QQQ Archives » Extras » Net Addict From the Q Files, a subsidiary of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

        YOU KNOW YOU ARE ADDICTED TO THE INTERNET WHEN:

  * You kiss your girlfriend's home page.
  * Your bookmark takes 15 minutes to scroll from top to bottom.
  * Your eyeglasses have a web site burned in on them.
  * You find yourself brainstorming for new subjects to search.
  * You refuse to go to a vacation spot with no electricity and no phone
lines.
  * You finally do take that vacation, but only after buying a cellular
modem and a laptop.
  * You spend half of the plane trip with your laptop on your lap...and your
child in the overhead compartment.
  * All your daydreaming is preoccupied with getting a faster connection to
the net: 33.6...ISDN...cable modem...T1...T3.
  * And even your night dreams are in HTML.
  * You find yourself typing "com" after every period when using a word
processor.com
  * Your heart races faster and beats irregularly each time you see a new
WWW site address in print or on TV, even though you've never had heart
problems before.
  * You turn on your intercom when leaving the room so you can hear if new
e-mail arrives.
  * Your wife drapes a blond wig over your monitor to remind you of what she
looks like.
  * All of your friends have an @ in their names.
  * When looking at a page full of someone else's links, you notice all of
them are already highlighted in purple.
  * Your dog has its own home page.
  * You can't call your mother...she doesn't have a modem.
  * You check your mail. It says "no new messages." So you check it again.
  * You refer to your age as 3.x.
  * Your wife says communication is important in a marriage...so you buy
another computer and install a second phone line so the two of you can chat.
  * As your car crashes through the guardrail on a mountain road, your first
instinct is to search for the "back" or undo button.





These days it's quite common for messages on social-oriented bulletin boards
to end with signoffs like "Hi and hugs to everybody." In fact, this has
become so popular that as much as 7.5% of the disk space on some BBS's is
currently devoted to this particular comment. The International Committee
for Relatively Pointless Abbreviations and Badly Misspelled Acronyms (SPUDS)
has just released a new, internationally approved list of abbreviated
signoffs. These include:

ooo              hugs

xxx              kisses

OOO              big hugs

XXX              big kisses

oo               hugs for everybody but you

OO!              big, excited hugs

CCC              hugs for people you can't quite reach around

OOQ              hugging with tongue

xx@              kisses and earlobe nibbling

zzz              snoring

yyy              anything that occurs between kissing and snoring

H                handshake

kkk              alternate form of "handshakes for all"

KKK              white robes for all

AAA              talk-show not-really kissing

[X]              kissing in the closet

XYZZY            a kiss that moves you

MMM              same as WWW, but from inversion boots

LLL              armwrestles for all

OOO~~~           big hugs and large caterpillars for all

)))              smiles for all

TTT              trees for all

jjj              gooses for all

JJJ              big gooses for all

OOOXXXYYYZZZ     this is illegal before marriage in nine states

OOOXXXyZZZZZ     still illegal, but generally not nearly as well received

Remember, there is much more work to be done to codify and abbreviate
excessively clear and understandable sign-off messages and replace them with
efficient and incomprehensible international symbols. Please contribute
money, suggestions, and chocolate to this worthy cause, and help make
conversation boards a better place for assembly-language programmers.