(diaryland) April 26, 2001 - 11:24 p.m.

Last year, I found this thing on the internet that said if you do certain things in microsoft excel, a special thing would happen. So I did it. And suddenly, I was in a room. It was a bit like Doom. I turned around a wee bit, and there was a door. I went in. The walls were pulsating. I went out again and looked around some more. I found a really thin wall below me and jumped onto the ridge. It was a squiggly ridge. A bit of a challenge. But I was determined to find out what goodies lay at the end of the evil microsoft programmers� sick little game. I kept falling off the damn wall, and had to keep doing the weird excel stuff to get back into the game every time I messed up. It cost an entire afternoon of homework time on my part and frustration on the part of countless others in the computer lab, trying to get hold of a computer to do important stuff on. But, finally, I got there to the end of the thin, thin wall. My heart pounded a bit more vigorously than usual. I had made it. There was a cave. It was dank. What treasures would the cave reveal to me? A voodoo doll of Bill Gates? Some sordid secret? A revolting picture of microsoft slave labour?

Nope. It was just pixilated photos of the programmers� families. Yet a strange sense of satisfaction came over me. I felt really, really nerdy. It was nice.