The meeting was fun! The meetings seem to be getting steadily smaller, which can be cozy. All you new faces seemed to dominate. It was a pleasure meeting you all!
In honor of an extremely nice young lady named Katrina, who attended her first meeting, some of us were discussing their traumatic “first meeting” stories. I didn’t tell mine there, so I thought I’d tell it here…
I had been following the hacking/phreaking/whatever scenes since BBSing was king, but never got up the nerve to go and actually meet people in the real world. I finally decided to attend Beyond HOPE in August of 1997, but I missed it for failure to get out of work. I figured that if I was ready to do that, I should damn well be okay for the smaller meetings. I determined to make it to a meeting before 1997 was through.
In August of 1997, I finally made it out to my first meeting. I happened to know that two guys from the old PLA discussion list, Compudroid and Zeno Strifer (then known as Evilork,) attended the NYC meetings. I bugged them to meet me there, and they agreed.
I stumbled into the Citigroup building (then known as Citicorp) not knowing what to expect. I wandered around the seating area for a bit, until I noticed some kids with hacker-ish t-shirts. One guy turned around, and muttered “26?” to me, in a ‘keep-a-low-profile’ voice.
“Uhh.. 26,” I replied nervously. I was but a wee lad of 19, and for the first time in my life, I was in the presence of what I imagined must be a bunch of – gasp – real life hackers! Until then, I had been totally solo in my geeky ways, apart from writing to people online.
I introduced myself as Rufus, which is what I called myself back then. “From the guy in ‘Bill and Ted?’” someone asked. “Uhh, no…” I proceeded to explain that I named myself after Rufus T Firefly, one of Groucho Marx’s characters. Luckily, they seemed to know who I was talking about. Introducing myself as my handle was weirding me out enough as it was.
So, someone pulled up a chair for me, and I sat down, trying not to be noticeable. (I have sort of a talent for that, when I need it.) The conversations flew all over the place, and I just soaked things up for a bit. Someone told a reportedly true story involving disgraced auto maven John DeLorean losing his dog, and I passed a bad joke involving DeLorean getting the idea for his automobile’s trademark gull-wing doors while walking his dog. (picture it, you’ll get it..) Everyone chuckled, and I suddenly felt a lot better. That didn’t really prepare me for what happened next, though..
Captain Crunch showed up.
John Draper. The original phone phreak. I thought a tableful of hackers was cool, but I didn’t imagine I’d meet this guy. I had stumbled upon the old Esquire article in library files, and read it through far more times than I could remember. I had heard stories about this guy which made my head spin. And, there he was.
A comparison for someone out of the loop – this was like going to a small “Star Trek” club event, and having Leonard Nimoy or Patrick Stewart breeze in.
Some of the guys from the table, who I only found out later were 2600 Magazine staffers, greeted him warmly. I, of course, stammered like a starstruck idiot. Luckily, there were others at the meeting as starstruck as I. Crunch was very amiable toward everyone, taking time to answer questions for a bunch of people before sitting down at the table and joining in the various conversations.
That was about the time where I, after forcing myself back to my senses, realized that gatherings like this could be really cool. Later, I met Compudroid and Evilork, and they turned out to be really cool in person as well.
With every meeting I felt more and more comfortable. The people were great, the topics were interesting, and it was just too cool to be able to actually discuss things with people which I had only been able to type to people in late-night BBS or web sessions. I have never been the type of person to strive to “belong” somewhere, but it did feel good when it started to happen naturally.
Ripple-dissolve back to the present day…
I had hoped to meet up with my pal Murd0c today, but he apparently couldn’t escape the confines of Pennsylvania long enough to make it to NYC today. You were missed, Murd0c!
I do keep meaning to write about my experiences at the UFP rally on February 15th. Thanks for all the emails. However, every time I do get the chance to sit down to write about it, I can’t seem to get anything comprehensible down. Some sort of weird writer’s block, I guess.
Now for some bad Haiku…
You think of time as
something you cannot control
I can tweak it, though
Watch Fox News Channel
for the latest one-sided
yellow journalism
If you butter toast
and launch it out into space
what will it stick to?
Good Chocobo!
Please enjoy this betel nut.
Happily you wark!
Can you tell I’m tired?