I will give anyone £500 to accurately tell me what MSN stands for without Googling it.
Just kidding, I don’t have that kind of money nor do I particularly care.
Anyways, remember MSN? Back in the day, we’d all rush home from school, power through our homework and settle into spending the evening online talking to people we’d sat beside all day. Mum would shout at us to get off the dial-up because the phone line was blocked and Grandma might be trying to call.
The level of conversation on MSN was absolutely tragic. We were all massive losers and if they were ever to release the history of our MSN conversations, it’s likely we’d all suffer death as a result of incessant cringing.
Here’s 6 MSN conversations we were all, tragically, part of.
1. The Dead End
This one generally involved targeting your crush, just to be able to tell your mates that you two were chatting last night. The absolute desperation of ‘Wb x’ will be studied for years by top behavioural therapists and they’ll still never be able to properly nail down why anyone used to employ that technique. This particular type of conversation was always very one sided, involving you pedalling all avenues of conversation in a desperate attempt to trick this unfortunate soul into liking you. This method gets 3 tragics out of 5.
2. Hopeless Teenage Flirtation
We’re all guilty of being both the culprit and recipient of this deeply tragic MSN conversation. It would almost always involve a remark about a new profile picture, then segue into some hot and heavy flirting. If you were on the receiving end, your main role was to feign embarrassment, even though you were loving every second of it and furiously hitting the print screen button to save the evidence for a later date. If you were the instigator of said flirting, you were as brave as a giant behind the giant desktop PC, but would instantly crumble into a pile of mortification when you met the other person face to face. This one gets 2 tragics out of 5.
3. The Decoy
After signing in and out roughly twelve times but somehow failing to get the attention of your intended target, you’d resort to the accidental conversation. You’d convince yourself that it’s entirely plausible to have started a conversation with the wrong person, now all you had to do was sell that idea to this unsuspecting victim. Once the formalities and standard ‘oops sorry’ was out of the way, you could slide right into those yet to be invented DMs and get some sort of POA in motion. I give this one 4 tragics out of 5.
4. The Intentional Interrogation
As a firm believer in not being a weirdo, I can only speak from a victim’s perspective in relation to this particular type of MSN conversation. You’d get a strange add in your contacts and accept them with a deeply tragic sense of optimism. Maybe this will be the start of a beautiful tale that you can recall at your wedding in 5-7 years. Or they’re a murderer. The adder would generally take an accusatory tone if you questioned their reasons for adding you, so this potential love story would more than likely end in a fight and subsequent removal from each others’ friends lists. Oh what could’ve been. I give this one 3 tragics out of 5.
5. The MSN DMC (Deep Meaningful Conversation)
This particular conversation happened in the dead of night when your parents and annoying siblings had gone to bed. The combination of an eerily quiet house and your overactive brain resulted in the instigation of an unnecessarily deep conversation that would frequently cover strange areas. You had to choose the recipient of this conversation carefully as they also needed to be a weirdo, otherwise it just wouldn’t work and you’d end up talking about fucking Lost again. In the above mockup of this particular genre of conversation, I have accurately predicted 9/11, just in case you’re wondering what category of loser teen I was. I give this one 5 tragics out of 5.
6. The ‘Hacking’
Easily the most tragic of the bunch, this MSN conversation is one we’re all guilty of. As we all know, the entire point of MSN was to get the attention and subsequent affection of the person you fancied. When all else failed, many of us resorted to the ‘OMG SORRY I WAS HACKED’ method of defence, after professing your love for the unwilling recipient. The main aim was to open a dialogue which eventually culminated in them asking you to marry them, but it came with a guaranteed success rate of zero. If anything, you just made yourself look like a desperate loser with no friends. I give this one 6 tragics out of 5.
