Okay: It's official. I have become a citizen of cyberspace. I have joined the ranks of Bill Howard the Computer Junkie and Bill Gates the World's Richest Nerd and I have spent perfectly good money that could be spent feeding the poor or buying a supercharger and sunk it into computer crap instead.
All so I could surf the Internet.
Which is why the Bad Dog won't be getting no supercharger any time soon, or even maybe the left front axle that it needs, or proper wheels (there ARE no proper wheels for an iX), or paint. But it's all right; there's a great cosmic irony at work. It doesn't matter that I don't have any money to properly care for and feed the Bad Dog, because I don't have any time to drive it, either.
All because of the net. Or, more specifically, the BMW Digest.
Argh! Agh! I don't know what got into me. In fact, this was sort of my own idea: "Boss," I said, "I got a great idea. We'll get on the Internet, see, and that way we can stay in touch with the readers and stuff." And no sooner had I conned him into this notion---although his motivations had more to do with instantaneous transmission of just-a-little-past-the-deadline stories without the ability to blame the US mail---than I went surfing off happily into the ozone: Search, I told the machine, for anything about BMW.
Mistake.
The search produced, among the incredible pile, the BMW Digest Home Page: http://www.wizvax.net/rwelty/bmw/. Which is all very well, except that it included the address to which you might send a request to sign up for this digest, after which it would come automatically to your very own e-mail address. Wow! Mail! So of course I dialed up bmw-digest-request@mailgate.wizvax.net and included the word "subscribe" in my message.
And then I went on vacation.
Let me tell you about e-mail: It piles up. And piles up and piles up and piles up. Meanwhile, I am on the road, exploring certain meandering routes that carry us happily to Monterey, never dreaming of the electronic bits and bytes that are now stacked up like drifted snow against the flimsy door of my e-mail box. So that when I get home and turn on my computer, I find a nasty note from the E-Mail Police that tells me I have too much stuff left over in their office, would I please come and get it (electronically, of course), which I figure out how to do sort of in just about a day and a half, which is when I can finally attack the mountain of electronic drift that now constitutes what we call the In Box.
Wherein there are exactly 342 messages.
A normal person might just look at the ones from real people, like Mike Richardson (that is, Mike_Richardson@siltronic.com), who is sending a confirmation that he and Kathy have indeed swum upstream to produce Little Mary (at nine pounds six ounces even bigger than Little Jeffrey, the giganto baby who is already itching to drive Dad's 325iX at age 3), and maybe just dump all the umpteen billion messages from automated servers like the BMW Digest. (At least I am assuming this thing is automated; in full Sorcerer's Apprentice mode, this thing could only crank out this kind of verbiage if it had 37 people pounding at the keyboard nonstop.) But---
---well, it's like surfing through the television channels, isn't it? Women (certain women, anyway) seem a bit perplexed at this predominantly male phenomenon, which can be boiled down to this: the fear of missing something.
That is, of course I could get rid of this pile of messages, but I can't hardly do that without at least scanning each one, now, can I? It wouldn't be polite: After all, here are all these electronically-connected BMW junkies offering each other advice on everything from how to get rid of water spots (repaint the car) to recounting their adventures in Monterey (anybody who refers to the Corkscrew as the Carousel and then spells it "Carocel" ought to be made to drive a Volvo); an awful lot of the bandwidth (whatever the hell that is) seems to be used up by people getting off the topic of BMWs to complain about people getting off the topic of BMWs and using up the bandwidth, and there are occasional missives to remind us that sanity is not a quality we may assume in people just because they like the same cars we do. In short, it's an interesting spectrum of humanity, from every part of the world, just like Roundel readers, which many of them are. So you can't just leave their stuff unread, now, can you?
I can't, anyway. Which is why the Bad Dog sits a bit forlorn and neglected while I catch up on all this mail. I promise as soon as I catch up a bit I will go back on the road and see what I can find out about the REAL speed limit in Montana, and maybe see what we can do to make the Press On Regardless Rally a BMW-dominated event. But I must confess a greater danger, an even more insidious thief of time than the great e-mail drift of 1996:
I just figured out how to download Duke Nukem 3D.
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Satch Carlson