arlene: You know, Doug probably remembers more than I do! But let me see.. our first assignment for Cowell 80 was to get a CATS account. Anyway, running through ideas with Lorelei, Jasmine, and Heather - they didn't like any of my suggestions, so I turned to Doug, Gerald, Kevin, and Paul for help....

DOUG: Okay, my memory seems a bit foggy on this but I remember my role taking place in the lounge with the usual gang of suspects, Kevin, Paul, and Gerald there too. I remember Darlene not knowing what to choose as an account name and I had just recently opened my account (salguod) so I turned her name around and thought it sounded neat. I presented it amid the other suggestions and then proceeded to work on convincing her it was way cooler than those other suggestions. Darlene reluctantly agreed and there you go. I think she was reluctant even after agreeing.

DARLENE: But didn't it take awhile for you to come up with flipping my name backwards? I seem to remember you having to write it down on a napkin.

DOUG: I might have had to work on the pronunciation or to demonstrate it better to you. Oh! I might have done it to show you what it would look like on screen!

DARLENE: Oh, right. I remember being much happier once I saw it down on paper.

(pause. Doug disappears. Darlene stares at jD's email. It's very late.)

Hmmm... so why do I now answer to linka?

(silence from the keyboard. There is a shuffling noise as the cd ends. The only other sound for a moment is whoosh noise the bed makes when one plops down belly first)

Well, ivo introduced me to woody online. He introduced me to paradox online. They both needed a UCSC account. So I let innocently let them have the password to enelrad@b since I rarely logged on. However, I had no idea that it would result in shutdown notices from CATS and flaming email. When the backlash grew in intensity, I started to stress. Then, one day, one of them actually locked me out!

Ticked off, I immediately registered torrcal@b (named after my hometown yet sounding like a monster in a Godzilla movie), logged on, told them to give me enelrad@b back, and that was the last they ever spoke to me.

A year later, I was on fnet in ivo's room when I was called away. Her friends Bob & Trish found the open computer. An hour or so later when I returned from doing my RA duties, the three were huddled over the computer cackling about their suicide prank. I barely had time to say, "what's going on?" when heavy pounding of feet on the metal stairwell and loud male voices demanding my location reverberated through the hall. Bob pushed me out into the hallway and slammed the door behind me.

Within a heartbeat, I was run over by 6 tall, white, varying sized strangers, dressed in fashions ranging from solid black leather and nose ring to the guy in a green trench coat and held a walking stick. The Proctor showed up. An eternity later, they left. I woke up to find this: (rumaging around in a plastic tin, pulls out a rag doll with "evil enelrad" printed in red marker on its chest) hanging from a noose outside my door. the doll's hair is straightened and is casually tossed back into the box. A few dust-filled sneezes punctuates the air)

After a few months, I returned and noticed that people were shortening my login to "enel" which made me read "anal", /m-ing me with messages for paradox or woody even though it had been years, accusing me of being a male in drag, or flaming me still! Feeling that the only way to make it stop was to develop a new identity, I flipped to razberrie, a whimsical spelling of one of my favorite fruits/colors.

(pause. This is almost like a Waiting for Guffman moment)

Within an hour geeks started to talk to me. In a week, geeks began to invite me places and stopped talking about me in the third person when I was in a group! When I actually started to warily meet and live with them, I discovered that they often called each by the nicks/handles from icb.

After a couple of years of entertaining myself with watching geeks call me "raz" or "berrie" and seeing the confusion on my non-geek friends and having nongeeks call me "dar" or "links" and having geeks look at me blankly, I realized it was time for me to acknowledge my inner-wannabegeek and blend my identities.

So, there ya go.