OT School reunions

[Simon Taylor]

BT Internet actually.

[Howard Neil]

AOL means "I agree"

[ARWadsworth]

Well it is 25 years since I left school and the school will be knocked down in the next few months.

I cannot recognise half of them by their photos on school facebook page:-)

I stayed friends with the ones I wanted to and I still ocasionally see them (distance is a bit of a bugger)

Now if I knew certain teachers were going to the reunion I would definately go. I owe one of two of them a pint as a thank you. It might be too late in another 25 years.

[ARWadsworth]

Now the odd thing is, most of the people who have confirmed for the reunion were the ones who I hated.

[Roger Mills]

Does it? In what language?

[John Williamson]

It has become a hallowed part of Usenet jargon.

It dates back to the days when users of AOL were first able to access Usenet. They would quote the entire (200 line) post they were replying to, and type on the last line "I agree", or if they were bored and had plenty of time "I agree with that post". Nowadays, a lot of older posters will snip as needed, and just type AOL on the last line.

Another in joke dating from the same period is the name news.eternal.september as the name of a news server which a lot of people posting here use. Each September, a number of new people came on line when they started college with all the bad habits that go with novices. When AOL users learnt about Usenet, the September phenomenon lasted all year, hence Eternal September. (Or so I understand, others may know better...)

[Hugh - Was Invisible]

Only been eternal for 2 years:

Dear users of Motzarella.org,

for technical reasons the Motzarella reader servers

news.motzarella.org, nntp.motzarella.org, reader.motzarella.org, reader80.motzarella.org and reader443.motzarella.org

will will be replaced by the following servers:

news.eternal-september.org reader80.eternal-september.org and reader443.eternal-september.org

on July 1, 2009.

[John Williamson]

From Eternal September's homepage header.:- "Today is September, 6554 1993, the september that never ends"

I'd say the person running it was aware of the joke when he had to solve his server problems. I sort of remember there was quite a story behind the need to change.

Motzarella was commonly, but affectionately, known as the cheesy server....

[ARWadsworth]

That sounds like a job for antibiotics

[Andy Champ]

:P

Andy

[jgharston]

I went to my school's about-to-be-demolished-and-replaced get-together. It's embarrasing how young all my former teachers seem to be ;)

JGH

[Gib Bogle]

What struck me at the reunion I went to was how few of the people I recognized. We all started at the same time (aged about 13), but there were many classes and I knew well only those in my class or those who excelled in sport or athletics. About 6 turned up from my class, out of

1. I was, for my sins, in the A class, but most of those at the reunion seemed to be from the bottom classes. The most amusing part of the evening was after the meal, when a number of guys stood up and recounted school stories. These tended to be about crime and punishment (there was caning in those days). I got the strong impression that the guys who didn't pay much attention to academic matters had much more fun at school than those, like me, who wanted to do well in exams. Interestingly a lot of these "no-hopers" had done very well in business. Maybe they got a lot out of school after all.

[dave]

Were you perhaps, the school "swot"?

[dave]

Well done OP for a super-long thread :-

[jgharston]

gah! Blame GG, that was the only post visible when I replied to it ;)

JGH

[Gib Bogle]

Not "the", but "a". This is a school with a very good academic record, and in the top class it was (and presumably still is) very competitive. I don't think I was the hardest worker in the class.

[Gib Bogle]

Thanks. I'd wondered about that.

[Mark]

Perhaps you hated everyone ;-)

[Mark]

The few I know of have had success inversely proportional to their marks at school.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Those who do very well at school can end up in academic careers. Never the best paid.