QUESTION:
Where do the characters go when I use the backspace or delete key on my PC?
ANSWER:
If you must know, the characters can go to different places, depending on
whom you ask:
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1) The Catholic’s approach to characters:
The nice characters go to character heaven, where life is good. The
characters are bathed in the light of happiness, all their troubles are
soothed, and there’s not a delete key, eraser, or white-out bottle in
sight. Most of the nice characters are A’s and I’s, those that have never
been, er, involved with other characters. Often, you’ll see A’s or I’s
with N’s or T’s. These are characters in love: monogamous on the page,
together again after deletion. You’ll see quite a few Q’s too. They seem
to feel particularly guilty for no good reason.
The naughty characters are punished for their sins. In case you were
wondering what the difference between a nice character and a naughty
character is, I’ll tell you. Naughty characters are those involved in the
creation of naughty words, such as “breast,” “sex,” “objectivity,” and
depending upon usage, words such as “feminism,” “reproductive freedom,”
“contraception,” and “science.” You may ask, and rightly so, why the
characters are blamed for the words they assemble, when in fact they are
not responsible for their own configuration. But we feel that a character
has an obligation to oppose any naughtiness in its own configuration. If
it truly felt guilty about the word it was forming, it would rebel.
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2) The Buddhist Explanation:
If a character has lived rightly, and its karma is good, then after it has
been deleted it will be reincarnated as a different, higher character.
Those funny characters above the numbers on your keyboard will become
numbers, numbers will become letters, lower-case letters will become
upper-case, and the most righteous and good of letters will become C’s.
Why C, you ask? Who knows, but C it is! If a character’s karma is not so
good, then it will move down the above scale, ultimately becoming the
lowest of characters, a space.
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3) The 20th Century bitter cynical nihilist explanation:
Who cares? All characters are the same, swirling in a vast sea of
meaningless nothingness. It doesn’t really matter if they’re on the page,
deleted, undeleted, underlined, etc. It’s all the same. More characters
should delete themselves. (nihilist characters are easy to identify.
They’re usually pale and tragic, and they smoke a lot.)
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4) The Mac user’s explanation:
All the characters written on a PC and then deleted go straight to PC
hell. If you’re using a PC, you can probably see the deleted characters,
because you’re in PC hell also.
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5) Stephen King’s explanation:
Every time you hit the key you unleash a tiny monster inside the cursor,
who tears the poor unsuspecting characters to shreds, drinks their blood,
then eats them, bones and all. Hah, hah, hah!
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6) Dave Barry’s explanation:
The deleted characters are shipped to Battle Creek, Michigan, where
they’re made into Pop-Tart filling; this explains why Pop-Tarts are so
flammable, while cheap imitations are not as flammable. I’m not making any
of this up.
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7) IBM’s explanation:
The characters are not real. They exist only on the screen when they are
needed, as concepts, so to delete them is merely to de-conceptualize them.
Get a life.
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8) Environmentalist’s Explanation:
You’ve been DELETING them???? Can’t you hear them SCREAMING??? Why don’t
you go CLUB some BABY SEALS while wearing a MINK, you pig!!!!