A 18 Year Old Assyrian from London stays a record-breaking 26
hours on Assyrian Voice.
By: Ashur Sada. July 22nd, 2005
What you are about to hear may sound familiar; something which you may have done before. But no matter how familiar, rest assured, that it is far from what you had done, or heard others doing. It is the real story of an 18 year old Assyrian student from London, England, who was able to remain online on AssyrianVoice.net, for a record 26 straight hours. Or the equivalent of one day and two hours. The record-setter (or breaker) emailed me personally and told me all about his record. He asked me that his privacy be kept, and that his name not get mentioned at all (which we respect and oblige) He prefers to be referred to as "R.B-UK", which I am guessing, stands for the "Record Breaker from the UK"?
Now to the real story. You are probably asking yourself : "why did he do
it?", "why the hell would someone waste 26 hours online, and only on one site."
I guess we are lucky enough, because R.B-UK did tell me his reasons for doing
this, which were very modest, yet interesting: he did it for the sake of doing
it and to be the first one to do it. Said the 20 year old record-breaker:
"I have been coming on AssyrianVoice.NET,
for 2 years now and I felt like a gimmick, and unable to stand out from the huge
crowd at the site. I was never popular, nor was I anything special to the people
of the website. You always have someone who is known all over the place, and
people fall in love with them. I was never able to become popular. So by doing
something as extraordinary as this, I am sure my name and identity would come
out and be appreciated more by Assyrian Voice. In other words, I am sinking deep
into the psychology of Assyrian Voice and how people think, and based on that, I
am doing this special thing to get some good attention. And last, I believe the
new e-magazine section at Assyrian Voice will be the place, from which this real
story gets broadcast to all AVNers and other people coming to this website"
So there you have it folks, according to the person himself. Now let us go into the details, as given to me by R.B-UK himself. First of all, the problem of honesty and truthfulness was something which I had to acquire, before being able to accept the reality and truth of this story. That is, to say that someone broke such a record, is not easy to believe without being provided with some logical and physical evidence or proof of course. Thankfully, that too is out of the way, as R.B-UK himself was able to provide me with all details, including photographs at different intervals (with time on them) of his sitting in front of the computer. Moreover, after providing me with his static IP, I was able to do a check-up in the server log to see if such activity from one person, did indeed exist; and the server didn't lie either. So basically, I think I did virtually complete investigative check-up to verify the truthfulness of his claims, and the results seemed to agree, close to 100%, with his claims. The man did indeed stay online on AssyrianVoice.net for over 24 hours (officially 26 hours according to him)
And now to more important questions, which I and many of you are thinking of now. Such as: "what did he do in these 26 hours? was he just staring at the screen?" No. According to R.B-UK himself, he spent the 26 hours doing a lot of interesting things. Call it "Educating himself in AVNism, if there is such a term or concept." The 18 year old basically visited every section on the website, and browsed/read it in details. For example, he was able to view all 77 albums, which he was never able to see before, due to the lack of time. He was also able to read every message on the message board (good news for those who like to waste our space and time; there is actually someone reading your messages) R.B-UK also visited the forums, and was able to read close to 100 topics in their entirety. As well, he went to the Interviews sections and read every single interview, since 2000 to this day. While moving from one place to another, he was taking occasional breaks at the text chat, and voice chat; the latter was almost always empty. In fact, at one time, he spent 9 straight hours on chat, even though he was silent most of the time and not chatting. He also read every single article in our E-Magazine section. He basically touched every brick that went into the building of the website.
The details of his story are rather interesting. He started his record-breaking visit to Assyrian Voice on July 6th, 2005 at 6 PM (London time) That night, he never slept. On the second day, July 7th, the London terrorists attacks happened, and he never knew about them until his mom told him. In fact, his mom told him to come and see what is going on, on TV, but he never left his chair. He wanted to break his record before moving out of that chair.
Another question which popped to my mind, just before publishing this story was: "Although we know some of his fundamental reasons for wanting to do this, what else did he seek to gain by doing this?" R.B-UK insisted that he did this just to go down in history for doing something, which no one else ever did; regardless of how worthless or silly it was. One reason he declines to reveal his name or real identity is to avoid being called a loser by others, for wasting 26 hours of his time, sitting on one website. Moreover, the guy is attending his first year of university in London, and he doesn't want to give the wrong idea about him being a lazy person. And finally, and I knew this was coming, he asked to be interviewed, and as a reward for his record breaking event, he wants to be fast-forwarded on the list and not to wait for years, like it is the case with most interviewee.
R.B-UK's next challenge is? no, it is not to get good grades and obtain his degree; that is his short term goal. His long term goal is, after finishing university is, to break a world record by staying online for over 100 hours, 41of which he promised to spend on AssyrianVoice.net; 41 is short for April 1st, which is the Assyrian new year. R.B-UK, wisely states that by breaking this record, I will not only put myself into Yahoo, and CNN and other news site, but I will be able to put AssyrianVoice.net on the map too, by claiming that I spent close to half my time on that website, while breaking the 100-hours challenge.
Finally, I hope to talk get in touch with R.B-UK within the next few days and
try to obtain his permission to publish some of the physical facts that support
his claims; just for the sake of making the story even more interesting. It is
not about dishonesty, because I already believe almost everything in the story.
It is just more cool when the story has an an aide to completely authenticate
it. As well, we will be doing an interview with him in the next few
months. Frankly, I had never met this guy before, although I had seen his
nickname on the chat at times. I think this guy will go from a no-one to the special-one!