In February 1996 an obscure government cipher clerk named David Coppard posted The IT Packet Diddler on the World Wide Web.
It was an immediate success: in six months alone, over thirteen people visited the site. An international campaign was mounted to give Buzz Jackson a shiny brass statue.
But such acclaim was not without cost. Not long after the site was posted on the web, Mr. Coppard disappeared mysteriously. There are unconfirmed reports that two men hustled him out of his apartment in the dead of night with a burlap Overwaitea bag over his head. To this day his exact whereabouts are unknown, although quite recently his name has been linked to the imminent onset of the Age of Chaos.
Meanwhile, the site languished, uncared-for and unloved, for months, until legal counsel for McWetboy Enterprises and Cheese Doodles, trying to declare Mr. Coppard legally dead so as to access his cache of Tajik dairy-sector mutual funds, stumbled across a dusty laptop hidden behind fifty-seven 28-oz. cans of botulistic corned beef hash. Thinking there would be naughty pictures contained therein, the lawyer turned on the computer.
Instead, he found the Diddler.
A mysterious chain of events ensued. The lawyer was found eaten by a feral tribe of expatriate Waterloo kinesiology grads, who took the disk home with them as a fertility totem. They, in turn, grew hideous moles on their earlobes. The disk then passed through a series of hosts, leaving a trail of carnage, suffering and questionable fashion choices, until it arrived on my desk.
By that point the Diddler clearly had seen better days. Some of its icons were missing, and nearly all of its external links were broken. But there was no way of telling whether it still retained its potency.
Do I dare suffer the consequences of presenting the Diddler to you?
a strange part of mcwetboy.net