Oh, how the youth love to be trendy, but some of us eschew fashion and stick with what works.  When I was lambasted as a dinosaur because I still use the same AOL email address I locked up back in 1993, I refused to budge.

Call me an anachronism.  An old man.  A dinosaur.  If you’re looking for a Dude, you’re in the wrong place.  I don’t hold it against anyone that they are obsessed with the superficial accouterments of coolness and geekdom.  Well, maybe I sneer at them a little and think they smell like elderberries, but they’re allowed.  Just not me.

I prefer to think of myself as a rebel.  Someone who refuses to be a slave to trends, to each new shiny thing that comes along.  I have a great email address, even if it’s got a suffix for a service upon which the sun has set.  If you think a different URL would make me a better lawyer, then I would pay attention.  But to make me look trendier?  Forget it.

I’m sticking with my stinky, old AOL email address.  If that puts you off, then don’t email me.  I can live with that.

That was written about two years ago, following this snarky advice about the flavor of the minute:

Esquire’s Rule #1033. If your lawyer’s email address ends in hotmail.com, gmail.com or yahoo.com (or aol.com), find a new lawyer.

Yesterday,  Venkat Balasubramani sent me a gift in this post at  Politico by Ben Smith.

There’s long been a certain stigma attached to an AOL.com email account, and those of us obsessed with keeping up with the times have cycled through Hotmail, Earthlink, Yahoo!, and any number of corporate domains before ending with the current standard of email modernity, the Gmail account.

But despite Google’s best efforts to stigmatize those unfashionable old domains, I’ve started to notice a certain prestige attached to the AOL.com survivors. Now that my mother has switched to Gmail, virtually the only people I email at AOL accounts are bigshots — people who were already so important by the time the various new fads (and technical advantages) arrived that they couldn’t be bothered to switch, and had nothing to prove to anyone.

You want to wear bell-bottoms or skinny jeans, knock yourself out.  You need an iPad or iPhone, have a blast. It’s not that I’m anybody’s bigshot, but that I have nothing to prove to anyone.

While it may be cool again to have a retro email address like AOL, you hipsters won’t be able to do it.  All the really good email addresses are long gone, and now the best you can get is bunch of numbers tagged on the end, the mark of the n00b, the stigma of latecomer trying too hard to be cool.  

It doesn’t matter that you’re on the cutting edge of every new meme that’s floated through Funnyjunk or have your own Youtube channel.  Social media wannabes collect followers of equal irrelevance, only to compensate for the fact that they weren’t around when this began and know in their hearts that the most they can be are social media climbers.  But those of us who carry our AOL email address around for almost a generation laugh at you. Ha!

So now the worm has turned and the old AOL email is the new cool.  If it makes you feel better, no doubt the worm will turn again, because that’s how cool works, constantly changing to some new thing every few minutes.  When that happens, I’ll be a dinosaur again, out of touch and totally unhip.

But you know what else will be uncool?  The cutting edge wannabe buying every new iToy that comes along so show to the world how cool they are.  So get whatever email address will float your boat. I’m sticking with my old AOL address, and couldn’t care less what you think of me for it.  For the moment, however, I am cool.  And it will pass.