[520] in Humor
HUMOR: What happens when you delete...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew A. Bennett)
Fri Nov 4 09:29:26 1994
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 04 Nov 1994 09:26:07 EST
From: "Andrew A. Bennett" <abennett@MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 94 09:35:41 PST
From: Connie_Kleinjans@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
QUESTION: Where do the characters go when I use my backspace or delete them
on my PC?
ANSWER: The characters can go to different places depending on whom you ask:
* The Catholic's approach to characters: The nice characters go to Heaven,
where they are bathed in the light of happiness. The naughty characters are
punished for their sins. Naughty characters are those involved in the
creation of naughty words, such as "breast," "sex" and "contraception."
* The Buddhist explanation: If a character has lived rightly, and its karma is
good, then after it has been deleted it will be reincarnated as a different,
higher character. Those funny characters above the numbers on your keyboard
will become numbers, numbers will become letters, and lower-case letters will
become upper-case.
* The 20th-century bitter cynical nihilist explanation: Who cares? It doesn't
really matter if they're on the page, deleted, undeleted, underlined, etc.
It's all the same.
* The Mac user's explanation: All the characters written on a PC and then
deleted go to straight to PC hell. If you're using a PC, you can probably see
the deleted characters, because you're in PC hell also.
* Stephen King's explanation: Every time you hit the (Del) key you unleash a
tiny monster inside the cursor, who tears the poor unsuspecting characters to
shreds, drinks their blood, then eats them, bones and all. Hah, hah, hah!
* Dave Barry's explanation: The deleted characters are shipped to Battle
Creek, Mich., where they're made into Pop-Tart filling; this explains why
Pop-Tarts are so flammable, while cheap imitations are not flammable. I'm not
making this up.
* IBM's explanation: The characters are not real. They exist only on the
screen when they are needed, as concepts, so to delete them is merely to
de-conceptualize them. Get a life.
* PETA's (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) explanation: You've ben
DELETING them??? Can't you hear them SCREAMING??? Why don't you go CLUB some
BABY SEALS while wearing a MINK, you pig!!!!
- Joel Garreau (garreau@well.com), as reported in his Cybersurfing column
in the Washington Post.
