Furbe's Ghost

To Neo,

I was never a person to think about having small dogs, now I’ll never know why I wouldn’t. I was never a person who understood “daschund people” and now I’ll never never be anything but one.

I will miss your smiling face and your boundless energy and your impatience and your excitement. I will miss your endless wellspring of joy and enthusiasm and the way you effortlessly made bad days better. I will miss your warmth curled inside my legs and I will miss your bright eyes staring at me when I wake up. I will miss your relentless face licking and the incessant jingle jangle of your tags mixed with the click of your nails on the hard floor. I will miss you staring at me on the toilet and the way you licked my feet after a shower. I will miss your tiny legs and your huge hairy feet and your never-ending string of foxtail injuries. I will miss your titanic courage and insurmountable confidence and the way you started shit with every dog we met. I will miss your insatiable curiosity and your complete obsession with food. I will miss the sound of you blasting through the dog door at a full run to come sit with me on the couch and the way your head shot up when you heard suspicious noises. I will miss your piercing bark and your constant need to inform me of strangers. I will miss your killer instinct and the pure joy with which you destroyed squeakers. I will miss the constant undeniable demonstrations of your eerie intelligence and the way you were a people and not just a dog. I will miss the way you knew me and the way I knew you. I will miss rubbing your belly and the softness of your fur in my hands and the way you laid your head on my arms and legs and leaned into my chest. I will miss your floppy ears and your ever sniffing nose. I will miss your noble profile and the way you had to follow everywhere.

Urinal Choice: It's not difficult.

I cannot seem to find the source of this knowledge that I acquired in the distant past. There are a wide variety of “guides” and “etiquette” pages on the internet, but they all fail in one way or another by over-complicating the topic. Sometimes they wander off into discussions of stupid bullshit like the “manliness” of the child-height urinal. Other times they suggest that certain configurations with OPEN URINALS require you to NOT USE THEM. This is patently fucking absurd. If there’s a free urinal, it is unreasonable for you to expect someone to dance around at the sink because YOU don’t like it. We all gotta pee, so fuck you.

I Made A The Net Reference

I’d understand if you don’t get the reference, but I cannot forgive you for not getting the reference. Anyone who works in technology owes it to themselves to be educated on exactly what popular culture thinks of us at any given moment. In 1995, there was no iPhone and no blogosphere. No Facebook and no Netflix. The internet was scary and the digitization of information and identity was even scarier. Orwell’s 1984 might well have been happening, even if most of the general public wouldn’t put it that way. The computer was hardly commonplace and the people who programmed and operated them were both rare and misunderstood. The possibilities for abuse of these poorly comprehended systems of information were terrible and magnificent to consider. The Net was a pop-culture response to this very thing.