Steve Doocy In “Once Upon a Time in the Wild West of the Internet”

There’s an old saw about why one should never assume. Yes, it is entirely possible that you could end up looking like a curple — that’s the fancy term for a horse’s ass and the response when someone challenges you to rhyme a word with purple — but what if you, as the result of an unwise assumption, found yourself at the mercy of someone who would playfully mess with you?

I refer to my father.

He’s no troll, to be sure. When he discovered that his email address was the one that an Australian university was sending information to for a student — who presumably had a similar name—he made every effort to ensure that the situation got straightened out. He is rather more like the writer who relishes the absurd situation he is going to put his characters into, so that he can imagine them playing the said situation out. It’s also a way for someone to realize they look like a horse’s ass without telling them directly.

One dilemma frequently encountered in the pixelated beforetime that was the early days of the internet — it was the wild west but with shareware and conventions where you’d swap cash for an unboxed sound card and Commander Keen and Leisure Suit Larry could innocently share the same folding table — was that of the user signing up for a new internet service.

After you’d exhausted the most obvious user names — already taken, no doubt, by early adopters who could probably buy you and everything you’d ever seen that day—you let your mind wander in an unguided but critical search for just the right handle for your email for the foreseeable future.

As an aside: As a teacher I am quite familiar with my student’s parents’ email addresses. And yes, when flirtybabe420 is your handle I imagine exactly what you think I might. Make better choices; it’s not as if free email services are hard to come by.

So there my father sat in the light of a monitor struggling to come up with a workable but yet unused username, and thus email address, for a then well known internet service provider now a going concern in memory alone.

Through the loosely connected stream of semi-conscious associations one experiencing the intense simultaneous pressures of needing to make an immediate decision and requiring that decision to stand up to posterity goes through he settled on a handle both appropriate and, well, consequential.

Fox11 at the internet provider in question dot com.

It was innocent enough, of course. This was before the days when every person or organization who considered them or itself a brand would snatch up a space on every internet or social media property within minutes of its launch.

That said, people often assume — despite the rather, shall we say? Expressive exhortations to the contrary—and so it was that my father received a great number of emails intended for a Fox affiliate, I gather channel 11, somewhere in America.

These emails have a special place in family lore, not only because of the content, but because of the enjoyment my father took from responding to them.

My father is, after all, the man who—in response to several years of self-congratulatory Christmas letters received from friends and acquaintances, nominal and otherwise—decided to send out annual Christmas letters which mixed fact with fiction to the extent that recipients often wondered why they had not heard about the birth of my entirely non-existent sister, Ashley, and the many surgeries to address her apparent, but unspecified, deformity.

Not everyone will gleefully interact with people who don’t realize that the phone number they dialed was a residence and not the local drive-in whose phone number was one digit different. There’s something — oh, I don’t know — almost vaudevillian about a scene where the kid working the box office is befuddled and astonished at the indignant, but very earnest, carful of people who insist that “Lou” had told them the special was $2.50 per car, yes, no matter how many people were in it and yes, we want to speak to your manager.

But I digress.

So when my father received an email from a kid complaining about what time The Simpsons was on this Fox affiliate, they received a “You should be in bed or doing homework” and “What kind of parents do you have?” in response.

The most frequent topic that came up in these emails was the morning show host. And he must have been pretty good at it, because the same Steve Doocy is now one of the hosts of Fox & Friends.

People would often reach out around the holidays. My father would invite them to an after-show party at the station, feel free to bring gifts and ask for Dave. Poor Dave!

One woman complained that Steve Doocy was no longer as funny as he had once been. We are as concerned as you are about his mental state, ma’am, but not to worry, we have had him in counseling for remedial comedy skills, please keep him in your prayers.

The most disturbing email came from a young lady who thought that it was important — very important, you see, for this young lady took the time out of her no doubt busy schedule to write to the station — that the folks at Fox 11, Somewhere, USA, to know that yes, she and her boyfriend liked to have sex and watch the morning show at the same time.

This raw material is too good not to work with, but at the same time…?

Not to get into kink-shaming, but I’d argue that taboos have a function in a society…?

And we live in a society…

So how does one…?

My father cracked his knuckles elaborately — I don’t know if he actually did this, but it happens on TV so it must be what people do—and let his fingers do the talking.

Steve Doocy was flattered, of course, and wanted her to know that any time he touched his nose or his glasses — did Steve Doocy even wear glasses back then? — it was his signal that she should call her boyfriend “Steve”.

We of course hope that this outlandish response, like all the others, was taken as a non-confrontational Jedi Mind Trick hint that one should look for the official email address of the folks you are reaching out to before hitting send.

But then I’m the guy who put the title “Lieutenant Governor of New Hampshire” in his twitter bio as a joke — that position doesn’t exist here — only to have the Managing Editor of this website receive inquiries as to whether or not a notable news figure — don’t ask me, he didn’t tell me whom — could use me as a source.

Never assume, folks.