WHERE DELETED CHARACTERS GO
by Joel Garreau (Washington Post)
QUESTION: Where do the characters go when I use my backspace
or delete them on my PC?
ANSWER: The characters go to different places, depending on
whom you ask:
The Catholic Church's approach to characters:
The nice characters go to Heaven, where they are bathed
in the light of happiness. The naughty characters are
punished for their sins. Naughty characters are those
involved in the creation of naughty words, such as "breast,"
"sex" and "contraception."
The Buddhist explanation:
If a character has lived rightly, and its karma is good, then
after it has been deleted it will be reincarnated
as a different, higher character. Those funny characters
above the numbers on your keyboard will become numbers,
numbers will become letters, and lower-case letters will
become upper-case.
The 20th-century bitter cynical nihilist explanation:
Who cares? It doesn't really matter if they're on the page,
deleted, undeleted, underlined, etc. It's all the same.
The Mac user's explanation:
All the characters written on a PC and then deleted go
to straight to PC hell. If you're using a PC, you can
probably see the deleted characters, because you're in
PC hell also.
Stephen King's explanation:
Every time you hit the (Del) key you unleash a tiny monster
inside the cursor, who tears the poor
unsuspecting characters to shreds, drinks their blood, then
eats them, bones and all. Hah, hah, hah!
Dave Barry's explanation:
The deleted characters are shipped to Battle Creek, Michigan,
where they're made into Pop-Tart filling; this explains why
Pop-Tarts are so flammable, while cheap imitations are not
flammable. I'm not making this up.
IBM's explanation:
The characters are not real. They exist only on the screen
when they are needed, as concepts, so to delete them is merely
to deconceptualize them. Get a life.
PETA's (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) explanation:
You've been DELETING them??? Can't you hear them
SCREAMING??? Why don't you go CLUB some BABY SEALS
while wearing a MINK, you pig!!!!
#board-2412
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle
AI
