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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

"Snarkout" comes from one of my all-time favorite books for young'ns -- Daniel Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys and the Avacado of Death. If you haven't read it, I recommend it, and the other works in the Pinkwater oeuvre, highly.

My first experiences with networks were FIDOnet BBSes in junior high, when I was "zigzag"; when I made the great leap forward to AppleLink (soon to transmogrify into America Online), I was "Doomsday." Both those names were incredibly lame (although zigzag has a certain naive charm), so I picked up another when I went off to college. Sadly, I was not the only one who wanted to be sassy@brown.edu, and the system then in place to set up mail aliases didn't check for duplicates. When too much of my email was ending up in the inbox of the ersatz sassy, I fled to a nickname that I thought would be less contested. And I like it very much, thank you.

One of my coworkers, whom I knew in high school, still persists in calling me "zigzag." One can't escape one's past.