Do you even remember a time before Gchat? Before you could just glance to that little sidebar to the left and click who-so-ever you chose to be the target of your ranting?
Be it work-, friend-, boredom-, or alcohol-related, Gchat is a one-stop shop for idle and necessary banter alike.
And today it wasn’t working for a really long time and we all freaked out.
Did you think you’d miss Gchat? I didn’t. We all use Twitter, right? And group chat programs for work? It turns out Gchat is still a necessary form of private communication in a world where everything we write is public. We started to feel… sentimental.
@lissijean @google srsly what am I supposed to do for the first two hours of work if GChat is down??
— Michelle Anderson (@MusingofPinhead) March 17, 2014
First #Gchat goes down. Next, fire & brimstone. Good news? You can still reach me on AIM: razzledazzle04
— Darien LaBeach (@dlabeach) March 17, 2014
This temporary absense inspired us to try and think back to B.G.C.—Before Gchat. How did we function?! And thus we went toiling back to find—you guessed it!—our very first Gchat conversations. Behold our misguided obliviousness. We were as skeptical about this chatting-on-Gmail thing as we were about a certain microblogging service that had just taken off.
First Gchat, 4/27/07 (hi @ninaokeefe) https://t.co/gEyxKvbU07
— Cooper Fleishman (@_Cooper) March 17, 2014
.@_Cooper The beginning of my first Gchat, 9/4/09. pic.twitter.com/MXUEd3jTnr
— Evan Weiss (@eaweiss) March 17, 2014
First gchat. Horrifying. pic.twitter.com/MbPyEJxkNd
— Molly McHugh (@iammollymchugh) March 17, 2014
My first gchat was apparently super lame. Long live AIM. pic.twitter.com/PpWxbe4zwb
— Beejoli Shah (@beejoli) March 17, 2014
my first gchat was talking to a girl about a boy I was flirting with on @benbrown‘s consumating. 3/1/06. RIP gchat. pic.twitter.com/2lObB3VfqU
— Summer Anne Burton (@summeranne) March 17, 2014
My first Gchat was about my surprise that Gchat existed, apparently pic.twitter.com/6I43tRLeKb
— Mark Berman (@themarkberman) March 17, 2014
My first ever gchat convo, age 19, unappreciative, naive, if only I knew it would be INTEGRAL IN MY TWENTIES https://t.co/iwcPj5ec8g
— Sam Faulkner Biddle (@samfbiddle) March 17, 2014
My first gchat pretty accurately reflects the majority of my interactions with human beings. pic.twitter.com/02XfWzEUwI
— Kevin Morris (@kmmokai) March 17, 2014
How this is possible, I’m uncertain, but I guess enigmas walk amongst us.
My first Gchat pic.twitter.com/fO4kBrrctZ
— Ned Donovan (@ned_donovan) March 17, 2014
Of course, we all know that plenty of our Gchats must remain off the record. Daily Dot writer Audra Schroeder was refreshingly honest: “My first Gchat is NSFW. Sorry.” I wish I could say the same. We all do.
Illustration by Jason Reed