Facebook ruined me
For around 15 years I’ve lived a double life, I’ve kept secrets from my “online friends” and “offline friends” alike, I’ve hidden who I am and that all came crashing down with the invention of Facebook.
I’ve been online since year 9 of high school which would have made me about 13. Back then I think 28.8k modems were all the rage and meant you were ‘super fast’ compared to the 14.4k versions. I remember my first time online with MSN, I had spent a minute connecting to find that there was absolutely no difference online to offline, atleast, that was my first thought. Then I discovered Microsoft Comic Chat and it changed my world. I spent hours on MSNs IRCX chat servers talking to people from across the pond although I was a kid, I had no sense of maturity in “real life”, let alone online, and swiftly became banned from MSN for being a general pillock. Who knew a SysOp could actually ban you from a chatroom!
Well, this is where my learning about PCs actually began. After my 3 day ban from the service I was back in the chatrooms under the name “PeterPan” (I have no idea why I picked that!), I got talking to some American lady who proceeded to rename me “Woody” (at which point I didn’t realise it was rude!) and so I changed my name.
I racked up some pretty major phone bills in my first year of the online word (I think the record was £300 in one month and sadly this was quite a regular occurance). I found some chatrooms on the MSN servers called #England, #13-19UKTeens and some others I can’t really remember. I made friends with lots of people (some of which I still know today!) and began my entrance into Geekdom. It first began with “script kiddy” antics (I used ShowDown Pro for mIRC) that allowed me to do illegal things (Denial of Service fellow chatters) and takeover channels so I became the temporary owner. The more I got into the takeovers, the more I got involved in a “gang” which soon entered into a war with a rival gang, we would constantly fight to own channels, albeit a “friendly rivaly” in the sense we would all visit the channels no matter who owned them, with maybe some banter thrown in. The longer this went on the more we looked into ways of keeping ownership of the channel so we looked into IRC bots (a piece of software that acts as a person but has a permanent internet connection unlike our dialup modems). At one point, myself and a guy called Chris even looked into seeking employment with Microsoft as SysOps for their chat network, which we would clearly abuse the power of, so that we owned the channels constantly, at which point we became friends with an Australian lady called SysOp_Mermaid (who just happened to be one of the hottest women on the planet!).
My lust for power drove me to learn more about IT in order to overcome my opponents, this drove me from learning about how to install and use software to learning how to write my own software.
Fast forward a few years and I started DJing with a friend from school, at which point my name was “DJ-Woody” which after a while, looked a bit silly so I decided to change the y to an e and so Woode was born, alas, this looked even more silly! On this day, DJ-WoodE was born! Eventually, as things do, my time as a DJ stopped, and so I dropped the DJ- part, and that is how I became known as WoodE.
WoodE was my online alter-ego, my escape from the real world. No one at school or work, as I got older, knew anything about WoodE and vice versa, no one who knew WoodE knew who Grant Bennett was. WoodE was, over a long period, a chatroom owner, a bot owner, a botnet owner, a chat network oper (SysOp), a man of all things technical, a man online with a life offline. All the while, Grant Bennett was at school, a DJ, a boyfriend, a son, a worker (post-16) with a life online. Never did these two seperate entities cross paths.
I’ve met a lot of people from first meeting online, I’ve been to many “meets”, my first one was when I was 17 down in Essex, I met a lot of people from the old MSN #England room, I had the phone number for SysOp_Mermaid (Victoria is her real name), I had “power”, I had anonomity, and then Facebook was born.
Facebook forced me to, for the first time, combine the two seperate people in me, it forced me to become Grant ‘WoodE’ Bennett. Something I tried to avoid for 15 years. There’s no dark reason for wanting to keep my “lives” seperate other than I was different online to who I was offline, I acted differently, online I had more confidence and more prowess. I would still prefer that my lives be seperate, I would prefer those who I went to school with not know WoodE, not because I’ve done (much) wrong as WoodE but because it isn’t who Grant is, the Grant that they know. I don’t mind people who know me as WoodE now knowing me as Grant but I guess I preferred being WoodE as I liked being anonymous and was paranoid about people finding out too much information about the person behind WoodE.
WoodE was the geek in me, the (at the beginning of my online ‘career’) “hacker”, the war monger, the web developer, the IT man. Grant was the guy who went to school.
Facebook changed me, Facebook ruined me.
Category: Personal | Tagged: October 25th, 2009