649 Oh, man, you are going to love this! I pulled off the most awesome prank in an IRC chatroom yesterday.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the term, "IRC," it stands for "Internet Relay Chat" and it's one of the oldest forms of chat on the web. These days, it has pretty much become a refuge for geeks like me. I've been chatting on IRC for years.

There is this chatroom that I used to hang out in a lot which I prefer not to mention by name. A few months ago, I decided to stop going there. Maybe I'll tell you more about that one day, but suffice it to say that I felt that I was no longer wanted there. It wasn't the first time that I quit going to the chatroom, but this time, I really meant it.

Anyway, yesterday I decided to go back into the chatroom, but I was going to go incognito. The people in this chatroom know me as "Bernie_M," but yesterday, I signed in as "Listener_649."

The chatroom is associated with a radio show, and the chat client they use on their website defaults to a name like "Listener_XXX" if you don't enter a nickname, or "nick," for short. When you see someone with a nick like that, you know you're looking at a new user, or "newb." So I entered the chatroom cleverly disguised as a newb. How awesome is that? I swear, I am so freakin' l33t. Ha ha!

When I first logged on, I was just like "hi, what's up?," you know, keeping it cool. People are like "Welcome, Listener_649." It was so funny! They actually thought I was some newbie! They had no clue that it was me! Ha ha!

I just wanted to lurk a bit and be a fly on the wall, but people started asking me a lot of questions. Some people in this chatroom have a tendancy to mess around with newbs, and I started getting the idea that my nick was drawing more attention than I wanted. In order to become less conspicuous, I changed my nick to "Six_Forty_Nine." Now, I was really under the radar. I am a master of disguse! Ha ha!

Then I just chatted for a bit, being careful not to say anything that would tip anybody off to my true identity. I think one person may have suspected something, because he asked, "Hey Six_Forty_Nine, how's your roomba doing?"

But I was too smart for him.

I said, "What's a roomba?" How's that for quick thinking? Ha ha!

And yet, this guy kept at me. He's like, "Bernie_M" this and "Bernie_M" that. I just played dumb. I told him he must be mistaking me for somebody else. When he continued to press the point, I just told him that he sounds obsessed with this Bernie_M guy and made a joke insinuating that he had a crush on him. I wish I could have seen the look on his face when I said that! I was totally pwning this guy. Ha ha!

After a while, I got bored and logged out of the chatroom.

OK, so maybe that wasn't a prank, per se, but still, wasn't that great?

Wasn't it?
- Bernie  ¶ 4:04 PM