EPISODE 41

Weeks and weeks passed and while I’d gotten pretty good at navigating my way around the Web, I still didn’t quite share Bosco’s fascination.  That didn’t mean that I wasn’t able to find some fun places to play.  CNN had a great news site that featured an area called Time Pathfinder.  Inside that part of the site, you could find all manner of Bulletin Boards that dealt with subjects that paralleled the news coverage that CNN offered.  My favorite was the political forum.  There, I met a very entertaining cast of characters who posted their various opinions on the issues of the day.  They were like me in one very important way too.  They were political junkies and they filled hundreds of pages on the site, speculating on the candidates and issues that would shape the upcoming GOP primaries and the General Election. 

And what a cast they were!  There was PatriotMan, a self-described former CIA agent.  His adherence to every conspiracy theory was legendary.  Hambone was a homophobic gentleman who would rail against the injustices of equal rights for anyone who refused to use the missionary position while making love…with the lights off.  Snowpea was his polar opposite, a very bright man who countered Hambone’s posts with his own reasoned arguments why gay and lesbian couples should be left alone to discover the joy and despair of love, unfettered by anyone else’s prejudice.  There was a very amusing fellow who took as his handle the name of the Guy Montag, the fireman from Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451.  Guy was a prophet of the 2^nd Amendment.  He was also a hawk on anything related to foreign policy and the military and one of the wittiest posters on the site.  His ability to turn a phrase made him friends on both the left and the right.   Another was a guy who went by the name of the nation’s first president.  GW, as he was also known, was a rare bird: a moderate Republican.  He had a very inclusive view of the world and he started a thread on the board called the Republican Rumpus Room.  Initially, I avoided it, figuring it was a hangout for rabid haters of President Bill Clinton, who I supported at the time.  Nothing could have been further from the truth though.  The Rumpus Room thread carried the following as its initial post:

The Rumpus Room is our online restaurant and bar, where all are welcome to this PFZ (Politics-Free Zone.) We may have our differences out there, but in here. . . we're all friendly. The bartender is Ramundo (an undergraduate student at Western Washington University and a great listener!).  We have also hired a serving wench named Nicole, who wears a sawed off t-shirt and some Daisy Dukes. We've completely restored the Bob Dornan Whine Cellar and for you cigar aficionados, we've added the Wayne Hayes Memorial Humidor for the storage of your favorite stogies. There is a new pool out back, with a patio full of deck chairs around it. You also might enjoy a stroll in the garden out back where the backyard smoker is always available to cure your favorite meats, fish, and poultry. Sit a spell, eat, drink and be merry. The kitchen is open 24/7and there is a great espresso machine for those who are interested...

Welcome all.... But be warned -- in here, the inmates are clearly in control!

You had to love a Republican who could poke fun at “B-1” BobDornan.  I became a fan of his “work” back in the 1980s, when Dornan, who was an extremely conservative US Rep. from Orange County, California, would take the podium during the “Special Orders” portion of the day on the House floor.  This was when the entire chamber would be empty, but the members were allowed to speak at length on any damn thing that came to their minds.  Dornan’s rambling talks could be extremely entertaining and I often made a point to try to be home, near a TV at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon to see if he was on C-SPAN.  If so, the workday was officially done as I would crack a beer and enjoy the show!  My favorite “B-1 Bob Moment” came in late ’95 when Dornan spoke to a meeting of Pat Robertson’s Conservative Coalition of America on the subject of mandatory term limits.

I recall him saying, “I can talk the talk and I walk the walk.  I’ve spent 17 years in Congress fighting for term limits!”

The crowd had roared their approval, unaware apparently of the wonderful irony contained in their hero’s words.

But the fact that GW, an ardent member of the GOP was so comfortable in his own skin that he could gently poke fun at the leaders in his own party was part of what made the Time On Line site so cool.  You could take on a persona (as I believe PatriotMan had), or you could just be yourself, like Guy Montag or GW.  I ended up visiting Guy, whose real name was Javier and we shared dinner and beers together many times where he lived in Northampton, Massachusetts.  He turned out to be a very nice person and I owe the World Wide Web a great debt for being the conduit for that friendship.  But in spite of all of that, I still couldn’t grasp what Bosco thought he was trying to do.  Clearly, I lacked what George Herbert Walker Bush once termed, “the vision thing”. 

One Monday, I came into the office and saw that all of our computer screens looked markedly different.  Bosco had hired a consultant to come in over the weekend and he had installed Windows on all of the desktop units.  My SE had been the only machine that could access the Web’s GUI interface.  Now Bosco wanted it for himself, Leah and a new salesman we had just hired the previous week to make the calls for Bosco’s studios.  I was officially out of the business of calling his hair replacement prospects it seemed.  My new job as a Web-head had begun in earnest.

The version of Windows back then, known not-so-affectionately as “Windows 3.X” wasn’t an operating system at all, but rather it was a shell that resided on the original Microsoft Digital Operating System, which Mr. Gates had cleverly named, MS-DOS.  In other words, while it looked like a lot like the Windows systems that we have all come to know, it didn’t really work like that at all.  It was very buggy and it failed quite often, leaving you staring at a blinking DOS prompt, or better yet – the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” that indicated that your entire system had crashed, threatening the integrity of everything that you had been working on.

Bosco however was very pleased.

“So what do you think?” he asked me as he looked over my shoulder.  I had been cruising around the Web, looking for sites that dealt with hair loss and hair replacement at the time. 

“I think it’s an apology from Bill Gates,” I said.

“For what?”

“For not being a Mac.”

“Michael,” Bosco said while shaking his head and smiling wearily, “You are the most eminently fire-able person I have ever met.”

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on June 16th.

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