kartooner

Remem­ber the laser pointer craze of the late-90s?

At first, only a few indi­vid­u­als owned a laser pointer and these were usu­ally edu­ca­tors or busi­ness folk uti­liz­ing them for their intended pur­pose; as a tool to aide in pre­sen­ta­tions. Before the laser pointer, a busi­ness per­son or edu­ca­tor would have to extend a long rod towards the pre­sen­ta­tion and depend­ing on the medium, whether it be Pow­er­point or “old school” trans­paren­cies, you either resem­bled a school marm wag­ging her ruler at her fright­ened stu­dents or a Jedi knight in train­ing. Truth be told, noth­ing was as effec­tive as the laser pointer, a small pen-sized device that emit­ted a laser at a reach between 50 feet to 20 yards, depend­ing on the qual­ity of the pointer itself.

It didn’t long for the long-haired hip­pies, rebels with­out clauses and the aver­age joe to turn a laser pointer into a device for evil. Shortly after the laser point­ers were intro­duced to the mar­ket at afford­able, consumer-friendly prices every­one and their dog had to have one and I’m sure at one point they weren’t sure why, that it just seemed like a cool thing to use and even­tu­ally it turned into a fad. “Oh, you own a laser pointer? Big deal, I have one here on my key chain and it reaches 50 yards.”

Towards the begin­ning of this craze I’ve seen peo­ple casu­ally pump­ing gas into their vehi­cles, hum­ming to them­selves a John Den­ver song, when all of a sud­den a red dot appears near their upper torso, skid­dishly mak­ing its way towards their fore­head. In this case, the gas pump­ing civil­ian rips the noz­zle from their tank and fever­ishly jumps into their vehi­cle speed­ing away, scared out of their mind. Mean­while, 30 or 40 feet away, a kid on his skate­board snick­ers to him­self and waits for another unsus­pect­ing vic­tim to test his laser pointer on.

I’d have to say the most annoy­ing aspect of this was when these laser point­ers made their way into movie the­aters. There you’d be, immersed in the film when sud­denly a red, blue, green and some­times pur­ple dot would appear near Tom Hanks nos­tril, flick­er­ing away and then dis­ap­pear, only to reap­pear moments later. The per­son with the pointer was usu­ally in the back and some­times you could make them out amongst the rest of the crowd. Other times, how­ever, they would blend in with the rest of the audi­ence, bust­ing a gut as they moved the dot in cir­cu­lar motions on the screen.

I could pre­tend that we didn’t own a laser pointer, but that just wouldn’t be the truth. Of course my brother and I jumped on that band­wagon and for a short period of time we enjoyed “spook­ing” the day­lights out of peo­ple. For exam­ple, we man­aged to annoy the neighbor’s boyfriend to the point where he skate­boarded his way to our house and madly tapped on the side win­dow hop­ing we would show our faces to set­tle the issue. As he tapped, we were rolling on the floor in laugh­ter, our stom­achs hurt­ing from the pain of giddiness.

Today, laser pointer tech­nol­ogy has advanced enough where you could prob­a­bly point a laser at the moon or at the very least imag­ine it’s reach­ing that dis­tance. The pointer craze has sub­sided, replaced by other things to occupy and enter­tain us, but I’ll always remem­ber when the laser point­ers were at their peak, when the pub­lic uti­lized them for wicked pur­poses and when some­thing as sim­ple as a laser on a stick kept us enter­tained know­ing we could spook or annoy some­one with the flick of a switch.