I wrote this while waiting for a 14MB file to download. I started writing these over an hour into the download, and "finished" as the download completed.
Enjoy.
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THE JOYS OF DIAL-UP
By Clint V Franklin
The Joys of Dial-Up #1: The euphoria that comes with realizing that your download speed has increased by tenfold over the 386 system you bought almost 25 years ago.
The Joys of Dial-Up #4: It doesn't break you down as fast as a CIA interrogation officer, and is not as messy as Chinese water torture.
The Joys of Dial-Up #11: Having the spare time to ponder how many ways one could commit the perfect murder, commit the murder, get caught, go to prison, and get out on parole just in time to see your Google search results for fat-chick porn appear.
The Joys of Dial-Up #29: Getting sniped by a yuppie and his cell phone on eBay, and not hearing about it until someone comes over to your house and tells you they read about it on Twitter.
The Joys of Dial-Up #34: Waiting for over an hour-and-a-half for a cake to download, only to discover that you've been lied to.
The Joys of Dial-Up #41: Being a Rick Astle fan who has never experienced rickrolling.
The Joys of Dial-Up #48: Being at ease knowing that if it's over 20MB, there's always a faster way -- get someone to burn it to a CD and have them snail-mail it to you.
The Joys of Dial-Up #56: Never having to deal with a computer virus because they can never manage to be completely uploaded to your system to begin the infection process.
The Joys of Dial-Up #60: Asking the phone company to remove the "call waiting" feature from your plan so that annoying telemarketers, friends, and loved ones don't disconnect your computer from the Internet when they call.
The Joys of Dial-Up #67: Discovering that stopping a news article while loading gets you to the article faster than waiting for the page to finish loading.
The Joys of Dial-Up #75: Becoming a law expert from the time you've devoted to reading EULA's and privacy policies while waiting for online software installers to finish.
The Joys of Dial-Up #83: Shooting-off a big white one while the image is still loading.
The Joys of Dial-Up #89: Learning that the "real-time" aspect of "instant messaging" is largely relative.
The Joys of Dial-Up #93: Not knowing what a "Nyan Cat" is. So I've been told, at least.
The Joys of Dial-Up #100: Creating a list of "The Joys of Dial-Up" because this 14MB file is only 77% completed, and there's still plenty of time to kill.