name calling making me doze off 22 of september, 1996 by johnmichael patrick monty monteith

Back when I was in fourth grade it was a given that the coolest people were the folks who could win the name calling contests. These contests were seemingly a lunch-time ritual at my school. The winner, the person who had the best name calling come-back, like "poo-poo brains" or "stupid face", would be the coolest person in that grade. Needless to say, I never won those contests. But there were a great many people that did, and by the looks of it, they all bought a Macintosh.

If you have spent any time reading through a MacWay Guy Kawasaki digest, or any of the numerous Macintosh mailing lists, you will have seen this name calling at least a dozen times. I have one issue of the MacWay digest that finds a way to name-call Microsoft or it’s products twenty-two times. Yes, that is one digest.

To make matters worse, even the most articulate of the Mac followers seems to practice this ritual of name calling. Certainly there are a few which have refrained, but an extraordinary number of these die-hard Macintosh fanatics seem to be unable to spell any of the competitions products or corporation names. At one time I thought that most Macintosh owners had a spelling problem, or were unable to figure out how to use spell check. But, I have been unable to find any numbers to back up this theory.

Instead, all I see are message after message of "Windoze", or "Microsloth", or any of the other countless names they have come up with. Now, maybe these names are just so funny to Macintosh owners that they feel the need to tell the joke thousands of times over. But, I own two Macintosh computers, and I have yet to laugh even once. As a matter of fact, the credibility reduction that this name calling does to the Macintosh movement has made me downright angry about it.

I will admit to the fact that back when I was twelve years old, I thought the Commodore 64 was the greatest computer on Earth. I insisted on calling the TRS-80 machines ‘Trash 80". But, I think I can be forgiven of this childish behavior, after all, I was twelve years old. Have all of the Macintosh owners participating in this name calling ritual not yet reached their teen age years? Maybe Guy Kawasaki himself has yet to go through puberty?

No. Obviously this is not the case. What we have are a group of people which, instead of speaking with facts and logical statements, have been reduced to name calling. Instead of attempting to prove how much better a Macintosh is, they have decided that it would be much easier to call the competition names.

Well, this behavior is nothing short of childish, and I deplore all Macintosh owners to move on to a higher level of reasoning. To help ensure that some day this might occur, I ask all computer owners to ignore the comments of someone who insists on name calling. If they want to act like fourth graders, then we probably should start treating them that way.