I’ve seen the movie Animal House over 20 times. I’m not ashamed to admit that. Often times my mind will wander to thinking about the movie and wonder what it would be like to go back in time and attend college in 1962. For some reason my mind quickly moves past the nostalgia portrayed in the film and onto the finer details of life in those days.

When I arrived at college in 1996 I brought my PC, stereo, telephone, a pile of CDs, my Playstation, a pile of video games, a trunk of clothes, and a bicycle. After my dad left town the day he dropped me off I set up my computer, fired it up, and played a few games. After all, the “meet your dorm-mates” shit didn’t start for hours and I had already decided that I wasn’t really going to be friends with my roommate. If the year had been 1962 I probably would have arrived with just a trunk full of clothes and the bicycle. My desk would have been completely empty as most dorm rooms didn’t even have telephones in those days. Picturing that scene in my mind conjures a sense of soul-crushing boredom. It’s the same feeling I get when I go down into the basement here at work (I work in an old building that’s been here since 1948) and see the rows of narrow desks and useless file cabinets neatly stacked in the storage area, never to be used again because a computer won’t fit on them.

The irony is that those days weren’t boring. Deprived of the distraction of easy entertainment and instant information it’s likely that I would have come out of college more well rounded. I’m happy the way things turned out but sometimes I still wonder if I would have been better off in 1962, walking out of an empty dorm room wearing a toga, carrying a giant beer mug to some party every weekend (well, maybe not the toga every weekend.)