How Pre-Internet 90s Kids Had Fun (& Secretly Disgraced Their Parents)
True, the internet was around in the 90s but it was rubbish and hogging the landline with a dial up connection was a real parent-annoyer.
intouch.cli.co.uk
With no youtube or social media and only four TV channels available, pre-internet 90s kids had to make their own fun. Glorious, hysterical, stupid fun. It was the golden age of recklessness. Pleasure for pleasures sake. No social media oneupmanship, no smart phones to evidence youthful misdemeanours, and the only way you were traceable was via 1471. That’s if you could even be located, baby.
To fill that boring gap of time between the ages of 13 to 16, when you’re too old to watch Chucklevision and you’re too young to go out drinking, you had to get inventive. Some pre-internet 90s kids shared stories of their reckless adventures with us.
Obviously we can’t recommend that you copy any of this behaviour. That would just be stupid.
“Going around at 4am to loosen the caps of delivered milk on people’s doorsteps and put different food colouring colours in each. Then later the dairy gets a phone call saying ‘my milk is red’ 'my milk is black’ my milk is green etc. I did that!!!” Mike Foster
flickr.com
“There were some derelict warehouses near where we lived. We spent a lot of time down there messing around on the huge wooden cable drums. One person would climb up and the others would roll it along, kind of like a unicycle except really dangerous.” - Anna Kinlay
pentregroup.com
“We used to make really elaborate prank calls. We’d dial random numbers until we struck it lucky and got a ring tone. Then we’d pretend to be American circus kids who’d been locked in our hotel room by our ringmaster father. We did one once that went on for hours, each of us taking it in turns to speak to this unsuspecting guy who became increasingly worried. A group of us would have the upstairs phone muted & on loudspeaker; we’d listen in and nearly wet ourselves laughing. We’d take it in turns to talk on the downstairs phone. It was so much fun.” -Alexandra Harper
tvtropes.org/Matt Groening
“The Burning Butthole: throwing aerosol cans onto a open fire (that we started in the woods) and then taking turns to run and jump over the fire.” - Gyp McGhee
flickrhivemind.net
“We used to break into this abandoned school on our lunch breaks. It was all boarded up and we got a real kick spooking ourselves going round all the darkened classrooms. On one visit we spent a long time gathering stuff to pile under a sheet we’d found so that it looked like a dead body. We did it to scare the other kids who used to visit. Then we exited via an upstairs classroom using an electric cable to abseil down from the roof. One of our crew twisted her ankle and had to be carried home. We felt like heroes.” -Julie McCann
wattpad.com
“We mixed up a batch of red food colouring with flour and water, climbed onto the garage roof, played for a bit, then poured the 'fake blood’ over my friends head and the ground while I ran in the house screaming at my mum that my friend had fallen from the garage roof… it seems pretty cruel now but it was funny at the time. My mum hasn’t ever forgotten this.” - Patrick Donley
facebook/Jennifer Mullins
“We used to go to the village phone box and call companies free phone numbers and suggest better ideas for their adverts, e.g I told BT to hire ET to do a 'BT phone home’ advert and read out my script to the poor bloke, it was for giggles but when they didn’t do it, I phoned again and again.” - Rosana Kemp
en.wikipedia.org
“My sister and I used to wait until our folks were having a dinner party and then see if we could get from our bedrooms to the front door without being seen - difficult in an open plan house!” - Shoina Pelham
designpics
“Phoned up aptly named shops like the hair salon 'a cut above’ and asked if they’d do 'a cut below’.” - Susan Cullen
wikihoe
“Car Surfing: one driving like a rally driver, the other lying on the roof with the sunroof open to hold onto and also a quick re-entry back into the car in case the police drove past.” - Ben Lewis
godvine.com
“One summer they shut my road off to replace some underground pipes. It was the holidays and me and most of the kids in my neighbourhood were left on our own between 9 to 5. The builders never seemed to be around and many a day was spent that summer scaling the fence and climbing through the huge concrete piping.” - Farrah Franks
prweb.com
“My sister used to measure the quantity of her farts by farting into an upside down jug of water in the bath and seeing how much water was displaced.” - Lisa Revill
ardjla.blogspot.com
“Speed Racing: find the highest, steepest road possible, lie down on your skateboard (head-first or feet-first) and whoever doesn’t end up with cuts all over their knuckles or in the ditch is a winner.” Frank Willis
“I put on all black and a balaclava, turned off the lights and hid until my sister came downstairs, then jumped out at her with a bicycle pump. Wow. She screamed for a long time. It was way harsh.” Bridget Woodman
en.wikipedia.org
“We used to look up our teachers numbers in the phone book then prank call them. The best one was when we called the DT teacher and asked him if he wanted to buy shares in the ‘Dwarf Society’. He said his wife dealt with that kind of stuff and passed us on to her.” - Jessica Halstead
ebay.co.uk
“Taping a stink bomb to the corner of the public telephone box so when it was opened it would drop to the floor and smash thus leaving a terrible smell.” Katherine Wickstead
ebay.co.uk
“We used to challenge each other to knock on a door and ask the person if we could use their toilet.” - Assim Ali
matthewtravels.wordpress.com
“We used to call restaurants and make 100’s of fake bookings.” Will Skot
“Me & some mates let down the tyres on our music teacher’s car when we discovered it parked in the driveway of our hot female PE teacher’s house in our village. We knew what was going on & we were not happy about it.” - Jamie Shaw
“We used to dress in army fatigues and balaclavas and break into peoples houses in our village. We never forced entry - we just went in through open doors or windows. Then we’d leave post-it notes for the homeowners telling them their security had been breached & how.” - Michael Page
scotusblog.com
Got any tales of pre-internet 90s fun? Tweet us @YahooStyleUk
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All the names in these stories have been changed to protect the identity of these reckless fools.
