Technology: Blerg

Notice the six or so phones stacked in the middle of the table at Mongolian Barbeque. Yay!

While Coach Bell and I don't always feel very old, there are ways in which our college experience was VASTLY different from that of the current team. For one, there were no cell phones and the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Google didn't exist. If we wanted to search the web we used AltaVista or maybe Yahoo. We used Lexus Nexxus to find articles and Interlibrary Loan to get our hands on a discontinued volume.

If my friends wanted to get a hold of me in the library and didn't feel like walking over there and up to my 5th floor cubicle they would simply call the front desk, say it was urgent, and get the librarian to page me over the intercom. I usually knew when I heard "Kim Geiser, you have an urgent phone call at the desk" overhead that my friend Beth wanted to meet at the Union for a grilled cheese. After a big game at Grinnell my senior year I called my parents collect at their home from a roadside pay phone to tell them we had lost.

I don't particularly lament the loss of Alta Vista. I don't really miss having to rely on pay phones. I am sure the librarians at my Alma Mater do not miss paging students to the front desk for urgent grilled cheese sandwiches. But Coach Bell and I talk often about how different our road trips were.

If there was a movie on the bus, we all watched it because we didn't have our own personal screens to catch up on last season's Grey's Anatomy while our seat-mate typed a paper on her laptop. Back in the day I would pack my Discman and my travel CD folder that held about 10 albums. After listening to G. Love and Special Sauce a couple times over the course of the weekend I was more than happy to talk to my bus neighbor about the defensive breakdown we had in the 57th minute and how to prevent it next time. After a tough loss we couldn't get on the bus and complain to our parents or our roommate about how terrible the midfield had been--you either sat scowling silently in your seat or you talked to your teammates about what had happened. Your teammates were all you had on those trips. If you had a question about homework you had to ask them. If you wanted to laugh you had to laugh with them. If you wanted to cry you used one of their shoulders. These days, the bus is completely silent. Everyone sits in their seat with their laptop or iPad open and their headphones on, lost in their own little world.

That's why it was nice to see some of the kids all place their cell phones in the middle of the table at team dinner and talk to each other. One of those things that we used to take for granted is now a nice change.