net.god

So my friend Anubis wants to be hip & up-to-date, and he asks me to teach him about the Internet. No problem, I can do that, so one evening not so long ago I bring him to UMass to get him started. We walk over the hill from my apartment to campus. All the way there, he's sniffing the air and his ears are swivelling. "Rabbits," he mutters and licks his chops.

He's got some sort of magical glamor over him, I think. I mean, passersby look at him and see his head is a jackal's , but it doesn't occur to them that it's odd. I know some guys who can do this: their girlfriends know they're assholes but stay with them anyway.

We get to my office. I set up an account on a Sun that doesn't get much use and start him working at a color xterm. I go over the basics of using his account. Being a deity and all, he could probably pick it up on his own, but hey, this is Unix, which can vex even the gods. But all goes well and in no time he's using bitmap to write his name in heiroglyphics. Next he decorates his root window with cartouches of his name and other glyphs saying things like Osiris is dickless and For a good time call Bast. I would have thought that ancient gods were regal and stately, but this guy's a real sonofabitch if you cross him, I guess.

After he's finished playing around, I get back to Unix basics, trying to touch on everything he needs to know. I guess I started to bore him, because as I'm talking about elm, I glance over at him --- he's got his pleated-linen loincloth hitched up and his snout in his crotch. He's licking himself.

"Hey, Anubis! Cool it, dude. We're in public, fer Chris'sake."

He glares at me and his hackles are raising and I can tell he's deciding whether or not to toast me (literally). I sweat it out for a few tense seconds. Evidently, he still wants to learn more from me because he lets it pass. Instead he says snidely, "Right, dp, you would if you could..."

He's probably right, but not in public. I guess a couple millenia in the Underworld tends to skew your sense of decorum.

I decide to move on to something flashy to keep his interest, so I fire up Netscape and show him the Web. "Sorry, Anubis, I can't give you space for your own homepage. You're not really supposed to be on our system." I explain to him about commercial Internet access providers and then continue with the Web.

His talent with a Web browser is amazing. I guess they're designed so that they're pretty intuitive to use, but this guy masters it in seconds. And for him there's no such thing as slow transfer -- he lays his hands on the xterm and -zap- the screen blinks and there's the next page. It takes him only a minute or two to find some archives of erotic photos and only a few more to peruse them all. And I thought the Greek gods were poon-hounds.

He goes for the Newsgroups button next, and starts reading "alt.pagan", hoping for laughs and maybe some adulation. Right away, he asks me to help him with the mailer; he fires off a biting response to some guy calling himself Osiris. I don't think he realizes that it's just a user-name and that it's not really his old nemesis. He and the real Osiris had some sort of falling out about 25 centuries ago -- he's Anubis's step-dad and kinda took over his job as Lord of the Underworld after a nasty accident. Anubis isn't one to give up a grudge. Anyway, about an hour later, Osiris replies with a nasty flame. I guess I shouldn't have mentioned the word flame, because my friend gets this maniacal look in his eyes.

"Flame Anubis, will you? I'm the goddamned conductor of fucking souls, boy! I've got more curses than you've got zits, you peon!" With that outburst he mumbles some ancient Egyptian curse and waves his left hand in a weird pattern. "There. Now that's a flame." I make a mental note to scour the newspapers tomorrow for stories of spontaneous human combustion. Meanwhile, I try to calm him down.

"Relax, Anubis, chill. On the Internet, no-one knows you're a dog-headed god. Heh heh..." He glares at me again as I scramble to explain that it's an allusion to an old joke. He lets me be again, even though I can tell he's not convinced.

He sulks quietly for a while and then says, "Jackal -- It's a jackal's head, not a dog's." I apologize to the point of grovelling. The rest of the night goes uneventfully; eventually even he gets tired and we log off.

Monday morning when I log back in, I have this nasty note from the my boss, saying that all of the file permissions on the Sun are screwed and somebody with a guest account that I created has been snooping around on the system. He warns me not to do it again and says he's disabled that account. I thought about warning him, but then, how would I explain that we've got a bored and ill-tempered Egyptian deity on our system now. I let it slide.

Tuesday I come in and find out I have an unexpected promotion to system administrator, due to the sudden death of my boss. Seems he was torn to pieces by a pack of wild dogs. My first item of business -- re-activating that account. I make a note to ask Anubis to be nice and to help out with our system security in exchange for access. I remind myself not to use the word watchdog.