1. A friend calls and says, "How are you? Your phones have been busy.... for a year!!!!

2. You forgot how to work the TV remote control.

3. You see something funny and scream, "LOL, LOL."

4. You meet the mailman at the curb and swear he said YOU'VE GOT MAIL.

5. You sign off and your screen says you were on for 3 days and 45 minutes.

6. You fall asleep, but instead of dreams you get IMs.

7. You buy a laptop and a cell phone so you can  have AOL in your car.

8. Tech support calls YOU for help.

9. You beg your friends to get an account so you can "hang out."

10. You get a second phone line just to call out for pizza.

11. You purchase a vanity car license plate with your screen name on it.

12. You say "he he he he" or "heh heh heh" instead of laughing.

13. You say "SCROLL UP" when someone asks what it was you said.

14. You sneak away to your computer when everyone goes to sleep.

15. You talk on the phone with the same person you are sending an instant message to.

16. You look at an annoying person off line and wish that you had your ignore button handy.

17. You start to experience "withdrawal" after not being online for a while.

18. "Where did the time go?"

19. You sit on AOL for 6 hours for that certain special person to sign on.

20. You get up in the morning and go online before getting your coffee.

21. .....You end your sentences with.....three or more periods.......

22. You've gone to an unstaffed AOL room to give tech support.

23. You think faster than the computer.

24. You enter a room and get greeted by 25 people with {{{hugs}}} and **kisses**.

25. Being called a newbie is a major insult to you.

26. You're on the phone and say BRB.

27. Your teacher or boss recommends a drug test for the blood shot eyes.

Bill Gates dies and heads up to the pearly gates (no relation).  Saint Peter meets him there and says, "Well, you've led an...  interesting life, Bill.  To be perfectly honest, we're not quite sure which place to send you.  So we're going to let you decide."

Gates swallows nervously and says, "okay".  St.  Peter snaps his fingers and they are instantly transported to a sunny beach.  There's beer and rock music and topless women playing volleyball.  Gates says, "Hey, is this heaven?  It's GREAT!" St.  Peter says, "No, this is Hell.  Let me show you what Heaven is like." He snaps his fingers again and they are instantly transported to a serene city park.  There's a soft breeze and birds are chirping and old people are sitting on benches feeding pigeons and playing chess.  Gates says, "Well, this is...  nice.  But, given a choice, I guess I'll take Hell."

St. Peter says, "You got it," and snaps his fingers.  Gates is instantly immersed in molten lava where his skin is flayed off in unspeakable agony. All around him he can hear demonic laughter and the screams of the damned. He looks up and shouts, "Hey, it wasn't like this!  Where's the beach? Where're the babes?"

Saint Peter looks down from his Macintosh and says, "Sorry, Bill.  That was the demo."

So you think you know what most computer acronyms really mean? Think again.

CD-ROM
Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months

IBM
I Blame Microsoft, I Bought Macintosh

PCMCIA
People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

ISDN
It Still Does Nothing

APPLE
Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity

DEC
Do Expect Cuts

CA
Constant Acquisitions

OS/2
Obsolete Soon Too,

SCSI
System Can't See It

DOS
Defunct Operating System

BASIC
Bill's Attempt to Seize Industry Control

WWW
World Wide Wait

A helicopter was flying towards Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of its navigation and communications equipment.  Due to the extreme haze that day, the pilot now had no way of determining the course to the airport.  All he could make out was a tall building nearby, so he moved closer to it, quickly wrote out a large sign reading "Where am I ?" and held it in the chopper's window.

Responding quickly, the people in the building penned a large sign of their own.  It read: "You are in a helicopter."  The pilot smiled and within minutes landed safely at the airport.  His co-pilot asked how the sign helped him determine their position.

"I knew it had to be the Microsoft building,' the pilot replied, "because, like any computer company's help staff, they gave me a technically correct but  completely useless answer."

If you see a message on the boards with a subject line of  "Badtimes," delete it immediately WITHOUT reading it.  This is the most dangerous virus yet.

It will re-write your hard drive.

Not only that, but it will scramble any disks that are even close to your computer (20' range at 72 Fahrenheit).

It will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream melts and milk curdles .

It will demagnetize the strips on all your credit cards, reprogram your ATM access code, screw up the tracking on your VCR and use subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs you try to play.

It will give your ex-boy/girlfriend your new phone number.

It will program your phone autodial to call only your mother's number.

It will mix antifreeze into your fish tank.

It will drink all your beer and leave its dirty socks on the coffee table when there's company coming over.

It will hide your car keys when you are late for work and interfere with your car radio so that you hear 1940's hits and static while stuck in traffic.

"Badtimes" will make you fall in love with someone who is like your Ex.

It will give you nightmares about circus midgets.

It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine, all while dating your current boy/girlfriend behind your back and billing their hotel rendezvous to your Visa card.

It will seduce your grandmother.  It does not matter if she is dead, such is the power of "Badtimes".  It reaches out beyond the grave to sully those things we hold most dear.

It will rewrite your back-up files, changing all your active verbs to passive tense and incorporating undetectable misspellings which grossly change the interpretation of key sentences.

"Badtimes" will give you Dutch Elm disease.

It will leave the toilet seat up and leave the hairdryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub.

It will wantonly remove the forbidden tags from your mattresses and pillows, and refill your skim milk with whole.

It is insidious and subtle.

