> This account of the events is given from my own
> point of view, because that's (obviously) how I
> saw them. If others have crucial differences
> in the way they saw these, please let me know.

Well, I suppose I don't have crucial differences, but I do have some.

I was in the chat room but had left the room for a moment, and when I came back everyone was speaking really bad French. It was kind of fun, and since I know almost know French but my mom knows some, I decided to play along, asking her for advice ("If 'okay' were a word in French, how would you spell it?"). Eventually Petit_Sam* and LeDave, who I figured started it, left and came back in English. That was over, although I remember thinking that if he archived it he would have a devil of a time trying to translate the Franglais accurately. Sam and Dave came back speaking in some sort of computer language, which was probably C++ because Dave started out referring to himself as Dave++. A lot of other people also apparently knew C++ and started playing along, whereas I just did a few lines of HTML-type talking.

And that's when the trouble started. BEER11487 or whatever the number was came in, closely followed by BUTT87429. Very soon they were being crude, irritating, and persistent: they got kicked repeatedly, mostly by Dave, but they kept coming back. Stephen accused Wormwood and me of being them, I guess because we had been ragging on the two through most of the time, and so I played along, claiming to have been BUTT2000 or whatever his stupid name was. Wormwood didn't play along, so I rebuked him for not confessing when everyone knew what he had done (at the same time I was PMing him, letting him know I was just kidding and also wasn't BUTT12345, and we ended up PMing each other with what we thought about what was going on. Most of what we thought was a mixture of frustration, confusion, and being tired of it). Sam came back, inquired about what had happened, and then said he had done an IP check and we really had been BEER and BUTT. I figured that a) he was kidding when he said this and just going along with some stupid joke Stephen had made (and I wondered if they had both been Stephen), or b) that he really had checked the IP addresses and it was someone who lived near me with the same cable Internet company, choice "a" being the more likely.

Then there was some confusing thing going on with Wes confessing and at the same time not confessing. Although I didn't know whether some of it was a joke, all of it was a joke, or none of it was a joke, it was really getting old and starting to grate on the chat room. Eventually, Sam and Dave confessed. I remember that at one point Dave said "You guys were actually pissed off? YES!" or something to that effect. I told Sam I had lost a bit of respect for him (note: "a bit," not "a great deal") because the whole had been irritating beyond belief to me, and to find out Sam was behind it and had caused all the friction that was going on in the room was angering. He said that if something like that had cause me to lose respect for him that I should leave. I clicked on the "away" link and logged out.

I came back a little while later. I said "sorry" because I had kind of insulted Sam and then left. The people there were talking about leaving or why people had left or something like that, and I said that I had left only because Sam told me to (it's important, at least to me, that you understand that the "sorry" and "I left because Sam said so" comments were not in the same utterance and were said for different reasons). Sam had calmed down, told me that he was writing a forum post about the whole thing, and asked me to respond when he was done. I told him I'd try.


> What is important to realize is that by
> imitating crude, drunken frat boys, neither
> Dave nor I were implicitly *endorsing* such
> behavior. Frankly, both of us ARE quite
> offended by the genuine frat boy stereotype.
> There are few I have LESS respect for than
> people who have no other ambitions in life than
> to drink and "score," nor the sense of class to
> keep from using profanity as punctuation.
> It's, frankly, disgusting.

And it is annoying as anything. I wasn't offended by a perceived endorsement of that type of behavior, I was offended by the fact that the awful behavior was, in fact, a joke, one that I didn't think could have possibly been funny to anyone except Sam and Dave. It was extremely irritating to, I think, everyone in the room (except the perpetrators, of course), and Sam was behind it? It brought my opinion of him down a little.

Please keep in mind that it was rather late and I was tired and not in much of a mood to put up with much. I don't think any less of Sam or Dave now. I don't plan to leave RinkWorks. On the other hand, I don't plan on making the sort of joke Sam and Dave did, because I see pretty much exactly the sort of response it will get.

-eric "Morris" sleator
Fri 8 Dec A.D. 2000

*Well, the underscore wasn't there, but the offensiveness-blocker doesn't like that word. Also, the blocker thing, unlike with the normal "Preview message" thing, doesn't have the thing down at the bottom where you can fix it without having to click on "go back."