Why I Don’t Type LOL

If there’s one thing I’m sick of, it’s snow. Let’s examine the situation here, I live in Wisconsin and apparently one of the penalties is that it has to snow. Well that’s fine, but if it has to snow why doesn’t it just snow a lot? I would rather be looking at grass or snow, but not a combination of both. It’s like the weather has a split personality here. When I wake up in the morning and I’m looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/4″ of snow I get a little irritated. It’s enough to have to go out and shovel but there’s always that thought in the back of your head that the shit’s going to melt in another month or so anyway. Well according to what the weatherman is saying now, we might get rain on Sunday so that should get rid of a bunch more of this shit… then again when was the last time they were right? You would think that in February I wouldn’t be so irritated with snow because being in Wisconsin this is just the norm right? Wrong; and for any naysayers I just point you to February 2001. You see, in the early part of 2001 we had the mildest winter I ever remember having. In fact mild is too mild of a word to use here. I would say that it was downright warm that year. The one thing that sticks out in my mind is that when Dale Earnhardt was killed I called my friend to tell him and he had just gotten back from a round of golf. A fucking round of golf… in February… in Wisconsin. I also remember having thunderstorms that month as well as temperatures well into the 70’s. Alas, here we are four years later and the only 70’s to be found around here are in the nursing home.

In my almost ten years that I’ve been online I think I’ve evolved. One of these days I might put an addition onto the main page explaining my trek from chatting in TalkCity in 1996 to spending most of my time on here religiously devoted to my web pages. One thing I noticed back in the old days was the shorthand text we used. There was the LOL, the LMAO and many variations of LMAO including LMMFGDAO as well as others. I think I used LOL back when I used to chat but not to the extreme, and now I can’t stand to type it at all; in fact it was painful just to type it now. I’ve been in the Yahoo Chat rooms off and on lately just checking out what’s going on and I wasn’t too impressed. Minus the porno bots, the environment has changed extremely. LOL and LMAO seemed to have stood the test of time and are still alive and kicking to this day. The other one that I’ve noticed that has come around is typing your feelings in between two *’s. Now I don’t do that either. You see when I was chatting we had this real cool program called Pirch32 that we used and one of the functions it had in it was called actions. All you had to do was type the following: /me wants to kick your ass.

Then what Pirch32 would do was put your chat name in and it would say DisgruntledHuman wants to kick your ass. Ahh, the pure awesomeness of the action. Of course now chatters have traded actions for emoticons and we’ve got 1,000 different smilies to express our feelings. Nothing tells me you love me more than a smiley with a throbbing heart on… it.

My point is that even though I mingle in with the chattatonic crowd I’m not really into the lingo and I’m not really part of it. I think much like there are rules to follow everywhere else in society I think there should be chat rules. The first should be that you are not allowed to use LOL more than once every 15 minutes… and if you put it more than once in a sentence then you are banned for four days. Oh yeah, and if you start a sentence with LOL you’re computer gets smashed with a sledgehammer.

The point I’m trying to make here is that you shouldn’t rely on LOL and you really shouldn’t think you need to use it to be part of the computer age. You don’t need to waste your time typing stupid acronyms to look like you’re in the in crowd when online. Seriously, wtf?