10 Years of Annoying People

This month marks the ten year anniversary of My Life on the Internets.

Right after the Fourth of July in 1998, my boyfriend brought home the first of our many computers, in spite of my begging him not to for weeks. "It'll change everything!" I protested. Indeed, it did. Now when I order a pizza, I can fiddle around with the toppings all I like before pushing that button that sends the order through, without having to annoy a person impatiently waiting for me to make up my mind on the other end of a phone line.

Speaking of annoying people, in the ten years I've been online I've literally annoyed more than three million people (don't click that link), and I've also told almost five million people everything I know about The Carlyle Group. My stuff has been linked to by Howard Stern, Michael Moore, and Wil Wheaton dot net, but most importantly by Tony's Kansas City ('cause he's the funniest blogger in the world, and unlike the others I actually go to that site every day). And, while I'm bragging, a Dragonball Z quiz I made with my son one time was listed, with a screenshot, in a Dragonball Z magazine I can't remember the name of, but it boosted the price of my stock to an all-time high amongst the young people I knew.

Ten years ago, I was online for about three days when I typed a search into HotBot:

"Free Website"

and that's where all the fun began. I didn't know much about computers back then, not even how to copy and paste. The first solid year that I was building websites, I had no idea that you could drag your cursor across the screen and turn things blue, then right click and "copy" what you'd just highlighted, then right click again and "paste" the blue section somewhere else. As a result, I have notebooks filled with HTML codes and JavaScripts that I copied by hand, and then re-typed when building my early websites (moron!).

Though I'm well known for doing things the hard way, this was one instance where it really paid off. Getting that up-close, inside look at how HTML works helped me learn how to manipulate the stuff I was copying and pasting the hard way, and once I learned all the miraculous things Microsoft products were capable of when a person clicks the right mouse button, I had myself a new career.

"Get paid to annoy people!" If a goofball like me can do it, so can anyone.

Happy anniversary to me!