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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: rrd@fc.hp.com (Ray Depew)
Subject: Re: MOTTO? What's it mean?
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1993 16:17:38 GMT

(Warning: this is 100 lines long!)
(give or take two-fifty)

Wayne B Hacker (wbh@math.ufl.edu) wrote: :
: I have only just started reading this group, but I do
: have one Question. It seems that some of the readers of this group
: do not like the newbies, my question is: who are the newbies and
: what did they do that was so terrible? ( does this count as one
: question?)[did that count as another?]

Newbies are fine. Newbies are great. Newbies are the lifeblood of this place. Heck, we were all newbies once. It's just that ... how can I say this? ... well, there are newbies and there are newbies.

The first group are the ones that have just discovered AFU and, realizing that they are in someplace "different," (I was gonna say "special") they act courteously and roll with the flow until they get the hang of things.

The second group are the ones who arrive with their own preconceived notions of what AFU should be, start throwing their perceived weight around like they were Leona Helmsley, don't give a damn about anything outside their small circle of perception, and get easily offended at some of the silliness that does go on around here, but aren't smart enough to just leave (or unsubscribe or whatever).

The Sea Wasp estimated that about 75% of what goes on here is silliness, which leaves only 25% for serious urban-legend stuff. Personally, I'd say he/she is being generous; I've seen it dip to as low as 5 to 10% during late summer and early fall, and it isn't all the newbies' fault.

We are serious about the core subject matter of AFU, that is, urban legends. Everything else, all the in-jokes, funny rituals and silliness, are part of the AFU "culture" that has grown up over the years -- an example of modern folklore in itself. (In fact, a professional folklorist, sociologist or anthropologist could get a lot of mileage out of reviewing AFU traffic over the past several years and tracing the evolution of the AFU culture (answering questions like "who first used the phrase FURRFU, and why did it catch on?" and "why don't AFUers like smileys?" and "why are they called AFUers?" and "what do they know that Douglas Adams doesn't know?" and "who is Ed Zotti and why do they despise him?").

At HP, we used to have company-provided coffee-and-donut breaks twice a day. During these breaks, everyone would abandon their desks and congregate around the donut stations for informal conversation. Sometimes the conversations were joke-telling sessions, sometimes they were serious work-related stuff that went on long after break time.

It's my opinion that the results of the work-related interaction during those breaks more than paid for the coffee and donuts.

HP cancelled the donuts (dropping the national donut-consumption average to 700 per person per year) and installed 24-hour, coffee-on-demand stations, so we could get a caffeine hit anytime, and not just twice a day. Since that time, the camaraderie and networking that took place around the coffee station has disappeared.

I found it again, here on AFU. When I first discovered the Internet in 1983, I ignored AFU for the most part, since from the outside it looked like a bunch of dumb jokes played over and over again by an "in crowd." (Some things never change!) One day several uears later, when I was surfing newsgroups during lunch, I saw a subject on AFU that caught my eye, and I've been here ever since.

All the models people have proposed for AFU are wrong. AFU is like nothing as cultured as a play or a concert. AFU is a game of pick-up football (American, Aussie or soccer), where anybody can join in and play. If you don't know the rules, you'll pick them up as you go along. Some personalities in the game may be inclined to screech at you when you do dumb stuff, while other personalities may be inclined to correct or inform you in a more polite manner. Some will even pull you aside in a quiet moment, to explain something important without embarrassing you in front of everybody else.

This particular pick-up game has been going on a long time. People who want to join in, but who insist on using their own ball, or their own rules, or who insist that we all need to have color-coordinated jerseys, will be invited to stuff it, or will at least be harassed until they decide to take their ball and go home. And good riddance to them.

(Many of the long-time participants in AFU are successful, published authors. It's not a good idea to get into a war of words with a wordsmith. They're very modest, and you don't know what you're tangling with until you get skewered by one of them.)

We are aware that there are innumerable spectators, too. Some of them even write for the WSJ -- hi, mom!

We love newbies here. The thing is, we like some of the newbies as friends, and we like others with ketchup.

Welcome to AFU. I hope you enjoy it here.

Regards
Ray Depew
Integrated Circuits Business Division
Hewlett Packard Co, Fort Collins, Colorado rrd@hpfiqa.fc.hp.com
Disclaimer: I don't speak for HP.