Got a Problem?

Admit It

There she lay, sultry as the sweltering August night, beckoning with more than just that curling index finger, her siren song mute but as maddening as the voices that called Greek sailors to their doom. The false moonlight of the streetlamps, pushing through the half-closed blinds, painted her cascading hair the same silver it did the wisps of smoke from the burning cigarette, smoldering in its bedside ashtray, that would be finished between neither her lips nor mine; and the intruding slants of light threw shadows on her in all the right places and accented each of her curves, which were in all the right places, too. Yes, I had a job to do, and that duty called, but so did being a man.

The above is

a. an excerpt from a bad hard-boiled detective novel.
b. an account of one’s love life before marriage.
c. an account of one’s love life before kids.
d. an account of one’s love life before joining SummitPost.
e. b, c, and d.

For our purposes here, we’ll select d, though some of us might want to pick e.

And if you chose d, you might be a SummitPost addict.

A WARNING BEFORE YOU READ ON: This article is an attempt at humor. You may not find it funny, but try to understand the lighthearted intent. I know some think articles should be strictly instructional and about mountaineering and climbing, and if you know you’re one of them, please do yourself a favor and stop reading here. But I do hope we can once in a while laugh and not take things so seriously. If you can’t laugh at yourself over something here, maybe you take yourself and this site too seriously (or maybe I’m just not any good at humor). So I hope you like it. If you read it and don’t, though, I’m sorry for wasting your time. And if you have any suggestions to add to the “list,” please share them.

Other signs of being an SP addict, in no particular order:

• Before you go to work in the morning, you turn on the computer to check what’s happening on SP, even if the kids are crying upstairs and you’re running late.
• You have wasted break time at work by visiting SP.
• While at work, you wish you could see what’s happening on SP.
• Checking SP is the first thing you do when you get home from work.
• Only while climbing or hiking do you totally forget about SP, if even then.
• You had to keep checking for the latest from Mel Torino.
• You thought Mel Torino might have been the best thing to have happened to SP in a long while.
• You get the references to having the sunburn to prove it and about REI’s being soft that sometimes appear in forum threads.
• You know which SP member has a thing for llamas and which one is good for posting pictures of girls with guns.
• When SP was down for several days in the spring of 2007, you didn’t know what to do with yourself if the weather was crappy and you weren’t at work.
• When SP was down, you checked at least three times a day to see if it was back up. Sometimes when you checked and saw it wasn’t back up, you clicked right back on before shutting your computer down, just in case SP had just come back.
• You or your spouse, or, to be politically correct, your significant other, became pregnant while SP was down. (Hey, what else was there to do?)
• SP is on your Favorites list and you sometimes click on it even though you had intended to click on something else.
• At home, you try to visit SP only when your spouse isn’t looking (hence the term SummitPorn), and when he or she catches you, you get that look just like the one the dog does after it pees on the couch and gets scolded for it.
• You frequently have another tab open while on SP so you can quickly switch to it if your spouse or boss (perhaps one and the same) approaches.
• Your spouse joined SP so s/he could communicate with you.
• You've taken a “quick look” at SP while company was over.
• Instead of just ending your session, you ever resorted to posting on PnP because there weren’t any threads in the regular forum that interested you.
• You’ve posted on the forum three or more times on a given day, sometimes several hours apart.
• You’ve ever taken a picture and thought, “This will look good on SP.”
• You took a personal interest in the melodrama over the banning of a kid.
• You really think SP should pay you for the work you put into it.
• You have taken part in a thread about Power Points or the voting system.
• You’ve already read this far into this stupid article.

I am proud to say that I am not guilty of ALL of these, but I’m ashamed to say that I’m guilty of most. And I’ll bet many other SP members are, too. The more of these that apply to you, the more likely it is that you have an SP dependency.

The disapproving looks I get from my wife (the ones I get when I’m on SP, I mean, not the ones I get the rest of the time) sometimes make me wonder if being a member of SP is a good or a bad thing for my marriage. In one sense, I assert it’s good; it keeps me occupied and away from doing other things that irritate my wife, such as providing intelligent conversation and seeing that the kitchen sink stays clear of dirty dishes (another great thing about SP is that I can crack on my wife without her knowing). On the other hand, I see the frowns floating my way when she KNOWS, and I suspect she thinks I could spend my time better by folding my towel properly or running around the house with our son and singing songs from the Cars soundtrack or pretending to be trains (yes, that happens almost nightly in the Sihler household; it’s actually a good way of getting some aerobic exercise since having children has pretty much destroyed the exercise and workout schedule I used to keep).

The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Instead of being on SP, I could be doing one or more of the following:

• Chasing other women.
• Complaining of boredom.
• Discussing politics.
• Watching dirty movies (well, there might be a few things better than mountains and SP).
• Climbing more and giving her more reasons to worry.
• Doing drugs.
• Drinking (well, since I’m as guilty of Drunk SummitPosting as many of the rest of you are, maybe that’s not such a good example).

She would respond that I could do useful things such as cleaning the bathrooms or vacuuming, but let’s be real. Cleaning the bathroom, according to me, takes just a few seconds; you spray the toilet with bleach, let all the mold drip into the water, and flush. Very simple. And vacuuming? Come on. I don’t even know where the vacuum cleaner is or how to turn the thing on, and I believe in cleaning the floor only when there’s a visible mess such as a pile of dirt, not for the theoretical dirt I hear is all over the place.

So maybe I do have a problem. And maybe you do, too. What’s the cure? Get out and climb more? But you still have to come home. And then you’ll look. You know it.

Help!

Additions by Other SP members

More Signs You Might Have an Addiction to SP

From brendon: You've ever been shamed into logging out by that red "Online Now!" on your profile page.

From GoingUp:

• You don't have SP in your favorites because it's always in your address bar history and you can type summitpost.org in milliseconds anyway.
• You’ve climbed a mountain just to to be able to get it on SP.
• You know what an Ivano Ghirardini route description looks like, or even what the "Chamonix Mafia" is...

From F Rhoderick: Your wife refers to the SP community as "your other family".

Inspired by Dennis Poulin: You or your spouse thinks of SP as mountain porn.

From Kamil: [You're] thinking of the sentences you're gonna write in your trip report while being in the mountains [added by author-- or the sentences for the mountain or route page].

From Mark Doiron:

1. What the heck is up with this bookmark SP stuff? SP is your home page! You relish the opportunity to click on the Internet icon on your desktop because the first thing you'll see is your profile page on SP.

2. It's all about power points. You add a comment to a forum discussion or another object just because you think it will be enough to get you one more power point. Then, you check back every few minutes to see if your power points have ratcheted up by that one!

From eric b: Checking SP before I climb a mountain and not finding it. Going to the mountain, climbing it, taking pictures, thinking they would look good in your article and thinking of all of the great things you want to say ONLY TO COME HOME AND FIND SOMEONE ELSE ALREADY DID IT (it just wasn't located under the logical heading) AND WHATS WORSE? YOU KNOW THAT YOUR PAGE WOULD HAVE BEEN MUCH BETTER!!!

From saintgrizzly:
Taking a "quick look" at SP not when company's over, but using their computer when you're visiting THEM!

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Thanks, everyone!

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