Well, to begin, you probably don’t remember me. That’s awkward. To be honest, I’d forgotten all about you, too. At least until a recent conversation with a friend about online forum moderation tweaked my memory. Ah, the things my friends and I discuss ...
I won’t waste too much of your time. It was 1984-ish or so. Pre-Internet, or at least any version of the Internet we would recognize. I had a Commodore 64 and my parents had just bought me a CompuServe modem. You may recall that ‘getting online’ was a big thing back then. Not to mention expensive - well, for me, anyway. For one thing, CompuServe charged by the minute. That was bad enough, but the small town I lived in didn’t have a local number, so I had to pay long distance charges in addition to that.
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| Exhibit A |
Ugh. Now I have to explain long distance charges. You know what? I don’t. I’m sure you remember them as well as I do. Many a young lad in a long distance relationship spent all night talking to their boo, only to have the hammer of parental justice descend upon them when the bill came the next month.
And that bill would come. But before that - sometime after I got my modem but before my parents took my privileges away for running up long distance and service charges - we had our fated meeting, you and I.
Actually, it wasn’t me you talked to, not for the first half hour. Sure, it was my modem and my account. I’d had the modem for about a week, and had been messing around on different forums - or chat boards or whatever they were called back then. That’s really was all there was to do on CompuServe. I was getting a little burned out on the whole thing but still addicted to that beep-boop-booooo dial-up noise.
But no, this was my friend you were talking to. We’ll call him R, to protect his identity. I’m sure he’d confirm the story if I asked him, but since nothing is riding on it I’d prefer not to drag up his juvenile antics. He’s a very important person these days.
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| "R" and your author in an undisclosed location several years after the event in question. |
R was visiting and wanted to try out my new stuff. So we fired up the old beep-boop-boooo and logged on.
One thing you should know before we go further is that R knew a lot about Eddie Van Halen. A lot. Probably enough to win an Eddie-themed Jeopardy round easily, even if he was playing against Eddie himself.
It didn’t take R long to find your channel - rockchat, or #rock, or rockytalk, or whatever name these things had back then. His eyes lit up and he dove right in.
In full disclosure, I wasn’t really paying attention, since I was eating Doritos or playing with Stretch Armstrong or whatever pre-Teens did in the early 80s when their friends were using their Commodore 64s. I was more of a go-along type kid, anyway. But he’s typing and typing and he’s like “hey, I’m gonna tell these guys I’m Eddie Van Halen!”
(Another thing about R is that, from time to time, he enjoyed messing with people.)
“Cool,” I said. Whatever. Dream your dreams, my friend.
Little did I know how big R was dreaming. Over a series of rapid-fire chats, he convinced everyone in the chatroom - a half-dozen or so Rock-n-Roll loving geeks - that he was, in fact, Eddie Van Halen. Eddie was bored with the long stretch of road between gigs and had decided to log on from his tour bus.
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| "Who makes your guitars?" "I do, of course." |
They were skeptical at first, but R answered every question that they come up with (remember - no Google in those days) until they bought into it completely. By now, I’d gotten into it, and we were huddled around the keyboard, laughing and spinning wilder and wilder tales involving Eddie, David and the whole crew. At some point it occurred to us - to me, anyway - that we couldn’t ride this tiger much longer. The smart thing to do would be log off and just laugh about it. Maybe even come back a few more times for some more chuckles.
But I was starting to feel bad about it all. As a kid, I had a sort of always-turned-on guilty conscience that followed me around everywhere. I felt like whatever I was doing at the time was vaguely wrong - so when doing something that was actually wrong, like now … well, you get the picture.
I kicked R off the keyboard and was like “Hey, guys, my friend was pulling your leg, he isn’t Eddie Van Halen, he just knows a lot about him. Just a joke. Ha ha, pretty funny, right?”
Boy, were ya’ll mad.
OK, I get it. Kind of a dick move. You and your online buddies had every right to be mad. And honestly, you had every right to block me as you did. What we did was clearly ‘trolling,’ even though no one knew what that was back then, and probably a violation of your CompuServe forum rules as well. So, no hard feelings there. Not even for the many insults you hurled my way until R convinced me to log off and go do something else.
That’s the background. And I’m not here to judge or rehash old grievances - just wanted to say two things. First, and most important, you should know that I felt really bad about the whole thing. Not as bad as I felt the time I stole candy from that store and spent the next two weeks waiting for the police to come get me - but yeah, pretty bad. I was convinced I’d done something awful and was in capital-t Trouble.
Being banned from your group - as little as that meant in real terms, since I never wanted to talk about Eddie Van Halen again after a half hour - was like trying to play a game with an Intellivision controller with one busted keypad button. It was hard to get past it. That feeling of having done something wrong lingered on and off until the next phone bill came, at which point my parents made sure I had other things to feel bad about.
I never really got closure on this. And after all these years, I wanted to reach out and bury the hatchet. So! This is me showing remorse. I’ve learned a lot in the past 30 years, and one of the things I’ve learned is that you should never toy with people’s emotions the way we did. Actually I learned that pretty early - probably should have done this sooner, come to think of it. Oh, well.
The second thing I wanted to say. Dude - you got punked. You got punked by a couple of 13 year olds. This was 20 years before MTV came out with Punk’d, but you could have been on the first episode.
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| Pre-Mila. Pre-Demi, even? |
You were a systems operator! A sysop, man! You were vested the weighty responsibility of managing this channel full of aspiring young rock and roll fans. You were supposed to be their mother hen, their protection against the cold, hard world outside, not letting foxes into your hen house. This was your dining room - and you let two pre-teens come right in, sit down at your table and make you look like a fool in front of your whole family.
Come on, man. What happened?
I’m sorry. Here I go again. You know what? This is on me, not you. You were the victim. We were the perpetrators. Well, mostly R. But, you know … I was there. So, again. Let me say I’m sorry.
Wait, did I not say that yet? Hmph. Well, I’m saying it now. I’m sorry for punking you and your crew. I hope you’ve had a full life, a career in the music biz or wherever your passion turned out to be, have a beautiful family and everything you ever wanted, and are looking forward to a long and well-deserved retirement in the Bahamas somewhere.
And don’t forget to catch that magic moment, and do it right now.
Stay chill, dude.
Love,
User MH4972a
