Connected to the World

Prior to 2001, my main experience with the Internet had been using my workplace's AOL account. I actually got into trouble when someone I'd chatted with IM'd the account when my boss was on-line. When I was on vacation, I had also used my Mom's and Loyd's AOL accounts. I once got Loyd suspended from chatting for five minutes. I think it was because there was a user named "JellyFeet" in a room I was in and I asked what their feet tasted like, so I got reported.

For my birthday in 2001, Mom got me a NEC laptop computer. It was an older one that Loyd used to use. He gave it to Mom. She got a better computer, so she decided to give it to me and pay for a full year of AOL. She warned me about a couple of issues. The first was that the battery wouldn't hold a charge, which meant you had to keep it plugged in all the time. It was no longer portable unless you had someplace to plug it in. The second: You had to push something to get the phone hookup to appear. I had no idea what she was talking about until the laptop arrived in the mail.

I took it out and examined it. Fortunately, Loyd and Mom had managed to keep the original case and instructions. I finally found the hookup. You pressed on this one area and it popped out. It wasn't apparent at first that this was what you plugged the phone into, but it was and it worked. It also had a floppy disc drive and a CD drive. These were separate components. You had to swap them out and could only use one at a time. One of the first things I did was get this floppy disc I had gotten at the Comic-Con and stuck it in. I couldn't get the material to properly appear, but it did contain the latest version of AOL. I was able to install that.

I then followed the directions to set up an account. Mom gave me her credit card number. But when I called AOL, they said they had to speak to the owner of the credit card. I had to call my Mom to call them up and set up my AOL. She called me back and told me what my user name and password were. She tried to get me the name fayd@aol.com. However, someone already had that, so I had to settle for fayd11. (I guess fayd #1 - #10 were all taken. Who knew there were so many fayds out there?)

But I was connected to the rest of the universe. I looked forward to chatting, joking around and attempting to meet women. I managed to do all of that and more. You'll learn about those adventures in the coming months.

A couple of years later, I decided to get off of AOL and go to a different ISP. My Mom had to contact them to shut off the account. You're likely aware of the tactics AOL used to use to keep people from closing their accounts. At this time, they offered three months for free and she said she had a hard time telling them no. I'm glad I never had to deal with them except for that time I tried to set it up. (I wondered if they got so desperate for accounts that they stopped checking the identities of people trying to sign up with someone else's credit card.) I saw that later on, they stopped offering the additional three months to anyone trying to close. They did everything in their power to avoid doing that.

But if I hadn't had that computer at that time in my life, I have no idea where I would be today. Thanks, Mom, for giving me that.