`Listen to the fool's reproach! It is a kingly title!'

-- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake

You don't agree??
But why just Amiga owners?
A brief history of the Amiga
What's so bad about the Amiga?
How to spot an Amiga owner
How to deal with Amiga owners
Comments and Feedback
How to contact the author

You don't agree?

I hear two cries from everybody when I do this page. `Surely not only Amiga owners?' and `But you can't tar everybody with the same brush!' are the more polite ways of putting them. :) I'll deal with the first in a moment. The second, yes. I know there are many Amiga owners who are extremely nice people, I can think of quite a few. The thing is, there are always exceptions to every rule. Amiga users are generally immature and arrogant, and there's no getting away from this. Unless you have actually met enough of them to decide this for yourself, there is no way of convincing you.

If on the other hand, you disagree because you do own an Amiga, then sod off.

But why just Amiga owners?

But of course it's not just Amiga owners. Here I'm only using `Amiga owner' to describe the whole section of computerland that gets on everybody's nerves ; .netters like you (I'm not a .netter) probably use the term `AOL user' to convey your undying hatred (although AOL users are normally just notorious for being utterly hopeless, not stuck-up with it). The reason why I do call people Amiga owners because the phenomenon originated on the Amiga. The Amiga was marketed as a games machine, and thus attracted a lot of 10 and 11 year olds whose parents wanted to keep quiet for a little while. The offspring of richer parents, or the more beleagured ones, demanded all sorts of addons, the modem being one of them. It is in this way that `Amiga owner' culture spread, and when many original Amiga owners metaphorically grew up and got a PC, they carried this on. Now that the Amiga's heyday is over, you'd more likely find the aforementioned beleagured parents buying their beloved children PCs, and so it all continues.

Like I say, you can really only generalise, and I'm only going by what I've seen myself. If anybody else has any other theories as to why the little annoying prats around cyberspace seem to invariably be ex-Amiga owners or actually have them, please let me know. I'd like to encourage debate on here, so I'd like to know your views (read sentence at top of last section)

A brief history of the Amiga

I really can't be bothered to do the research here. Prehaps some other time. :)

What's so bad about the Amiga?

The tragic thing is, nothing major. It could have been quite a neat little computer if it wasn't dragged into the cesspit by the majority of its users, even though, and I am greatful to Richard Murray for this information, some Amigas were marketed with song lyrics by B-52 imprinted on their PCBs.. love shack baby! :) As I said before, it was marketed as a games machine, which lead to piracy and was part of its downfall. The only slightly suspect things about the Amiga that I can think of, are Workbench (a sad parody of a WIMP interface), and the infamous Guru Meditation Errors that appeared in earlier models. Now, apparently, while the Amiga was being developed, it ran a program in hardware that was connected to an external brainwave monitor, that checked to see if the person in front of the computer was relaxed before using it, and if not it would pop up an error box. The problem was that that piece of code wasn't actually taken out in the first Amigas, and of course the monitor wasn't there, so you kept on getting spurious errors. Oh dear!

How to spot an Amiga owner

This really is a piece of cake. You'll usually find them posting spurious messages on the net or on bulletin boards, or hanging about Amiga BBSs and, naturally, piracy boards. On systems like Fidonet, you can spot an Amiga owner instantly if they post with a program called `Spot', a great program title for adolescents if there ever was one.

If you're not entirely sure, look at the writing style. Amiga owners started up their very own, which originally was peculiar to them alone but appears to have spread like a malignant cancer to PC and, to a lesser extent, Mac users. Amiga users always like 2 change words in 2 numbers and letters and u will always know them by there bad grammer and, punctuation some times u c them even writeing in 1 long sentence like this bec0s they think that 2 behave in this way and 2 use daft spelings is kewl Miggy usrs have there own words like lamer and u wIlL ofTen fiND tHEm miXinG CApital + l0WeR CaSE leTTErs lIKE tHIS iF U Take All Ths iN2 aCC0uNT iT iS Relly eEze 2 TeLL Just WHo iS a MiGgY 0wnR + Wh0 IsN'T.

