Addicted to the net

You Might be Addicted to AOL if...

• Tech Support calls "You" for help.
• Someone at work tells you a joke and you say LOL.
• You watch TV with the closed captioning turned on.
• You have called out someone's screen name while making love to your significant other.
• You keep begging your friends to get an account "so we can hang out."
• Three words: Carpal tunnel syndrome.
• You want to meet a girl/guy and your first impulse is to turn on your computer.
• you've ever gotten onto an airplane just to meet some folks face to face.
• you have to get a second phone line just so you can call Domino's.
• You have ever joined "Si habla Espanol" (Spanish chat room) "just to work on my Spanish."
• you've ever typed "drinking on AOL is better than drinking alone."
• you go into labor and you stop to type a special e-mail message letting everyone know you're going to be away.
• you have a vanity car tag with your screen name on it (oops thats me twice!).
• you no longer type with proper punctuation, capitalization, or complete sentences.
• you have met over 100 AOLers.
• you begin to say heh heh heh instead of laughing.
• when someone says "What did you say?" you reply "Scroll up!"
• you find yourself sneaking away to the computer in the middle of the night when your spouse is asleep.
• you turn down the lights and close the blinds so people won't know you are online again.
• you know more about your AOL friends' daily routines than you do your own spouse's.
• you find yourself lying to others about your time on-line and when they complain that your phone was busy you claim it was off the hook
• you have an identity crisis if someone else is using an s/n close to your own
• you would rather tell people your bloodshot eyes are from partying too much instead of the truth (all night online).
• you change s/n's so much that you have to get your profile to see who you are (identity crisis here).
• you're broke, your modem burns out and you go out onto the streets to sell your body to get a new one.
• you open your home to 15 strangers for a week merely because they have computers and cool s/n's.
• your kids are standing at your side saying "mommy, please come cook dinner" and you would rather type another "LOL"
• you marry your cyberboyfriend/cybergirlfriend and you both sit at your own computers and chat to each other every night from across the room.
• you type messages to people while you are on the phone with them at the same time.
• you won't work at a job that doesn't have a modem involved.
• your dog leaves you.
• you have to ask what year it is.
• you are doing things more and more that you swore you would never, ever do when you first found chat.
• you write a letter like this..."dear tom, hiyas! how r u doin well i gotta go bbl!"
• you name your pets after people with whom you talk online.
• you smile sideways. :-)
• you sign on and immediately get 10 messages from people who have you on their buddy lists (::cringe::).
• you have a map on the wall with red thumbtacks to mark where people you have met are.
• you look at an annoying person off-line and wish you had your ignore button handy.
• you bring a bag lunch and a cooler to the computer.
• your significant other kisses your neck while you are chatting and you think "uh oh, cybersex pervo."
• you have withdrawal symptoms if you are away from the puter for more than a few hours.
• you use AOL lingo in everyday life (if you still have one... hehehe).
• you take a speed reading course to keep up with the scrolling.
• your buddy list has over 100 people on it.
• you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is get online before you have your first cup of coffee.
• you have to inject No-Doz into your butt to keep it awake.
• you have your computer set up so that it goes directly into AOL's welcome screen.
• you wait 6 hours online for a certain "special" person to come home from work.
• you don't know where the time has gone.
• you end sentences with three (or more) periods while writing letters in pen/pencil.
• your relationship online has gone farther than any real one you have had.
• you get up at 2 am to go the bathroom but go turn on your computer instead.
• you spell things out loud instead of actually saying the word.
• you don't even notice anymore when someone has a typo.
• when you enter a room and 23 people greet you with {{{Hugs}}} or ***Kisses***
• you stop typing whole words and use things like ppl, dunno and lemme
• your voicemail/answering machine message is "BRB, leave your s/n and I will TTYL."
• you type faster than you think.
• you got your psychiatrist addicted to AOL, too, and are now undergoing therapy in private rooms instead of at his office.
• you want to be buried with your computer when it dies...or vice versa
• you actually enjoy the fact that you are addicted.
• you can actually read and follow all the names of the cast that scrolls up your tv screen at the end of a movie.
• people say, if it weren't for your super reflexes in your eyes and fingers, you would have long been classified as a vegetable.
• you dream in text.
• being called a newbie is a *MAJOR* insult.
• there is absolutely no interesting chat any room and you are really bored....yet you don't want to leave in case you miss something.
• you double click your tv remote.
• you can now type at more than 70 wpm.
• you think about starting a 12-step recovery group for AOL junkies.
• you are on the phone for a minute and need to do something else you say "BRB" or "BBL"
• you check your e-mail and forget you have real mail aka snail mail
• you go into withdrawals during dinner
• you spend at least 30 minutes making sure you say goodbye to everyone in a room
• you stop speaking in full sentences
• you have gone into an unstaffed tech support room and ended up "giving" tech support to other AOLers
• you have to be pried from your computer with the Jaws-of-Life
• your last sexual experience was really just a "textual" experience
• you set your kitchen on fire while cooking dinner because you wanted to "check your mail" and while you were there you "just wanted to see who's on"
• you meet people from AOL in public and have no idea what their real name is, so you call them by their s/n.

BTW, IMHO this also applies to CompuServe, Prodigy, GNN, Delphi, Microsoft Net, ATT's Worldnet and, most of all, the World Wide Web. (That's just in case you thought only AOL had addicts.)