Do you find that, no matter what your
intentions are, your work
schedule increasingly cuts into your online time?
When was the last time you saw the sky?
Less than a week ago? Did
you know what it was when you saw it -- without being prompted?
Do your email friends complain that your
obsession with eating and
sleeping is lowering your response time and weakening your relationships?
Welcome to Life Recovery
Anonymous. We are men and women who have come together to share
our strength and our pain in recovering from our
addiction to everything that interferes with that which makes life truly
meaningful -- The Internet. We are committed to overcoming our craven
dependence on face-to-face contact that pulls us from our duty to answer
each and every email; our misguided emphasis on physical building and
making that interferes with the daily upgrade of our websites; our painful
addictions to food, sleep and fresh air; our weak rationale that we can
have "just one hour" with the family. Someday we will *not* do the
laundry, we will *not* repair the window, we will *not* answer when our
name is called Offline. In the meantime, we support each other in our
small victories, and in our defeats.
My name is Anitra, and I <sob> have a
Life!
This is our program:
- We admitted that our lives were out of control: the contents of our
closet would not respond to a Directory command, our children would not
respond to their URL's, and our spouse would not respond to a Ping. If
she did, it hurt.
- We came to believe that a Higher Power could restore the order that
we, in our human limitations, could not.
- We found this Higher Power in the Internet, and surrendered our will
to our Higher Power.
Our Higher Power gave the will back and said we
needed two witnesses before it was valid, and we might have an attorney go
over the second codicil, it had a loophole big enough to drive Major Domo
through.
- We made a searching moral inventory of every time we had failed to
download the newest upgrade of anything; every time we had willingly
logged off before our time ran out, power went down or our body collapsed;
every time we had let more than five minutes go by without checking for
new email messages.
- Having made this moral inventory, we then shared it with at least one
other person; actually, we shared it with everybody in our address book
then put it up on a website with five mirror sites and registered them all
with every existing search engine.
- We became entirely ready to have our Higher Power remove from us all
of our moral weaknesses: our stubborn resistance to upgrade more than
twice daily; our craven dependence on food and sleep; our slow response to
"You've got mail" at 4 am.
- We humbly asked our Higher Power to remove these failings, before all
the good domain names were bought up and everybody else's websites were
flashier than ours.
- We made a list of everyone who had been wronged because of our skewed
priorities: when we dropped out of their chat line to answer the doorbell,
postponed answering their email to have dinner with our family, did not
have new content posted on our website for their daily visit just because
we were helping our elderly neighbor escape from her burning house, and
failed to send their e-petition to end homelessness to 500 addresses
because we were out building *one* homeless shelter.
- We committed ourselves to making amends to everyone whom we had
wronged.
- We proceeded to make amends to these persons whenever we could do so
without causing them further harm by distracting them from their online
game time.
- We continued to seek improvement by daily updates from download.com
and answering every post on at least three newsgroups.
- Having had a spiritual awakening from our practice of these steps, we
grabbed a large stock of chocolate covered coffee beans and went forth on
the Net to carry our message of hope to other sufferers from the
distractions of Life.