A long time ago in late February 2001, on the 18th floor of Three Greenway Plaza in the sweaty bayou city of Houston, a frustrated Tier II desktop support technician copied and saved a bunch of screenshots of the worst helpdesk tickets he’d ever seen. (The fact that this was his first IT job necessarily meant that the sample size of “helpdesk tickets he’d ever seen” was pretty constrained, but as things turned out, they actually were pretty bad.)
The tech took the screenshots home and, after a bit of noodling with Microsoft FrontPage 98, created a crappy homepage using the web space allotted him via his Southwestern Bell DSL account and uploaded the tickets there, along with some snarky commentary. He posted a link to the new site on the USENET group alt.tech-support.recovery, and then went on about his day, thinking that he’d made something a few people would get a laugh out of. He didn’t think anything about it until the next morning, when more than two dozen e-mails came flooding in, full of effusive praise for the site and asking for more.
The tech was me, and the site was the Chronicles of George.
I’d made a thing, and it got super-popular out of nowhere, spreading as things used to do in the days of the Internet before social media—via IRC whispers and forwarded e-mails, USENET postings and ICQ “Uh oh!” pings. Site visitors began to pour in. Within a week I’d blown through my Southwestern Bell bandwidth allowance; I posted a plea for help and received a hosting offer from Dan and Doug of the now-defunct md-sites.org, so the Chronicles of George moved over there. Within a week, rising traffic made short work of md-sites’ 8GB bandwidth allowance, and the site moved again to what would be its home for the next decade: North American Networks (NANC). The hosting came free, thanks to the largesse of NANC owner and CoG fan Ozbob.
Bob’s donation of time and equipment and money and bandwidth kept the site online as its popularity first exploded—thanks in part a ton of linkage, including a huge traffic bump from being featured on TechTV’s The Screen Savers as the “Site of the Night” on February 15, 2002. The site was at its peak popularity around 2002 to 2003, and things have just sort of gradually and steadily slowed since then. These days the main site pulls in a few hundred unique visitors per week—though sometimes the site shows up on Reddit and then, for a few hours, traffic looks like the old days.
George and me
George wasn’t the guy’s real name, but the company was a now-defunct Internet startup called Questia. (We’re below the fold here, and plus it’s been twenty years, so I feel like I can finally come clean. And the odds of many people reading this are low anyway.) George didn’t have any helpdesk experience, but Questia was hiring people like mad and needed warm bodies answering phones and creating tickets, and George was family friends with the internal helpdesk manager. The company grabbed him up.
I said a lot of mean shit about George in the CoG’s original FAQ page, about his work ethic and his seeming inability to absorb the computer knowledge I thought he should easily be able to absorb, but honestly everything I said was wrong and stupid. I was an arrogant early-twenties IT nerd with a massive chip on his shoulder who thought he knew everything. I would never have said any of it to George’s face, because George was kind and funny as hell and I was a nerdy coward. So like a nerdy coward, I blasted my frustrations out over the Internet—a place I knew was safe, because it was the year 2000 and it truly, truly was a different time.
I regret it, like I regret a lot of the things I did and said and believed two-plus decades ago. I wouldn’t make the Chronicles of George today. George was just a guy doing the best he knew how to do, and I was an insecure asshole who thought anyone who wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, was an idiot. Which made me the idiot.
Anyway, that’s what happened. There’s also a CoG forum, with its own two-plus decades’ worth of stories and in-jokes and drama—oh, much, much drama!—and a whole pile of wonderful friends. It’s the best thing that’s come out of the site. Cheers, y’all who have been with the CoG forever, going back to the EZ-Board days. Thanks for helping make it all worth it. Wish I’d spent more time hanging out.