"Anyone want to hear a story?"

It was half-past seven: bedtime for Ada and Homer's four grandchildren who were now sitting around their bed while their two children did the dishes. Homer looked at Scott, the boy, and Dawn, May, and Faye, the three girls that stuck to one another like glue.

"Me!" All of them jumped up, raised their arms, and screamed.

"All right," she smiled. "Once there was a place called USENET where everybody was safe and happy. It had bad people, but they were little bad people. But the Big Bad Bell was worse than all the little bad people put together!" She assumed a shocked expression.

All of the children were frightened and rapt.

"The Big Bad Bell was a big bell with a million arms. Each arm was on a telephone set. It made you pay a lot of money just so you could talk to your friends!"

The children hung on to her every word.

"And so a group of good boys and girls started up, called 'phreaks'. Their job was to cut"--she made a snipping motion with her fingers--"one of those arms at a time so that the Big Bad Bell would disappear forever!"

The children waited for what came next.

"But the Big Bad Bell became angry at the phreaks for cutting its arms off. And so it breathed flame and created trolls to be its slaves!"

"Hey, what's trolls?" Faye, the youngest of the girls, blurted out. The others looked angrily at her for interrupting.

"I'm glad you asked," forgave Ada. "Trolls are jerks."

All the children gasped for they had heard a word they were not allowed to say.

"They're not nice people. They say bad things about you and they try to make you feel sad. Because when you're sad, they're happy. And the Big Bad Bell was the biggest baddest troll of all!"

"Hey, that's 'worst'!" May corrected. No one listened.

"And so one fine September day the Big Bad Bell struck! It was called 'Eternal September'. The Big Bad Bell sent all its flames and all its trolls over to USENET. But the people of USENET just didn't give up!"

Homer scanned their eyes. All the children were expecting a happy ending.

"So the Big Bad Bell sent USENET a new surprise. The spammer. Spammers are even worse than trolls. Spammers don't say anything. They just say the same thing a million billion trillion times. They make it so that nobody else can say anything."

The kids were happy they had heard a big number.

"Do you want a story with a happy ending?"

"Yeah!" the kids roared in unison.

"Well, there isn't one. The flamers are still there...the trolls are still there...the spammers are still there. That's how the world works. There are no happy endings. Now go to bed."

"You heard what Grandma said," Alex, the father of two of them, reminded.