CitizenTed

Hey Bebo Guy! Want to make it truly great? Do this:

Make our relationships on the site valuable. I can already send my friends news, cat pictures, web links and YouTube videos. Don't need FB to do it.

What I want to do is this: share files - even large files - anonymously and efficiently. I want to send a ZIP of hi-res photos to Sandra. I want to send a 2GB bundled audio project to Johnny. I want to be able to peruse their Bebo Boxes as well. Why, look! Johnny has an MP3 of Fart Blower and the Ham Sandwiches doing a cover of "Downtown"! Yes! I will take this file...

IOW, imagine a mixture of Megavideo and Facebook. Files can be stored for ~30 days for free and left permanent for $0.99/mo or whatever. File repositories are secure from non-approved visitors.

We can now truly "share". And sharing is caring. Will this support "piracy"? Maybe. Who cares? It's not a public spewing of protected content. It's truly tape-sharing between friends. Bebo will have a feature no one else else (a social network with DropBoxes) and this feature will stir controversy and bootstrap usage even more.

Hey! Look! Frankie has an FLV of the latest Downton Abbey! And I thought he was a dumb jock. I'll take it! YOINK!

I hate to be a one-upper, but your story reminded me of my youth as a cable TV guy in central New Jersey. One day, just before Christmas, I was called out to the projects ("council blocks") in New Brunswick. Complaint: no cable signal.

Like you, I always skipped the elevator. Instead, I hauled my gear up the steps, which involved hopping over a dice game. Normally, a white man hopping over a stairwell dice game in the projects was a death sentence, but I had the cable guy uniform and the gangsters like TV, so I got a pass.

I went to an apartment about 8 floors up and a jolly fat black woman let me in. She had a bunch of kids bouncing around, all excited because the TV man was here to fix the TV. The flat was very warm and had potted plants everywhere, but it still reeked of mold and old cooking oil. In the projects, the company wired everyone's cable to a central box in a floor utility room. The cable drops were never properly tagged because nobody gave a shit.

I put a tracer on her cable plug and headed to the utility closet. Once inside the closet, I noticed the cable box was way up high near the ceiling. Rather than scrounge around the projects for a step ladder, I pressed my back against the back wall, feet against the front wall and shimmied up to the box. I put in my special key, opened the box and-

The whole front panel fell right off its hinges and hundreds of cockroaches exploded out of the box. I was showered in roaches. They flew down my front jacket, onto my pants, up my cuffs and made a frantic dash to escape the glare of the single bulb in the closet. They instantly burrowed into every crevice they could find.

Suffice it to say I immediately fell to the floor, leaped up and started swatting at myself like a lunatic. I was in all-out panic mode. I had to talk myself down just so I could create a rational response. Otherwise, I may have ran screaming and leaped 8 floors to the parking lot.

Instead, I started stripping off my clothes. There was nowhere to hang them; I could only dump them on the floor. As I started a piece-by-piece inspection/cleaning process, the roaches just started crawling all over my nekkid body. I swatted and swatted, but panic started to set in again. I pulled on my trousers and a shirt and marched quickly back to the apartment. I asked the nice fat lady if I could use her bathroom. She agreed. In the bathroom, I stripped again and carefully scanned my shirt, pants an shoes for roaches. Quite a few were found, quite a few were squished and the rest escaped.

Finally convinced I was roach-free, I went back to the lock box. Most of the roaches had scattered. I shimmied up, located her drop, found it had a broken F connector, fixed the connector and plugged it in. I left my skivvies and uniform jacket on the floor. I left the lockbox cover on the floor, too. Fuck that. I wasn't about to shimmy back up and futz with that thing.

After a careful roach re-inspection, I went back to the apartment. The cable TV was clear and sharp. The children were dancing. Fat momma was happy. I had her sign, gave her a receipt and walked down the stairs, past the dice game and into my truck.

I was really upset, and I used the radio to call up base and read them the riot act about cable TV in the projects. I was advised to shut up and drive back in. Upon arrival, my boss was prepared to chew me out inre "proper use of the radio system", but I sat him down and told him the roach story. He sent me home and told me to pick up a new uniform the next day.

tl;dr: I once took a roach shower.

Hi Andrew!

What's your favorite all-American dish?

I've heard there's pretty girls in Mozambique and the sunny sky is aqua blue. And all the people like to stop and speak and that it's very nice to stay a week or two.

Did you help the Man of the House out of tough scrapes, like when his Aunt Agatha insisted he marry Madeline Basset, a girl who writes poems about the stars being God's daisy chain?