Not quite sure. I had this username then as well, but the (very) few posts that I bad back then are now gone. Possibly the great hamster uprising did it.
But I’m here now - that’s what counts.
The television show hooked me, and my incredible crush on Mike Lukas. I found the website a bit after that but I didn’t join the boards. This must have been a couple years later since I’m not sure when the website went up. I remember I worked at Kinko’s and would use the computer in my off time to read the archived articles. I had heard the rumor about asbestos in tampons, and I didn’t know what an urban legend was but I knew it sure didn’t sound right. I emailed and Tuba or Lynn emailed me back and told me to rest easy and keep plugging away. I thought “These are people with my sense if humor.”
But then, of course, I was intimidated so I lurked for years before finally signing up in 2000.
I think I read the column occasionally, but it was the book collection that really struck a chord with me (early 90’s I guess). I remember reading it on a plane, and when I read the column about people putting milk jugs around their lawn to keep dogs from shitting in their yard, with the description of a mutt laying a turd directly on one of them, I laughed long and hard.
The book sat in my husband’s bathroom at his parents for years ignored by me. One day, bored with the reading material, I finally picked up one of the Dope copies and was hooked.
That was maybe 1991ish or 1992.
Found SDMB via AOL a few years later ( not as Shirley Ujest) and have been here online ever since, contributing utter nonsense on a daily basis.
The things I could have accomplished in my life if I wasn’t always going, I need to check the boards.
Heroin would be easier to quit.
I believe I saw the columns in a free weekly while living in Albuquerque.