Embarrassing things we did in our mid-teens

It’s now exam season and we’re all struggling to survive under the inevitable pressure that rears its ugly head this time of year.

If you find yourself experiencing a quarter-life crisis, you may start reminiscing of a better time in your life, a simpler time, when a night out might only cost you a tenner. A time before deadlines, when the hardest academia you were ever faced with was GCSE practice papers.

We are talking here of course, about our mid-teens. Here’s a list of some of the ridiculously cringey activities most of us got up to during our mid-teens…

Attended teenage nights at nightclubs

Held once a month these were usually the whole buzz of the schoolyard. Hours could be spent talking about who “curted” who, which check shirt clad lad got hit by some other lad, also wearing a checked shirt, and who got kicked out by the bouncers for being a right drunken mess.

Countless photos were taken at such events, every girl had a camera rather than a camera phone, and she would take pictures with EVERYONE she knew there.

Of course with these being teenage nights there was no alcohol served, and this was the only time in your life that you could get to see what the bar at your local night club looked like without anyone crowding it.

Just because you couldn’t buy alcohol there didn’t mean you couldn’t get “off your face” though, which brings us to our next point…

Excellent turn out tonight

Really shit pre-drinking

If you went back in time and told your mid-teen self that you would one day pre-drink with a WHOLE quarter bottle of vodka they would like, omg, die.

Mid-teen pre-drinks typically consisted of really low percentage alco-pops for girls and really low percentage beer for boys. This drinking would usually also take place on a coach someone in your year had organised for everyone, because there was not a chance you were doing it in front of your parents at home.

You’d have to get loaded on the journey down to ensure your buzz didn’t die half way through the night (which it usually did because you were shit at pre-drinking), and this often resulted in at least three people being sick on the aisles of the bus.

A classy Bacardi Breezer shot

Facebook cringiness

The constant trend of Facebook “backstalking” ensures that those regrettable 2010 status’ never go away.

We have all been guilty of posting a “like for like” status, or have posted a question as a status rather than just googling it.

There was also those blog things (where did they even come from, like who wrote those things in the first place!?), that you copy and paste from someone else’s profile and answered the questions for yourself. Because everyone just HAD to know what the initials of the last person you text were.

There was also the popular practice of writing a comment on every last one of the photos you put up. Usually involving those laughing face things: “:L”

This same person now does a degree in English

Questionable fashion choices

Style is a funny thing. Why anyone ever thought neon skirts and huge flower headbands were a good thing we may never know. But that didn’t stop us from wearing them.

Everyone was guilty of some dodgy outfit combinations, which usually considered that pumps were an acceptable dressy shoe. I’m aware that this applies more so to girls than boys, but sure the lads couldn’t go wrong with a Henley’s hoodie and boot-cut jeans.

Style choices influenced by this month’s French “Vogue”

MSN

It’s funny to think that your whole social world once started and stopped with you having access to your family computer.

Before smart phones, group chats were an exclusive feature of MSN, the best instant messaging service in the world. Some fond memories of this long dead program include status’ detailing who your best friends/boy and girl friends were (each name followed by a smiley face), annoying “nudges”, and the extremely cunning practice of signing in and out loads of times to try and provoke people into writing to you.

Musical Memories

Long before he took over the world with his master talking-over-music skills, Pitbull was simply a newcomer in the charts and the music scene was a very questionable place.

Whether you were all about the DJ Sammy so you could rave at the teenage nights out, or were so edgy that you decided to go with the more alternative, totally heavy metal rock styling’s of Fall Out Boy, there’s still bound to be one surviving track on your iPod that instantly gets you all nostalgic feeling.

Anyone else remember this one?

Borrowing people’s IDs

When you eventually grew out of that teenage-night phase, because that was like so stupid and you were like, totally mature now, you now moved on to going to over-age nights where the bouncers had a ridiculously lenient door policy.

This meant having to ask your older sibling/cousin/neighbour/person who used to go on your bus in primary school, for a lend of their appropriately aged ID. The worst part was that you actually thought you were a criminal mastermind fooling these bouncers into letting you in.

There was always that one person who couldn’t get in because they had tried to use a 25 year olds old passport, which ensured lots of drama, crying, and trying to sneak out to give them a lend of “your” ID.

Don’t think Sinead’s ID is going to work for you lad

Omgggg lah cn u beeleave hw embrssing sum people usd ta be?!?!?!?!?

Still though, you might read a similar article to this in five years time, talking about how embarrassing “Snapchat” and “selfies” used to be. Be warned.