Strange occurances at TCP Towers

[Be warned - This post was written whilst this troll was burning the candles]
[            at both ends and in the middle at TCP Towers. As a result,     ]
[            this post will probably be a little incoherent in places.      ]

Something strange is happening at TCP Towers... however for things to really become clear, a little explaination is required.

TCP Towers has a local point of presence in Southampton (well, we are based there). However, the problems start with the free local phone calls that we suffer from. Any luser that has a phone line provided by the local cable company, Videotron, can get free local calls to TCP Towers between certain hours. Like 7pm to 7am weekdays and all of the weekend. Now, when TCP Towers was first built this wasn't a problem. We didn't have that many really sad lusers.

However, things change. We now have lusers doing indepth testing of our lines. Its nice to know that our modems can handle 40+ hour long connections, but we really wish that they'd not do it all of the time. We have lusers clocking up 80-90 hours online a week quite regulary. This has lead to problems with the non-line hogging lusers not being able to point and drool over their EMail and Usenet.

The result of this is a flamewar errupts on the local newsgroups every now and again between the line hoggers and the reasonable luser[1] that lasts for a couple of weeks. Eventually it charms down and the line hoggers tend to cut back their usage for a while.

Not so long ago, another ISP in Southampton put their charges up and implemented a time limit. The natural result was that their heaviest lusers came over to us and started using up time online as if their modem was about to be repossed.

So, the trolls got together and had a big discussion with the King of TCP Towers. In the end we decided to limit the usage lusers could make of our system[2] during the worst hours and also increase our subscription fee. The limits we're having will only really affect the lusers who are using up the most time online... like the 5 lusers who between them managed to account for 5% of all of the time spent online by all of our customers on the local POP.

Most of our customers accepted this, although there was much muttering about the price increase. Most lusers accepted (once we'd explained it lots and lots of times) that the extra money we'd be getting in would go towards getting new toys for them to play with (ie more modems and phone lines).

A small, but very vocal, hardcore of lusers didn't. Strangely enough, these include some of the heaviest lusers who wouldn't be able to point and drool on the web or download images from the red-lit parts of Usenet as much as before. So a flamewar errupted.... and Phil the Peeved bravely waded in to answer the lusers questions.

We found something new though. One of our lusers is really a Net kook in disguise. Now, I've had complaints about what this guy has posted to Usenet before. However, it was nothing major and a warning got him to shut up. He really came into his own with this flamewar. He basically started to post personal attacks on Phil because TCP wasn't going to implement his idea for solving the lack of free lines. First of all, he read one of the points in our original announcement as putting his idea into use on BT lines. However, it had to be pointed out that he wasn't reading the original accouncement correctly and this wasn't the case. After reading Phil's reply to his post, he posted his first real rant. This claimed that Phil was a parrot, constantly repeating everything back again. He then started to claim things like buying decent modems was a bad idea as they cost too much and why couldn't we just use those cheapo white box modems from PC World. He ranted about why Phil hadn't made sure that Videotron was supplying lines with "the normal speech AGC (automatic gain control) DISABLED (so as not to corrupt the data-only signal)". Now, it may seem strange to this luser, but the senior engineer at Videotron Southampton hasn't even heard of this. He also started to change the words from Phil's posts, which gave us a hint of what was to come. In the end, he claimed that customers not having to pay their phone calls was none of TCP's concern... we just had to provide enough modems. This rant was about 140 lines of stuff like that... written in such a way that it was hard to read (ie the usual stuff like forgetting to use capitals were they are needed (his finger must have slipped on the the foam on the shift key), non-existant punctuation, weird ways of quoting people which make it hard to see what he has written and bad spelling).

We had another rant of a similar length and in a similar vein. More of the "My idea is wonderful. I don't care if its technically hard to implement, its a great idea just do it" and "You must be idiots if you can't do this".

More rants followed, which often disagreed with each other. In one Phil was described as a technical wizard. In another, a moron. He then started using EMail that "other customers had sent to him". Now, they may have been real EMails (they didn't show any of this lusers writing technique), but they were also from the lusers who are known to be using the system the most. He then started demanding that the MD of TCP come forward and answer all of his questions. There is an interesting point here. A week before all of this ranting started, this luser visited our sister company and talked to our MD down there and ask for the same facility to reduce line congestion. Our MD pointed out that we were not going to do it and gave the reasons why.

The last rant this luser posted (and the reason behind this post) was this evening. This luser ended up making up a list of other lusers' posts and Phil's reply to them. Except that this luser wrote the "reply's from Phil". Its not differcult to tell this (for starters, Phil actually knows how to use the shift key to get letters in uppercase).

We've already had a couple of our better trained lusers flame this kook already. And then John the unstable did, abit from a home account. Whilst it was a nice flame, I ended up cancelling it was a number of lusers know that what John's home account is. Unfortunately, I accidently cancelled the original offending article (hey, its late I just cancelled the first message-id I saw).

This is the strange happening... I got on the phone to John and got him to give me a copy of the article he had. That's right, I un-cancelled this venomous article. That may sound a little un-BOFHish. However, I realised that this luser has only been shooting themselves in the foot with the attitude his has in his posts. The most recent article goes from being a pain to being slanderous :) Its kinda nice since it gives a point from where we can justify vaping this luser's account.

I'm guessing that this luser will probably claim that TCP forged the article from him at some point as well.

[sigh] I can see that Friday is going to be really fun at this rate. Anyone want a proto net.kook ? Going free...

[1]	well, as reasonable as lusers ever get.
[2]	although we're not limiting their usage as my as I'd like, ie non at all.

Posted on 31st May 1996