Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I worked at Tektronix for a while. Before I had any official job, I got some hosting account. I got kicked off of AOL for writing bots, flooding their chat rooms, and just being annoying. I was scripting the AOL client from another Windows program. I also wrote a bot to flood their online form to send you a CD. I used every variation of my name, because I didn't want their duplicate suppression to only send me one CD, because they had those 100 free hours, or 5,000 free hours. I submitted this form a couple thousand times and for a week or so the postman would be coming with bundles of CDs wrapped up.
My mom was like, “Damn it, Brad, you're going to get in trouble.” I was like, “Eh—their fucking fault, right?” Then one day I get a phone call and I actually picked up the phone, which I normally didn't, and it was someone from AOL. They were just screaming at me. “Stop sending us all these form submissions!” I'm not normally this quick and clever, but I just yelled back, “Why are you sending me all this crap? Every day the postman comes! He's dropping off all these CDs!” They're like, “We're so sorry, sir. It won't happen again.” Then I used all those and I decorated my dorm room in college with them. I actually still have them in a box in the garage. I can't get rid of them because I just remember them being such a good decoration at one point.