-A few years ago, I was having such problems with my computer that the Dell support rep who was assisting me actually had to call tech support at another company, and then wait silently on the line for three hours while the second rep talked me through the problem.  At the end of the call, the Dell rep, who was based in New Delhi and had apparently Googled me while waiting on hold, said to me in a thick Indian accent, “Dude, Ruminations totally rocks.”  And so my experience writing this column over the past decade has never ceased to be eventful.  This is the last of several special issues published this month to celebrate ten years since I began writing Ruminations in September 1997.  All of my columns pasted back-to-back produce a 460-page, single-spaced document containing over 213,000 words (about one-third of which are some derivation of “fuck”).  That makes for a lot of memories, my favorites of which I’d like to share with you all today.

-Ten years is a long time.  I’ve gone from making fun of my friends who were pre-law to making fun of my friends in law school to making fun of my friends who are lawyers.  (It never gets old.)  Or, put another way, when I first began writing this column as a college freshman, no one I knew owned a cell phone and Facebook was literally a physical book full of faces that we would scour trying to get laid.  Now, you’re probably reading this column on your cell phone, before logging on to Facebook… and scouring it trying to get laid (OK, some things never change).

-In college, I got an email from an employee at Microsoft who said that he had been at a huge conference, walked by Bill Gates’ table, and overheard him mention my site.  I was blown away at the time and since then have heard reports of Ruminations cropping up in the strangest of places.  It’s been used to teach conversational English to students in Finland, Austria, China, and Japan.  (Somewhere there are a bunch of Austrians running around saying, “Yo dude, let’s get fucked up!”)  It’s been cited in numerous college term papers, assigned as required reading by professors, and even made the focus of an entire class at Berkeley.  I’ve been the subject of one student’s graduation speech at Binghamton and another’s application essay to Tulane.  Which to me confirms what you’re probably thinking right now – our education system has gone to complete shit.

-Speaking of which, people love to read this column in the bathroom.  When I first started, word spread when students would print out and post my emails on the inside of dorm bathroom stalls.  Later, some of my cubicle-dwelling fans would print out the column, take it with them to the bathroom, then leave it there for a co-worker to discover.  Recently, I got an email that students were once again posting Ruminations up in their dorm bathrooms.  So ten years later I’m right back where I started – in the shitter.