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.