How to deal with Amiga owners

When you meet an Amiga user in the street, or even on a board or the .net, the cardinal rule is to stay calm. This is obviously easier to do if you've come across one through mail, but still important to remember. Because these people are generally all the same, there are all sorts of ways of dealing with them, and you probably have your own ideas. But, here are a few general points to bear in mind.

• Unless you are being deliberately and purposely attacked, try not to provoke them. This is probably akin to belabouring a thick but extremely fierce rhinoscerous around the head with a club ; it might be very easy to put them down, but it is wiser not to annoy them until you know exactly with whom you are dealing.
• Try not to descend to their level. This is tricky to do at first, and in some ways is linked to the concept of staying calm, but if you reply to a flame like `u R sAd + UrE mUMs a Wh0Re' with a comment like `tell your mum to close her legs, the fish keep dropping out', you aren't thinking up anything new or original and you are playing a game that is familiar to them. At the very very least think up new flames, or take a different tack, for example I had a screenful of insults from one Amiga user and I just quoted it all back and typed a :-) onto the end. Although it is probably less likely one would be able to spot one in the street and unlikelier still that you'd attempt conversation with them, this idea still applies. What I usually do is say or do something surreal or bizarre, and while they're off their guard, go in for the kill.
• Never forget that their age range is likely to be around 12 to 15 - or even if you know for a fact that the Amiga user in question is older then you can treat them as such, because of course, they're about that mature. Because of this, if they absolutely get on your nerves, you can always threaten to get their parents involved ; there is nothing more annoying for an early teenager than to be reminded of the existence of their parents (believe me, I've been there, and you might have been too), and it is more possible than not that their parents have exactly the same opinion of their angelic offspring as you do.

These, as I say, are a guide. Base your own technique for dealing with these pests on those points, but don't copy them verbatim - it is important to keep them guessing as to what their adversaries are about to do next.

Comments and Feedback

So, you've heard what I think! But am I the only person to think this way?? By no means. Because this page is relatively new there's very few people who've heard about it, so please get scribbling about any funny or annoying experiences you have had and they'll be put up here. If any Amiga owners should choose to write here, then their messages shall be put up here and duly ridiculed. But, meanwhile, here's a selection, most recent first.

From : Martin Donlon, martyd@hotmail.com, 1/11/96

My next door neighbour bought an Amoeba about two years ago, with the intention of helping him with his homework and helping his mother with her accounting job. So, the first day he got it, I went to his house to have a look - only to find that he had the RF cable plugged into the wrong socket and was calling the shop he had bought it from because `The joystick port at the back is too big'. He had of course, like any sensible Amoeba owner, tried to plug the two joysticks into the 25-pin serial port. How he failed to notice the joystick ports on the side, I'll never know. Anyway - what the hell was he doing with two joysticks anyway (self bought, they didn't come free) when he was going to be using the Amoeba for educational use?

From : John Langfield, john@arcticbb.demon.co.uk, 28/10/96

A friend at work has an Amiga. He has been having problems with the hard disc. It keeps giving error messages. So, I sent a message in the Fidonet Amiga echo stating what the error message was and asked for help - and I only got one reply and it said, `Amigas can not run hard discs.' I have seen the one with the fault and it has two hard discs on it. So, I sent a message stating that I have seen it and it does have two hard discs. The reply to this message was that the computer must be an Archimedes or an Atari. And that I must have read the name wrong. This went on for 6 other messages making a total of 7 messages. He still thinks that you can not have hard discs on an Amiga. He must be totally thick!

Contacting the author

If you have any comments and stories, you can email me, Quintin Parker, at quintin@digibank.demon.co.uk. One word of warning. If some of you out there are tempted to mail bomb me, bear in mind that this is a BBS account, which does not accept long mails and bounces them back at you. Plus, I get to find out the email address of the perpetrator, and I have a nice Unix core dump here which I've been looking for a use for. Your address will also be published up here, so people can mailbomb you too. Don't try it.

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