An Attempt to Break @joelmw's Verbosity Record

39

Or how Barney found her way to the Meh website.

One day I was watching 60 Minutes and saw this:

I was hooked. Here was a computer like nothing I had ever seen before. Hmm, back up a minute. In 2007, I didn't own a computer; I knew almost nothing about them. But this! This was wonderful and I wanted one. So, after seeing this in the spring, I watched and waited and looked for any info about the progress being made with these computers. And then, I guess it was in the fall, that OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) offered their Buy One,Give One Deal. Buy one for yourself and a child in a poor country gets one. So, I called immediately and ordered one.

On Christmas Eve, we had a snowstorm. My neighbor waddled over to my house with some cookies she had made. And lo and behold, parked in a snowbank was my brand new OLPC computer (this was better than a Red Ryder BB Gun). I brought it into the house and waited for it to warm up. Luckily, to help past the time, I had cookies to eat.

When I opened the box, there was my little green and white computer and a pamphlet. Nothing else, no directions. Nothing. Stumped, I plugged it in. Although it had a battery, I didn't know that it should be charged first thing before use. Anyway. There was a glowing light, so I thought the computer would work. So, I pressed the button and it started up.

On the home page was an XO avatar that looked like this and it said to name it.

I know it's hard to see, but all of the avatars are different combinations of colors. My avatar was (yep, you guessed it) two shades of purple. All I could think of was Barney the dinosaur and thus I became Barney in XO land and later on other internet sites.

Getting bored? Well, too bad. Anyway, I soon learned that my computer needed to be hooked up to the internet, but fortunately I had the curiosity of a child, which came in handy and figured out how to connect my computer onto the internet of the nearby school (it was an accident that I did this). And then I saw this:
These were the avatars of lots of other people who had purchased these wonderful little computers. Confession time: I thought all of these people were in my hometown. I didn't realize that they were from all over the world.

I soon figured out that there was a chat room and met a lot of wonderful people. Some of these people invited me to join their server where they taught me about computers and the joy of linux, on which these little computers were based. However, my new linux friends were so far ahead of me that I couldn't keep up with them. Just as I learned something, they were jumping into something else. it was frustrating. I guess you can call me a linux dropout.

But in one of the chat room discussions, there was talk about a website named Woot!, so I went there and watched. Keep in mind that I didn't know anything about buying things on the internet and I had heard all of these bad things about bad websites, so I watched. I lurked and lurked. I liked what I saw, but I still lurked.

And then I heard complaints about Woot! changing ownership and how it wasn't the same anymore. Eventually, there was talk (even though Woot tried to delete it) about a new site called Meh. And I came here.

Anyone still awake after reading this? Did I break the record?