[geeks] I am a truly sad individual <theoretically humorous, but true>

[Chris Byrne]

Earlier today, I relized that my primary non-work social interaction (apart
of course from my wife), are email, and instant messaging.

I have plenty of friends, I just never physically see them any more. We
communicate via email and instant messaging. I've even stopped posting to
most of my other mailing lists.

I'm trying to decide now if this a moderately pathetic, or totally pathetic.
I'm not quite sure at this point.

Even worse, the only reason I started asking this of myself because I've
been stuck on dialup for two days (thank you frikken PacBell) and in
addition to the near physical pain it has caused, I relized just how much
email traffic I get (about 1k to 1.5k non-spam messages a day), and how
disconnected I am without it (totally).

Once again, moderately or totally pathetic ;-)

This of course made me think back even further to the point where I dropped
compuserve for 'real' net access in college.

Since 1993

The longest I have gone without checking my email is five days

The longest I have gone without sleep is also five days

The longest I have gone without food is six days (being homeless and broke
for two months really sucks)

The longest I have gone without internet access of any kind is about a week,
maybe ten days

The longest I have gone without a home/place to stay (unless my car counts)
is eight weeks

The longest I have gone without a car is six months

The longest I have gone without sex is two years (This was by choice. I had
a girlfriend kill herself and blame me. That kind of put me off
relationships for a while. The longest I've gone involuntarily since 1991 is
maybe three months)

Clearly e-mail and the internet are more important to me than food, sleep, a
home, a car, or sex.

Of course I take solace in the fact that I didn't check my email every few
minutes on my honeymoon, but that was probably only because I never had one
;-)

Chris Byrne