OT/OOP Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: [missing] links

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Friday, July 4, 2003, at 08:21  AM, Avraham haRofeh of Sudentur 
wrote:

>> And no, his name is not Mario Nebbits.
>
> This is the second or third time I've seen that name in recent weeks. 
> WHO is
> Mario Nebbits?

Some four or five, or more, Pennsics ago, some member of this list 
(IIRC, somebody from Oklahoma, but neither of the Deckers) went to 
Pennsic or some other long war-type event, either leaving a vacation 
autoreply set for her work e-mail address (also the subscribed address 
for the Cooks' List), or maybe she went on vacation without 
unsubscribing and her mailbox filled up.

Anyway, we were quite a high-traffic list at the time, and normally 
there'd be maybe 200 posts in a day. This person's mail program, or 
local server, or something, decided to reply to each and every post, in 
turn, with a notice sent to the Cooks' List stating that so-and-so was 
on vacation, we should only stop spamming her mailbox, and if we had 
any questions we should contact the sysadmin, Mario Nebbits (I think 
this was some kind of bank).

And then, because suddenly we were all getting 400 messages a day 
instead of 200, the server began to reply to its own messages to the 
effect that So-and-so was on vacation, with posts that said that 
So-and-so was on vacation. Making 600 posts. Or, rather, since it then 
replied to _those_ posts...

...Basically the end of the world as we know it. And digest users had a 
really fun time, as you can imagine, with digests being generated about 
every two minutes containing nothing but the same message, over and 
over, with a different subject line.

Since it was Pennsic (or some other War) week and we were 
uncharacteristically low on food/historical content anyway (this may or 
may not have been the year of The Great Twinkie Debates), there was a 
certain amount of picking on Mario Nebbits. I thought it was a great 
name for poking fun at, with its sort of unmatching, unbalanced 
elements. As in Ophelia Wong, or Heathcliff Moskowitz (both real 
people, BTW). And, since he was the only name to which we could even 
indirectly attach blame for this problem, there was a certain amount of 
ragging on old Mario, even though we knew he wasn't really to blame. 
Okay, we were an angry mob with pitchforks and Mario Nebbits remains, 
to this day, collateral damage.

Adamantius