God bless Texas Instruments, the creator of the greatest of all academic aids, the TI-82.

Honestly, where would we be without our TI-82s and 85s, with their big screens and graphs and other do-hickeys? Think about it — our calculators had profound effects on our academic careers. They taught us more than any teacher or stupid book could ever teach us.

Who would have survived math class in high school without playing such electrifying calculator games as Snake, Tetris and Drug War. ("Yes, I would like to buy a bigger trenchcoat to hold more drugs!")

A lot of people say teenagers and college students do drugs because of some social-cultural connection between drug use and acceptance by one's peers, but I think its because we played Drug War and dealt cocaine and ludes until we got millions of dollars. Who didn't want to deal drugs after playing Drug War?

The kids at my middle school had a Drug War contest, and the winner had something like 10 million dollars. Lesson learned by 13-year-old kids: The drug trade is very lucrative. It was like a role model like Michael Jordan doing a "Just say YES to drugs!" commercial.

The best part about the calculator games was that you actually looked like you were doing classwork. "I swear I'm doing the assignment, not learning the drug trade with a calculator game."

And who ever could remember all those darn physics equations during senior year? I sure as hell couldn't. So I popped those formulas into my calculator in cleverly disguised programs called "Chap 1 Notes" and went to town. Some people had whole chapter summaries in their calculators — it was insane.

I remember when I got my first TI-82 in eighth grade. Mrs. Schenk, who liked to shower the first row of desks with spit, said that we all should get one, and we all did. I opened the package, and then Mrs. Schenk spit on my new calculator. I wiped it off really fast and stroked the calculator like it was my first born son.

Every time somebody dropped a TI-82 on the ground during class, some smartass, usually myself, would say "that sounded expensive!"

And occasionally calculators would get stolen, and it would be a big scandal. This fat weasel kid that looked like Newman from "Seinfeld" in my high school stole about 20 calculators, and then he tried to sell them to the same people he stole them from, and he got expelled — calculators were sacred.

We worshipped the calculator. It was never wrong. We said, "why learn how to do this problem? We'll always have our TI-82s." And the teachers never had a good answer for that, because they knew they couldn't compete with the TI-82.

We got lazy. We put really easy problems like "40 x 3" into the calculator just to make ourselves feel better, like we couldn't ever go wrong without it. It was like a second brain.

Now we're in college and we don't really use our TI-82s anymore. We have learned that professors test us on what we actually know, not just what we could put into our little wonderful electronic friends.

The calculator used to be a way of life, but now it's just a nice thing to have around for solving finance problems and doing addition. It's a shame, but all things must come to an end someday, and eventually, we all will actually have to learn something, instead of relying on the TI-82.

So, for memories sake, I say everyone should give their TI-whatever a hug today, and remember all the jams it got you out of, how it was there when you stressed out at the SATs, and how you know not to overpay for heroin because of Drug War.

The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

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