Addicted to the Net

You might be addicted to the Net if…

  • You actually wore a blue ribbon to protest the Communications Decency Act.
  • You kiss your significant other’s home page.
  • Your bookmarks list takes 15 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 family has 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 spouse drapes a wig over your monitor to remind you of what they look 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.
  • 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 believe nothing looks sexier than a man/woman in underwear illuminated only by a 17″ inch svga monitor.
  • 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 what sex over three of your closest friends are, 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 2 months.
  • Your wife tells you she cut her hair last month.
  • You miss more than five meals a week downloading the latest games from Apogee.
  • You start looking for hot HTML addresses in public restrooms.
  • You wake up at 3 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.
  • Your virtual significant other finds a new net sweetheart with a larger bandwidth.
  • 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 spouse 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 tattoo 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 person you picked up was only a jpeg.
  • You put a pillow case over your laptop so your lover doesn’t see it while you are pretending to catch your breath.
  • 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 200 hours per month “unlimited.”
  • You turn on your computer and turn off your spouse.
  • 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.
  • As your car crashes through the guardrail on a mountain road, your first instinct is to search for the “back” button.