A/S/L? Me Too!!

It was so simple really, like shooting fish in a proverbial barrel. New people would enter the chatroom and more often than not, would get cut down by myself or any of the other regs/regulars. See when you step into the lion's den, be prepared for a fight, because we protect our own.

It started out innocently enough. I visited the AOL chatroom one day while at work, purely out of boredom. So much text was scrolling up the screen, it was tough to keep up with it all. But you learn who to pay attention to and whom to ignore fairly quickly. Pretty soon I'd log on while at home, and seeing the same screennames from earlier in the day, you can't help but say hi. And sooner or later, it's like the bar Cheers, where everyone knows your name and you're a reg.
Regs or regulars, were just people who came into the room often and were well known. It wasn't really tough to become a reg - just come in, don't be a jerk, and sooner or later people will start talking to you. But of course some people needed help in this area.

One of the things that I did to break the ice with newbies was to offer up a seat at our bar. Of couse there really was no seat, no bar, no swimming pool, and no trapeze act in 20 minutes. But sitting around "just chatting" got old after a while, and so it was decided/decreed that presto, there was a bar in the corner. Then came the pool. So on and so forth. See if you weren't a reg, then you had no clue what was going on. But if you did know what was going on, you played the "game". It was one of those things that you either got it, or you didn't. In retrospect, this was WoW before there was a WoW. It took alot to imagine that you were in a room with a pool, a bar, tv's all over the place, couches and loungers in all corners, and not staring at some chat window with spam posts for a bigger dick scrolling along, or spam bots trying to get you to click on their spam links.

One day a screenname caught my eye - PrincessPhreak. Now we all understand the Princess part, but what got me was the Phreak part. Go ahead and Google it, I'll wait. See? It's not to often that you see Princess and Phreak used in that manner. I laid back and watched as she got bombarded with A/S/L and picture requests from the peanut gallery. She held her own for the most part, coming up with witty replies and ignoring the downright obscene. After a while I finally offered her a seat which she gladly accepted.

It was to become the start of a beautiful friendship.