Internet in the last millennium.

Anyone out there remember this one: Hamster Dance?  I know it was before Y2K, I was still teaching at Churchill, and it wasn’t my last year.  The internet was nothing like we know it now.  DSL, Cable and fiber optics did not exist for anyone other than the Armed Forces, the entire general public was still on dial-up. 

Ok, so maybe I exaggerate a little bit, or it could just be that I’m a little fuzzy on the details.  But I do remember that the Hamster Dance  was all the rage, you didn’t hear music or see things moving, let alone both, very often back then.  This was amazing.

I was sitting in the front row in the auditorium with my good friend, and Spanish teacher, Adele and the Vice Principal at some community meeting.  We were bored.  We were annoyed at some of the things people were saying about teachers and our profession.  To save our sanity, we were drawing little dancing hamsters on a pad of paper, and whispering “da, da, de da de, da, do, do..” to each other.

Our senior counselor, Smarsh, was talking to the audience when out of the blue he gestured over to us, called out our names and asked “right?”, looking for confirmation on whatever he was currently talking about, which, for the life of us, we had no clue what it was.  DEER IN THE HEADLIGHTS.  Out of sheer panic I blurted out “Why, of course.”

Personally, I think he did that just to wake us up and make us pay attention.  Kind of a classroom control thing.  I gained a lot of respect for the man that evening.