The Annoying Persistence of Memory

I`ve got a problem of sorts. A couple years ago, I was reading alt.folklore.computers and someone clueless (some sort of sociologist) posted a survey to the newsgroup essentially asking everybody who read it to do a complete brain-dump of every single bit of computer folklore they`d ever heard.

This seemed to me to be a totally annoying and presumptuous thing to do - as if they had a perfect right to expect the Net to do their homework for them.

So I took their survey, replaced every occurrence of the word `computer' with `penis', and reposted it as a followup. Some of their questions, which I am not making up, were the following:

Do you know of any ways in which people believe a computer will affect the birth of a child?
Have you heard anyone offer special advice about how to make an inoperative computer work (e.g., talk nicely to it, hit it, get the tech support guru to walk into the room, place a phone call to tech support, etc.)?
Do you know stories about anyone with a specific occupation that is associated with a computer (e.g., gambler, banker, prostitute)?

(Yes! Prostitute! It actually said that in the original survey! That may have been what gave me the idea to do the substitution.)

Someone has apparently snagged the modified version of the survey and put it up on the net somewhere, in some gopher server or other. I occasionally get mail (for some reason, it always comes from AOLers) asking me smarmy questions about it.

One guy said it was hilarious; I asked him where he found it; his entire response was ``on a gopher''. I asked him ``What gopher? Where?'' He was silent.

Now, there is a thing called the ``Bears Code'' (I think); it's used by gay men on the newsgroup soc.motss to covertly describe what they look like and what their sexual preferences are. It looks like this, from a random posting snagged off that group:

Eric W. Andersson  (aka FriskyBear)
andersso@nevada.edu    B3 t+ w+ dc g++ k+ s+ r+ m e p l

There is also a parody/homage to the Bears Code called the Geeks Code, which is used by self-described computer geeks to describe their eating habits and preferred computing environments.

Why is this important? You see, at the end of my article I`d included the following cryptic string:

-a +X -x -e -m -S -F"> "

I don't know what this translates to in either the Bears code or the Geeks code - because this string is neither.

That string is my preferred set of command-line options for the trn newsreader. Seriously! It's totally unrelated to the Bears Code, it's totally unrelated to the Geeks Code (which wasn't even invented at the time); my only explanation is that I must have seen people's Bears code strings on alt.censorship and decided to put my own random cryptic string into my postings.

But people think it's a Bears Code string, and coupled with the... ahem... particular fixation that I put on the survey questions, my AOL correspondents seem to think they know something about me that simply isn't true.

So let this be a warning to you. If you put something up on the Net and it happens to be memorable in any way to anyone, you're going to have to live with it the rest of your life.

Daniel F. Boyd / boyd@csgeeks.org

Last modified: Thu Mar 30 15:47:25 1995