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Dear Sir: Please Unsubscribe Me From Your Internet

My Internet Gets Too Full

So you’ll need to check out this great letter that Mike Duncan received. No, really. I’ll wait.

Update: The post there is gone…but the Neatorama story where we found it originally is still extant.

Back? I think that’s perfect. It reminds me of two stories.

First, I used to work tech support for a division of a large corporation. And there was a time when we didn’t have standard software loads on the machines, and internet browsers weren’t always loaded by default. Every so often, we would receive a request in our queue that someone wanted to have “the Internet” installed on their machine. To this I would always respond, normally by howling, “THE WHOLE THING??!?” And then would immediately start trying to calculate the sort of upgrade they would need before we could perform this daunting task.

I know: lame. But when you’re doing tech support, you take the humor where you can. I’m sure fellow veterans of that occupation would back me on that.

[ad#longpost]The second thing it reminds me of is my grandmother. My mother’s mother. We always called her Mamo. Mamo was always a bit crazy. And I mean that in a good way. The best way, in fact. She was the kind of grandmother who, no matter what you wanted to go do, knew the story of someone who had gotten killed doing it. Mamo worried about everything. When my sister was to be born, she asked my mother what they were going to do about the stairs in our two-story house. “What are you going to do about those stairs when the baby gets here?” My mother, used to these sorts of questions, merely replied, “We’ll just put them in the garage.”

She subscribed to both the Weekly World News and The National Enquirer. Yes, subscribed–had them delivered to her home. And she believed most everything she read in them. Shortly after the anthrax delivery to the Enquirer in 2001, she wrote them a letter unsubscribing from the paper. She was afraid some of the anthrax would be absorbed into the ink they were printing the paper with and wind up delivered to her home. I tried to explain to her that it didn’t exactly work that way, but she wasn’t understanding it. And too late she threw out all of her old copies just in case they had somehow retroactively gotten anthrax in them as well. Granted, her handwriting was pretty bad, so I don’t know that the people at the Enquirer could even decipher her request.

Anyway, she was a hoot and a half.