The In Love 4 Lyfe ReminderĬonsider it the '90s equivalent of shouting your love from a mountaintop - there was no better way to alert the world to the fact that you had the best BF or GF ever was to 'tag' them in your away message, i.e. It looked a lot like 'Bored as a mofo, someone IM me!' Or there was the more passive-aggressive variety, like 'So mad right now! Don't IM me,' that, while screaming 'Don't talk to me,' obviously meant 'IM me right this very second so I can vent.' 3. This was the default away message whenever you weren't actually away but were more than likely staring at your screen waiting for your crush from third period to log on. I don't think any '90s kid made it out of the decade without at least one away message that read 'Don't cry because it's over smile because it happened' or 'LiFe'S nOt AbOuT tHe BrEaThS wE tAkE, bUt ThE mOmEnTs ThAt TaKe OuR bReAtH aWaY.' Clearly, we had a lot of time on our hands, because painstaking typing in alternative upper and lower case is incredibly time-consuming. In that spirit, come ROFL with me as we take a look at nine classic away messages from yesteryear, with a little help from the hilarious Twitter account. And although it has since been made all but obsolete by other more modern platforms, it's fun to look back on the days when the hardest part of creating an online profile was deciding which color to make your Comic Sans. So, regardless of how silly our lingo and elaborate handles back then seem now, it doesn't change that it was the social media of choice at the time - all the cool kids were doing it. It essentially served as our training wheels for Snapchat and Instagram and, well, texting as a whole. Really, AIM was cutting-edge technology at the time.

The very sight of that little yellow running man icon or the tell-tale sound of a digital door opening floods me with memories of crafting what I believed to be witty little away sentiments under one of the many ridiculous screen names I rocked during that decade (CactusJane? Verboden Slyph?). I'll be the first to admit that I was the queen of AIM back in the day. Get ready to toe that fine line between nostalgia and mortification, because today we're going to explore away messages you definitely used in the '90s.

Classic aim away messages