Yesterday marked Yahoo!'s 10th birthday. For those of you who don't know, I currently work at the big Y!, so it was quite a momentous day. So momentous, in fact, Sugar Ray came out of their 90's time capsule to perform for us. Yes,
that Sugar Ray. You know, the ones that just want to fly. It was actually a fun little bash, so kudos to you Mark McGrath for an entertaining little show. Yes
that Mark McGrath, new host of TV's
Extra.
Anyhow, the day's festivities got me thinking about my first experiences with the Internet. I think back to my very first email address back at UCLA. Back in 1995 we didn't get to choose an email addy, we were just assigned a random sequence of letters and numbers. My email addy? IZZY7OS@ucla.edu. Why do I remember that? Perhaps it's because my good ol' IZZY mail got taken away for improper use.
You see, with my first email address I only knew about 6 people I could actually write to. That was about the extent of it. And once you fired off these emails, people weren't in the habit of checking in daily, so there was generally some gaps in response time.
One day, I checked my mail and found that I had nothing to reply to. Instead of just logging out and leaving the computer lab, I decided to surf through the campus email directory. For some reason, it was ok to post everyone's names that signed up for a UCLA email account at that time, so you could surf through it and pick out people to send messages to. Sure, I could have looked for the names of my friends, but what would be the fun in that?
Instead I chose to email students who had the misfortune of sharing names with famous people. I usually stuck with popular actors' names from the world of TV, like Ted Danson, for instance. Most would respond with a laugh and an, "I get that all the time" type email. However, I distinctly remember emailing a kid named Henry Winkler and asking him what it felt like to be the Fonz. I followed that up something like, "Say 'hi' to Potsie and Ralph Malph when you see them. Ayyyyyyyy!" Apparently Mr. Winkler didn't find this funny since he reported me to the UCLA computer lab and had my account suspended. Can you believe that? Frickin' Fake Fonzie told on me. For someone who's mantra was "be cool," this guy certainly wasn't.
In the end I had to beg to have my account reinstated, and I never did email any more "celebrities" after that. So Fake Fonzie, here's to you buddy. I almost wish I could find you today so I could tell you "Hey, remember tattling on me 10 years ago? Well I work at Yahoo! now, bitch. I'm deactivating your Yahoo! Mail account so you can see what you put me through. Say 'hi' to Potsie and Ralph Malph for me... oh wait, you can't since I shut down your email. Ayyyyyyyyyy!"
