No nothing is wrong with the car, turns out; the coolest kid not on TRL just got a page.

That’s right, the Jeopardy of electronic devices, spitting out a phone number you must call. Or, if you were unlucky enough to have an alpha-numeric pager (latin for too gay to function) you may have even gotten some coded message only someone with an advanced degree in cryptology can decipher. If only you were in the 5 square feet that the somehow less practical car phone worked you could call the number on that. Now however you have to pull over, find a payphone, and return said call. What’s more, the number sent to you nine times out of ten fell into one of two categories:

a) A wrong number was dialed somewhere along the way, because let’s be honest, these new non-rotary phones are just so hard to use. More often than not this results in two to three calls to the wrong number trying to confirm if you were given a wrong number or dialed a wrong number and about $6 in payphone charges. Or,

b) A kind friend, knowing you have little else to do aside from wear a little box on your belt all day and wait for people to waste your time, has paged you with the number to the Chinese food restaurant 2 states away making sure you spend a good 30 minutes and as many quarters, dimes and, nickels on the phone trying to figure out why you were paged by someone who only seems to care if you want General Tso’s Chicken or Mongolian Beef.

Either way you’re a loser.

Pogs

Seriously? What the hell do you do with Pogs? Why was the Guatemalan lady in the food court willing to sell me 8,000 of them for the price of 50 cents?

Whoever came up with the idea was a genius. "Hey, let's print pictures of shit on some cardboard circles and sell them to kids. Money!"

It's not even like you could collect them like Pokemon cards. (Never thought I would be extolling the value of a Pokemon card). With those at least you could run around making your friends feel like shit because you got a Charizard and the best they had was a Weedle. Imagine taking a break from Blitz on your N64 and saying to your buddies "Dudes, I got that Pog with the purple guy with the one eye that is bigger than the other. Wanna see?" The only correct response to that would be a punch in the face and the door slamming as your friends went to make a new friend who wasn't fucking lame.

But, of course, I still have my Pogs in the bottom of some drawer. You know, in case they are ever cool again.