Went home and logged back online to find our office friends in full damage-control mode, burning court records, censoring public opinion sites and forging cancels on Usenet to keep yesterday's spectacular defeat private. How do I know this? Posted news of it to alt.homepages.geocities. Got cancelled. Posted news of it to alt.censorship. Got cancelled. Tried to call Channel Seven. Got a knock at the door. Hid in basement.

Being the Bastard (ex-)Geo From Hell means having a lot of goons after you.

Got irate email from CEO telling me to open the door. Didn't get to read it on acct. of mail filters detecting the attached Surplus Direct spam and throwing it out. Catted together the entire contents of ~/spammail and sent it back.

Being the Bastard (ex-)Geo From Hell means not letting a little spam wreck your entire day.

Slipped out the back and hid out at a friend's house. So... they wanna do damage control, eh? Let's see 'em handle some REAL damage.

Their goons' next step would be to scour my homepage to try and determine where I might hide out. Naturally, found some fun things to do here....
 

* * * in Geo HQ * * * 

"What's on the homepage?" Bastard Rookie In Training(2)
Let's see--
Lots of garbage ... bell,bell,bell ..form feed ... 'nother form feed... Hey! The l'il sonofabiscuit buggered my terminal!

* * * Back to the BGFH * * *

Next order or business is to zap that infernal SATAN scanner that keeps probing around on my server. After the Geo spook resets his console a few times and stumbles his way to page2.html, a warez copy of Tombraider 3 is waiting for him.

"Ooohh, Lara Croft!" *click* Tech A

Okay...so it wasn't tombraider. It said it was... the loze runs it, gets a "File is corrupt" error erstwhile not noticing the embedded trojan, and half his network is down for the day.

Of course we can't have all these Bubbas running about town a-lookin' for me, can we? The remaining portion of their server is put to good use sending (forged) mail to all GeoStaff alerting them that my dead body's just been found floating downriver, so call off the manhunt.

Being the Bastard Geo From Hell means faking your own death, at least once a month.

Being the GeoCEO means never getting wise to this, ever.

* * * Bastard Rookie In Training (2) is adeptly handling the customers. * * *

"Network outage? Down-or-not-responding? No no, sweetie, you'se got it all wrong. What did you say your ISP was again?

* * * Meanwhile, in Geo Conference Room * * *

GeoCEO: Men, we have a problem. Our pop-up ads are not generating the response they used to. Could it be, people are getting sick of popups so soon? Well... I'd tend to blame some sort of conspiracy by the browser makers and ad-filter-software developers... ...Also, the major search engines are detecting all the window.open's and banning us as a porn site. Regardless of the reasons, we need to come up with a new annoying advertising gimmick that will regain the visitors' attention. We need ideas!

"How about flickering ones with subliminal messages?" Geo Queen of Rain

"Nope, already doing it. How do you think I got that new model-year 2000 Ferrari that's parked out front?" GeoCEO

"By the way, what ever did you do with your OLD model-year 2000 Ferrari? And how come OUR salaries haven't raised in over 3 years?" Tech A

"Um, er, nevermind." GeoCEO

"I think I've got a hypothesis: Popups have lost their annoyance factor... (random "BOO"-ing starts up from around the table)...if we were to make them even more annoying, users would respond to them--" Tech B

"Yeah, by closing them faster!" Tech C

"Hey now, let's hear him out..." GeoCEO

"All right, I have a couple demos with me, I'll show you the keys to the city of enhanced revenue..." Tech B

"...Keys to the city of enh--What is this s**t, you're worse than that damn narrator!" Geo Queen of Rain

"Hey!" Narrator

Ignoring GQoR, Tech B clicks his URL into GeoCEO's laptop, disables the CEO's GeoCities JavaScript ban (even the GeoCEO is no idiot) and waits as the popups appear.

"Ack! These are horrible!" GeoCEO

"Close 'em! Close 'em! I think I'm having a siezure!" Tech A

"Dammit, I'm trying!" GeoCEO

"The wave of the future, eh? You can't close them. The only way to make them leave you alone is to click on the banner." Tech B

Tech A disgorges his breakfast on the floor, convulsing.

"No way. What if I..." GeoCEO

The CEO punches the "X" to kill the popup, and two more appear. A Dr. Watson window pops up alerting to a low-memory situation. The popup's banner loads, reading "We are GeoCities. We are holding your RAM as hostage. Click on all the banners and it will be returned to you."

"Have we figured out how to do that, reclaim the memory leaked away by all the pops?" Tech C

"No. But they'll click the banners, just the same..." Tech B

"Devilish, I love it." GeoCEO, rebooting. "You said there were more?"

"Yep." Tech B, pulling up another example. "This one's a little more... active."

"It looks like a popup, ordinary enough..." GeoCEO

Just as he says this, the pop becomes active and scoots underneath his mouse pointer.

"What the dev...This thing is like a @Q#$% parasite!" GeoCEO, frantically moving his mouse cursor away as the popup chases it, flickering "CLICK HERE".

Tech A, who had somewhat recovered from the first banner-induced epileptic attack, fell back to the floor jittering and frothing and the mouth.

"It's like some ugly chick at a dance, who you just can't seem to ditch..." Geo Queen of Rain

"Like your wife?" Tech C

"Yea-HEY!!" GQoR

(Glancing back to LCD) "Oooh, I see our profits skyrocketing already! And they said greed would kill us." GeoCEO

"But wait, there's more!" Tech B (More booing, flying objects, tomatoes, spitwads, etc. from the rest of the table)

"If it's another popup you're being delivered to the Microsoft building air-mail!" Geo Gofer, edging open one of the windows

"No, not another popup. Even better. I call it the AdSquare...." Tech B