Questions That Keep You Awake All Night
Question: Where do the characters go when I use
my backspace key or delete them on my PC?
Answer: The characters go to different places,
depending on whom you ask:
The Religious Right's explanation: 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 also in PC hell.
Stephen King's explanation: Every time you
hit the Delete 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, Michigan, where they're
made into Pop-Tart filling. This explains why Pop-Tarts are so
flammable, while cheap imitations are not. 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 been DELETING them??? Can't you hear
them SCREAMING??? Why don't you go CLUB some BABY SEALS while
wearing a MINK, you PIG!!!!
This investigative expose of a secret that computer professionals
have been keeping hidden from you was by Joel Garreau, as
reported in his Cybersurfing column in the Washington Post.
Thomas R. Fasulo, Editor
I HATE COMPUTERS Newsletter
http://extlab1.entnem.ufl.edu/IH8PCs/