Humor in a Fido Vein

The Sysop,
upclose and personal
Translated by Petko Bossakov, 2:535/1

This is an old text file, contributed by the users of SORE BBS, a node in the former Net 350. Unfortunately the BBS is down, but the text stays, and I hope the authors wouldn't mind if I translated it and submitted it to the Fidonews. Some of its charm is lost in the translation, but it's still quite funny. Some brand names that are specific to Bulgaria have been changed.

His day started like a Star Trek series. The only difference was the surrounding environment. It wasn't a spaceship, but simply his own house, where he grew up among his incomprehensible relatives. He woke up late, around noon. He opened his rheumy and tired eyes and lazily stretched. After focusing his blurred sight with the help of his glasses, a thought passed through his dishevelled head like bytes pass through a phone cable. "Today I have to put the new file areas in order, because tonight I have to chat with that cool girl, Stilyana, again. By no means I can allow any error to slip in. I have to make a good impression -- talking to a female creature in the chatroom is a rare occasion. Sometimes I feel that the girls who connect to BBSes are not like the others... Oh, they are the thing that makes us move forward, like the head of a floppy, which is formatting a disk. Well, sometimes we stay somewhere longer, thinking about a girl for some time, until she's fed up with chatting. It's like a bad sector on the disk -- stops us for a while, and then we start moving forward again, until we get to another bad sector. Damn, how stupid I am, comparing girls to bad sectors. Well, what can I do -- the bad sectors are less than the normal ones after all. Yaaaaaawn!" He yawned thoughtfully. Looking at the ceiling, he noticed a small spider. "It is as big as a pixel in 320x200," he measured.

The noise from the computer put him to sleep again. After two more hours, a strange, but familiar feeling made him get out of bed. The smell reminded him that it's time to change underwear. "Damn, I forgot that this would happen again. Sitting with these pants so long in front of the machine... that's an insult to my dear computer. Let's deal with the change instantly. I wonder where did mom put the clean ones?" The sysop started rummaging in the drawers, but with no result. "Why can't everything be in a good order like my file areas... I have to teach my mom to work with Maximus. Then maybe we could get along with her."

After an hour of looking in the wardrobe, our hero found what he was looking for. He took off his yellowish pants and when he got naked like a boxless CD, he looked at his floppy penis. He thought "Eh, so much time passed, and I still haven't felt the pleasure of doing it with a real girl. It must be a lot better than watching a MPEG with Pamela Anderson. But maybe this evening I will get to know Stilyana better, I hope she uploads some digitized picture..." Thinking about this, fast as a hard disk (UDMA2), the SysOp changed his clothes, threw the dirty pants on the chandelier and headed for the kitchen. As often happenned, his mother had left a note asking him to buy some stuff from the shop. "Can't they learn that I don't want to go out for such stupid things! I might visit Pesho, but he hasn't made an upgrade lately, so there's no reason to go there. If only bread could be bought over the Internet... and then teleported through the modem... If everything is made of bits, why bread isn't? It'd be best if people could learn not to eat. Or maybe some kind of pill once a day. And now I have to go back and forth every day, like error-correction code. This is stupid. And it's just about time for those scientists to make a chair with a toilet in it. Why does a primitive need have to disturb me?"

These were the fundamental questions that our Sysop was thinking about. And he firmly decided to put this for discussion in the BBS (and why not also in the website).

In that moment, the temperature in the fridge managed to rise to the point that the compressor turned on. The sysop jumped: "Wow, it scared me, it's like the hard disk of an Apple ][. That reminds me that I have to put a newspaper ad that I'm selling my old harddisk. I love it, but I need money after all."

After these digital thoughts, the SysOp opened a jar of peanut butter and spread it generously on a slice of bread, which he bit off with a lot of indignation. This was caused by the sign "Peanut butter" on the label: "Why the hell have these idiots written it with Playbill, when it'd be better in Times New Roman? Designers! I wonder who pays them!?"

This time, however, he decided not to send a complaint to the company, because this was just a small jar with some stuff made of peanuts or whatever.

After all this, he started working. The first thing he did was looking at the newest users on the BBS. "I don't like this guy, Angel, he's been online 22 times and hasn't send me any file or message, just downloading. Damn, 18 MB! I'll lower his level, he could've at least left me his opinion about the BBS. I gotta put a note for users, and maybe in a bold font."

Continuing with these thoughts, the SysOp didn't notice that his room had become a mess. This kept up until his mother returned from work. Just upon entering she felt sick and in spite of the fact that she was tired from today's work, she started yelling at him. And the poor Sysop thought, "Why do you have to scream, better help me spread the news about the BBS outside Bulgaria, you work in a newspaper after all. And tomorrow I promise that I'll buy the bread."

One of the things the Sysop couldn't understand is that the neighbors from the block thought he was "a very good boy", while his former schoolmates said "what a f***ing nerd!". Maybe they can't appreciate his qualities. Aah, the reason is that they can't see how well he configured his two modems. They both use the same interrupt. Of course, they can't work at the same time, but maybe in the future...

At that moment an unpleasant, but familiar pain got him out of this line of thoughts. The old haemorrhoids again. "I have to do something," he said, "this evening I will check that website about self-treatment. It's good that there are people to think about it."

Well, I might go on with this story till the end of time. I can only come to the conclusion that the Sysop went on like an Iron Maiden song says, "From Here To Eternity".