I got this e-mail on Thursday, June 19, 1997:
You are a really perverted person, and need help!!!CRAZY!!! CRAZY!!!
My response follows:
<sarcasm>
Well, I can see you never studied to be a psychiatrist. When dealing with someone who has (or who is believed to have) a mental disorder, it's generally considered counter-productive to tell him he's crazy.
Remember what happened to Homer Simpson? They were doing a spoof of "The Shining," and Homer was playing the part of the hotel caretaker. He'd written something like "No TV and no beer make Homer go crazy" all over the walls, but he'd forgotten the exact words (so have I, come to think of it). He started to quote it to Marge, but stopped at "make Homer go...something something." When Marge suggested "go crazy?" Homer said "Don't mind if I do!" and started making funny faces and "whoop whoop" sounds. Then he began chasing the family around the hotel with an ax.
But of course, you've seen the episode, so I won't bother you with the details. Just bear in mind that telling a pervert that he's crazy is generally not an effective method of psychiatric treatment, and can often result in being sent lengthy e-mail messages that have little if any lasting value.
I also recommend that you not use so many exclamation points. It's a waste of bandwidth, for one thing. If there are 20 million e-mail users in the world, and each one sends two exclamation points a day, that's 14,600,000,000 exclamation points per year. Cutting that in half would save 7.3 gigabytes, which if transferred at an average rate of 28.8Kbps, would save 70.4 hours, or almost three days' worth of bandwidth. But does anyone think of this? No, of course not. It's just another shameful example of mankind's wasteful use of ASCII data. I mean, if everyone used nine exclamation points where one would have sufficed (did you _really_ need to say "CRAZY!!!" at all?), think how much slower the Internet would be. It's almost as bad as spam, and we all know how much of a drag that is, especially when microwaved (man, _that_ was a mess to clean up).
</sarcasm>
So in conclusion (try not to cheer _too_ loudly), let my finish by summarizing at the end of the terminus of this message. I'm a zoophile, which means I'm sexually attracted to animals. I've been this way a lot longer than you've known I existed, and it's too late for me to change. You may or may not think I'm crazy or perverted (heck, maybe you just sent me e-mail because you had nothing better to do on a Thursday afternoon, and never expected a response at all, much less one like this), but if you do, bear in mind I'm very well-adjusted about it, and I accept myself fully as zoo. You'll have to get up a lot earlier in the universe's lifespan to affect my sense of well-being. And I set my alarm clock on weekends, if you can imagine such a thing, so set the dial back and get practicing. :)
visits since 8/9/97
Flames -- Updated Thursday, June 19, 1997 -- E-mail Actaeon