Hello USA Paul!



17 Sep 94 16:43, AUST Paul Edwards wrote to Geoff Armstrong:



 PE> You would have

 PE> to let it go for about 3 months probably before you reached

 PE> 1 meg of messages that way, and then I might start getting

 PE> shirty and charging you $1 as a once-off charge for a

 PE> permanent slice of my hard disk real estate.  Then again, I

 PE> might not think it's worth the hassle.  Time will tell I

 PE> guess.  I played a cat-and-mouse game with Alan, expecting

 PE> him to call back with his point address.  I had about 7 meg

 PE> of mail waiting for him after about 5 months, but then I

 PE> gave in and deleted it.  A couple of weeks after that he was

 PE> pointing again.  BASTARD!!!!!!!!



ROFL! I wonder does Aust Paul want me to pay him some sort of diskspace

rental? Hopefully he'll only want payment based on what the disk is

worth now rather than the original price. I suppose he's only got

himself to blame though for accumulating 7Mb of mail, because I did

make it clear I was giving up pointing semi-permanently.



Giving up BBSing for a few months was great. I ended up putting more

motivation into my work, looked seriously for a new job, and ended up

getting a new job where at least the remuneration was not at the

miniscule level of a public servant. This then led to being able to

afford to get a home loan, which has lead to me moving in four weeks.

The hardest part was finding a plausible excuse to tell Aust Paul. I

knew of his almost legendary persistance, and his obsession with

pointing.



I gave up BBSing after returning disillusioned from a driving holiday

in your country. It finally hit me during that trip that the US had a

significantly higher standard of living than Australia. For years I

kidded myself that we were luckier here in Australia than you Yanks

because we had less crime, more open spaces, easier going people, and

better/cheaper food. If finally hit me that if you weigh up all the

important things (positives and negatives), living in the States would

be preferable to living here at the arse-end of the world. I mean what

a joke. Australians crow about the natural beauty of this and that, but

you've really got to be a fan of scraggy gum trees and boring deserts

to claim Australia's got any decent sightseeing. I was out suffering on

the pushbike this morning and I contemplated Garigal and Mt Kuringai

national parks. Two parks full of boring gum trees. And they're asking

$7.50 to drive your car into Mt Kuringai park to visit Akuna Bay or

cottage point. These 'National Parks' are a joke. At least in your

country the parks are worth paying money to see. Instead of scraggly

gum trees you get to see 2700 y/o Sequoua trees that I look like an ant

standing beside. The Grand Canyon shits on boring rocks such as

Ooolooroo as well. Unfortunately I made the mistake of visiting the

Canyon in the middle of winter and my wife certainly wasn't impressed

as visibility was only about 50 feet. I do however know what it's like

to walk to the bottom of the Canyon and be almost moved to emotion by

the shear size of the thing.



Australia is a joke in many other ways. To hear the bragging during the

Commonwealth games (you wouldn't have heard of this competition) was

pathetic. What a second rate competition, and Victoria BC would have to

be the most boring place on earth -  populated by Canucks who have a

cultural cringe similar to the one suffered by Australians. Anyway, at

least our swimmers were bought to earth by those classy, rule abiding

and sportsmanlike female Chinese swimmers.



So I returned from holidays with the thought of looking into obtaining

a green card. Unfortunately the obstacles were significant - my wife

doesn't share my enthusiasm and I couldn't leave my two cats behind.

But at that stage I thought, well fuck Fidonet. But now I'm picking

up locuser, locsysop and avtech again because it's quite convenient

to quickly scan a mail packet every few days, and the RTL/poofter

thread is good for a laugh.





Regards, Alan



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