Rear Windows 95

Way back in the late 90s, my grandma treated me and my younger cousin to a class to learn HTML. I was 18 and my cousin was 15. It was an all-day class with an hour lunch break in the middle. There were five or six other people who all seemed to be taking the class as part of their job training; my cousin and I were the only people under 30.

This was back when computers had just started having those scrolling text screensavers, and I’d learned how to change the text — not hard, I know, but it was new enough that many weren’t used to them at all. Over lunch, my cousin and I were the first ones back because we’d just brought lunch rather than driving to a restaurant and coming back. We were bored, so I changed some of the scrolling text screensavers, mostly to things like, “HI!!” or some Simpson’s quotes, but on one guy’s computer I change it to say, “I know what you did and you’re not fooling anyone.” Typical but tame high-school-prank type stuff.

I don’t know if anyone noticed the silly or simple texts, but the man at this last computer was one of the last ones to return from lunch. He sat down and saw the text, and sat there for a few moments, reading it as it repeated across his screen. He said to the woman next to him, “Did you do this? Who did this? How do they know?!”

He seemed really shaken, and of course now that I’m a proper grownup I feel a little guilty, but I still laugh hysterically every time I think of it.