Lets get on with more of the business: SIGNS OF INTERNET ADDICTION You actually wore a blue ribbon to protest the Communications Decency
Act. You kiss your girlfriend's home page. Your bookmark takes fifteen minutes to scroll from top to bottom. Your eyeglasses have a web site burned in on them. You find yourself brainstorming for new subjects to search. You refuse to go to a vacation spot with no electricity and no phone
lines. You finally do take that vacation, but only after buying a cellular
modem and a laptop. You spend half of the plane trip with your laptop on your lap...and your
child in the overhead compartment. All your daydreaming is preoccupied with getting a faster connection to
the net: 28.8...ISDN...cable modem...T1...T3. And even your night dreams are in HTML. You find yourself typing "com" after every period when using a
word processor.com You turn off your modem and get this awful empty feeling, like you just
pulled the plug on a loved one. You refer to going to the bathroom as downloading. You start introducing yourself as "Jim at I-I-Net dot net dot au
Your heart races faster and beats irregularly each time you see a new
WWW site address in print or on TV, even though you've never had heart
problems before. You step out of your room and realize that your parents have moved and
you don't have a clue when it happened. You turn on your intercom when leaving the room so you can hear if new
e-mail arrives. Your wife drapes a blond wig over your monitor to remind you of what she
looks like. All of your friends have an @ in their names. When looking at a pageful of someone else's links, you notice all of
them are already highlighted in purple. Your dog has its own home page. You've already visited all the links at Yahoo and you're halfway through
Lycos. or [C]ontinue? You can't call your mother...she doesn't have a modem. You realize there is not a sound in the house and you have no idea where
your children are. You check your mail. It says "no new messages." So you check
it again. You refer to your age as 3.x. You have comandeered your teenager's phone line for the net and even his
friends know not to call on his line anymore. Your phone bill comes to your doorstep in a box. Even though you died last week, you've managed to retain OPS on your
favorite IRC channel. You code your homework in HTML and give your instructor the URL. You don't know the sex of three of your closest friends, because they
have neutral nicknames and you never bothered to ask. You name your children Eudora, Mozilla and Dotcom. You laugh at people with 2400 baud modems. Your husband tells you he's had the beard for two months. You miss more than five meals a week downloading the latest games from
Apogee.t, or [C]ontinue? You start looking for hot HTML addresses in public restrooms. You wake up at three a.m. to go to the bathroom and stop and check your
e-mail on the way back to bed. You move into a new house and decide to Netscape before you landscape.
You tell the cab driver you live at
http://123.elm.street/house/bluetrim.html You actually try that 123.elm.street address. You tell the kids they can't use the computer because "Daddy's got
work to do" and you don't even have a job. Your friends no longer send you e-mail...they just log on to your IRC
channel. You buy a Captain Kirk chair with a built-in keyboard and mouse. Your wife makes a new rule: "The computer cannot come to bed."
You are so familiar with the WWW that you find the search engines
useless. You get a tatoo that says "This body best viewed with Netscape 1.1
or higher." You never have to deal with busy signals when calling your ISP...because
you never log off. The last girl you picked up was only a jpeg. You ask a plumber how much it would cost to replace the chair in front
of your computer with a toilet. You forget what year it is. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. You ask your doctor to implant a gig in your brain. You leave the modem speaker on after connecting because you think it
sounds like the ocean wind...the perfect soundtrack for "surfing the
net". You begin to wonder how on earth your service provider is allowed to
call two hundred hours per month "unlimited." You turn on your computer and turn off your wife. Your wife says communication is important in a marriage...so you buy
another computer and install a second phone line so the two of you can
chat. As your car crashes through the guardrail on a mountain road, your first
instinct is to search for the "back" button.