One time, my friend Ryan and I invented instant messaging. “What are you doing?” he called to ask me. “Making a collage.” I used to do that. I cut out basketball players from my magazines and pasted them on to paper, or on to composition notebooks (which I laminated and they looked really cool). “Go log on to your mom’s computer and send me an email. Then I’ll click ‘send & receive’ over and over until your email comes in. It’ll be just like we’re instant messaging.” We sent emails from our moms’ email accounts because we didn’t have our own. I was pretty new to email. I was in the fifth grade. Just about the only button I was familiar with on Microsoft Outlet was ‘send & receive.’ That’s actually probably the only button I’d still be familiar with on Microsoft Outlook. I actually typed Microsoft Outlet just then and didn’t notice it until two lines down, but I’m leaving it there so that you believe me. It’s been a long time since I’ve used this program. Ryan and I traded emails back and forth, rapid-fire, about the Detroit Red Wings and cool WordArt we had made and the ‘Ernest’ movies and Age of Empires 2, of course. Two weeks later, my friend Jeremy told me about AOL Instant Messenger, which the entire world of everybody who’s anybody pretty quickly came to know affectionately as AIM. He told me to get a screen name. “You can do your name and maybe something that you like, like soccer, because that’s what mine is, and a number like your birth year, which is what I did.” I was in my creative prime then, so it took me no time at all to come up with jordansoccer88. Ryan and I stopped sending emails back and forth after this. Did AOL rip us off? I don’t know, I really don’t. I haven’t done the proper research. They may have had the idea separately. But I can tell you that I don’t use AIM anymore and neither does anyone I know. I do, however, have 2 email accounts and sometimes I send emails to people I know and they email me right back and then I email them back too and it’s like we’re instant messaging and just taking a little longer to say what we want to say, but sometimes that’s good because people can say dumb things too quickly when the other person can always see that “jordansoccer88 is typing.”