It is dangerous and terrifying to behold.

It is also a rather  interesting shade of mauve.

These are just a few signs.  Be very, very afraid! PLEASE FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!!

6. As soon as you have one, a better one is just around the corner.

5. No one but the creator understands the internal logic.

4. Even your smallest mistakes are immediately committed to memory for future reference.

3. The native language used to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.

2. The message "Bad Command or File Name" is about as informative as "If you don't know why I'm mad at you, then I'm certainly not going to tell you".

AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON COMPUTERS ARE FEMALE:

1. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half of your paycheque on accessories for it.

God in his infinite wisdom decided that the human experiment on earth was totally out of control. He called the 3 most powerful people in the world together and told them he was going to destroy the earth in three days, and to please advise their people.

President Clinton called his cabinet together and told them: God is going to destroy the world in three days. Get your affairs in order and make your peace... no one will be spared.

The Pope returned to the Vatican and spoke to the people from the balcony advising them to make peace with God, for the world would be destroyed in three days.

Bill Gates called  his board of directors together and told them I have good news and better news. The good news is God considers me one of the three most powerful men in the world. The better news is we don't have to fix Windows 95.

Desperately seeking technical support. I'm currently running the latest version of Girlfriend and having some problems. I've been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 all along as my primary application, and all the Girlfriend releases have always conflicted with it.

I hear that DrinkingBuddies won't crash if you run Girlfriend in background mode with the sound switched off. But I'm embarrassed to say that I can't find the switch to turn it off. I just run them separately, and it works OK.

Girlfriend also seems to have a problem coexisting with my Golf program, often trying to abort my Golf program with some sort of timing  incompatibility.

I probably should have stayed with Girlfriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance with Girlfriend 2.0  After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with Girlfriend 2.0 He said that I probably didn't have enough cache to run Girlfriend 2.0 and that eventually it would require a Token Ring to run properly. He was right - as soon as I purged  my cache, it uninstalled itself.

Shortly after that, I installed Girlfriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it it gave me a virus. I had to clean out my whole system and shut down for a while.

I very cautiously upgraded to Girlfriend 4.0. This time I used an SCSI probe first and also installed Virus protection. It worked OK for a while until I discovered Girlfriend 1.0 was still in my system!   I tried to run Girlfriend 1.0 again with Girlfriend 4.0 still installed, but Girlfriend 4.0 has a feature that I didn't know about that automatically senses the presence of Girlfriend 1.0 and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions!  The version I have now works pretty well, but there are still some problems. Like all versions of Girlfriend, it is written in some obscure language that I can't understand, much less re-program.

Frankly, I think that there is too much attention paid to the look and feel and not enough to the desired functionality.

Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you usually have to use gold plated contacts. And I've never liked how Girlfriend is totally 'object-oriented'.   A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of Girlfriend to  GirlfriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of Girlfriend.

He discovered that GirlfriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to Fiancee 1.0. So he did. But soon after that, you have to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he describes as a 'huge resource hog'. It has taken up all his space, so he can't load anything else. One of the primary reasons that he upgraded to Wife is that it came bundled  with  FreeSexPlus 1.0.

Well, it turns out that the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, particularly the new Plug and Play items he wanted to try.  On top of that, Wife1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything. And, although he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw 1.0 which has an automatic pop-up feature that he can't turn off.

I told him to install Mistress 1.0, but he said that he heard that if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife, that Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.0 won't install anyway due to insufficient resources.

Anybody out there able to offer technical advice.......?

A great new software announcement!!! This memo is to announce the development of a new software system. We are currently building a data centre that will contain all firm data that is Year 2000 compliant. The program is referred to as the "Millennia Year Application Software System" (MYASS).

Next Monday at 9:00 there will be a meeting in which I will show MYASS to everyone. We will continue to hold demonstrations throughout the month so that all employees will have an opportunity to get a good look at MYASS.

As for the status of the implementation of the program, I have not addressed the networking aspects so currently only one person at a time can use MYASS. This restriction will be removed after MYASS expands.

Several people are using the program already and have come to depend on it. Just this morning I walked into a subordinate's office and was not surprised to find that he had his nose buried in MYASS. I've noticed that some of the less technical personnel are somewhat afraid of MYASS. Just last week, when asked to enter some information into the program, I had a secretary say to me "I'm a little nervous, I've never put anything in MYASS before." I volunteered to help her through her first time and when we were through she admitted that it was relatively painless and she was actually looking forward to doing it again. She went so far as to say that after using SAP and Oracle, she was ready to kiss MYASS.

I know there are concerns over the virus that was found in MYASS upon initial installation, but I am pleased to say the virus has been eliminated and we were able to save MYASS. In the future, however, protection will be required prior to entering MYASS.

We planned this database to encompass all information associated with the business. So as you begin using the program, feel free to put anything you want into MYASS. As MYASS grows larger, we envision a time when it will be commonplace to walk by an office and see a manager hand a paper to an employee and say "Here, stick this in MYASS."

This program has already demonstrated great benefit to the company during recent OSHA and EPA audits. After requesting certain historical data the agency representatives were amazed at how quickly we provided the information. When asked how the numbers could be retrieved so rapidly our Environmental Manager proudly stated "Simple, I just pulled them out of MYASS."

1. Every intelligent man must have one.

2. They cost a lot.

3. They do a lot.

4. Most of them are very expensive.

5. They can cause you to have migraines.