As a corollary, you don’t even hear about the big news unless or until you read it here (or maybe The Daily Show).
…when someone at work makes a statement and you respond “Cite?”
I do this often. It is something I learned from this board. I don’t know if the SDMB invented that as a meme, but I learned it here, and it is one of those cool things that made me love this place. I’m waiting for the ‘Cite?’ tshirts. It is the only doper shirt that I wouldn’t feel like a cornball for wearing.
You hear on the radio or television that somebody famous died and your first thought is “how many points were they worth?”
The corporate news is doing an indepth story on"breaking" topic and you find it vaguely familiar. Later that day as you surf the SDMB, you find a discussion/debate/thread on the very subject that was started months ago!
You have to submit this idea to Shirt Woot’s derby. I’d spend $10 on that, and you’d get paid for the idea. Win/win.
That would have been a great thing to PM me, Mom-of-Andrew.
But, nah, I didn’t come up with that. I have heard dopers suggest those tshirts before.
… the real world becomes a series of annoying interruptions of your online conversations.
The other day I found myself rooting through the bookshelves near my parents’ room to find my dad’s copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel, because I’d heard a lot of Dopers had read it. Alas, I couldn’t find it. 
I also find myself wanting to say “cite?” to some of my customers at work (we get creationists sometimes).
Heck, I’ve been asking creationists, flatearthers et al for cites for yoinks… they never seem to be able to provide anything more accurate than “the Bible says so!” Uh, no. Not unless you can provide book, chapter and verse, bubba, and apparently not one of y’all can.
You know you’re a Doper when you’re internet-less for a couple of days and wonder what happened with the dogs, cats, weddings, children and job searches of people you’ve never met in person but who have posted about them in MPSIMS.
I always start mental threads on the Dope when thinking “deep thoughts” about cultural or political stuff. Then I end up thinking of the potential train wreck/nuisance it might become and end up never starting the threads. But most of my mental conversations these days are caged in terms of Dope threads.
…when you hear random phrases like Beefwhistle Pullet Surprise and think to yourself “…band name!”
You agree with people in real life by saying ‘This.’
… you visit a town/state/country for the first time solely for a dopefest. This happened to me for Amsterdam and Prague.
… your SO/spouse says thinks like:
“You should ask your Dope friends about …”
When the first thing you do when you get to work is check your control panel to see if anything new was posted to any of your subscribed threads.
and THEN you go get your first cup of coffee.
At my house the phrase from Ms. Attack is “you should ask your imaginary internet friends”.
I’m not imaginary. I don’t think I am, anyway.
Winner!
You can’t remember the name of a movie/book/whatever and your first instinct is to start a thread.
And check back in 5 minutes expecting to find the answer.
And it’s usually there.