I JOINED one of those new-fangled inter-Web message boards last year. I thought I’d pop in there for 40 minutes a day, like a local cafe, to keep my chat muscles active. I thought it would be a cheery wheeze.
Readers, my autumn-quarter phone bill was pound;536.36. And, last week, I threatened to kill someone who posts under the name my_arse_your_face.
At first we were all strangers to each other. It was like a Viennese masked ball, where, from behind our ridiculous pseudonyms, we could show off all our best gags and flirt like tarts on a bet. Hands_so_low, who was very funny, was the board’s heart-throb, and we all thought that dobby_bavro was a dull idiot.
We passed the days conjecturing on whether one could fit a hamster up one’s anus and, if so, whether the hamster would be better off with or without a hamster companion. It was the springtime of our cyberlife.
Then a party was proposed so everyone could meet. I thought this was a catastrophically bad idea, mainly because I’d spent the last six months pretending to be a six-foot-tall depressive evil overlord called earl_doomio and I didn’t want my gravid varicose veins to blow the mystique. I was the only one who didn’t go.
The next day, our online treehouse was turned on its head. Hands_so_low, it turned out, wasn’t the totty everyone had been expecting - he was 50, bald, and danced like a squid on a hotplate. Dobby_bavro, however, turned out to be a really fit bird. Thus dobby_bavro’s statement “Whoargh! I fancy Angel off Buffy” was answered by 15 prospective shags. Meanwhile, hands_so_low, got called “grandad” six times before lunch and stopped posting. The board became very dull and I haven’t been back since.
So, if you must meet someone you met in the cyber-well, wear a bag on your head. Type everything you have to say into two Palm Pilots and swap them. And every so often fall on to the floor shouting “error 404 URL not found on this server” because, it seems, that’s where the magic is.
