The view from my office... - Freethinkers Anonymous

July 19, 1996

Well, folks, the view from my office this week was going to be Screen Savers, or Don’t Leave Your Computer Unattended When Chris Is Around, but yesterday there was an emergency in the building. A construction worker spit in one of the smoke alarms, and suddenly sirens were sounding, the fire lights were flashing, and a pre-recorded message was crackling over intercoms I never knew my office had. "Attention! An emergency has been reported in the building! Please walk to the nearest stairway exit!" Naturally everybody ran to their offices to grab their valuables and anything else they could carry. "Do not take the elevators," droned the voice as everybody came out carrying post-it notes, coffee mugs, keychains, and Walkman stereos and headed straight for the elevators. Thinking that this was one of the few times when following instructions would actually be a good idea, I actually took the stairs. Naturally I got caught, one flight down, behind two suited gentlemen who blocked the stairway like cholesterol blocks an artery. Today was the first day they were wearing their new wingtips, and they were having trouble with the laces. Although ninety nine times out of a hundred these alarms turn out to be false, I was in no mood to tempt fate, and was about to fix their shoelace problem with my penknife when the pressure from behind–the five or six other people who decided to take the stairs–got the human clot moving again. Finally I made it out of the building and pushed my way through a crowd gathered two feet outside the door. "I wonder if it’s a bomb," someone muttered. I decided to get farther away from the building–if someone really were going to blow up the hair salon or the Japanese restaurant I didn’t want to be among the spectators scattered across the county. I’ve never understood why people stay right by the building when there’s possibly a fire or a bomb threat–no one should be that dedicated to their job. The last time there was an alarm in the building, I was somewhere else eating lunch. When I came back, a group of about thirty people was standing on the sidewalk staring straight up. No one said anything, and for all I knew, someone was dangling something out of their office window and drawing a crowd. I went back to my office and worked for about half an hour, when my fellow employees came back. They gathered around my office. "Where were you, Chris?" I said, "The safest place I could possibly be."

Enjoy this week’s humor from the internet..

YOU KNOW YOU ARE ADDICTED TO THE INTERNET WHEN…

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 start introducing yourself as "Jon at I-I-Net dot com"
All of your friends have an @ in their name.
You can’t call your mother….. she doesn’t have a modem.
Your phone bill comes to your doorstep in a box.
You laugh at people with 2400 baud modems.
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 clicked on the above link to see where it led to.
You start tilting your head sideways to smile. 🙂
Your spouse 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.
You begin to wonder how on earth your service provider is allowed to call 200 hours per month "unlimited."