.
Then, at about 1:00 am on the night of February 29 (or the morning of March 1), X, another Blacker Hovse frosh, asked me out of the blue how many links to my page existed. Being quite proud of the scarcity of links pointing towards my page, with many more pointing away - so as not to take in visitors faster than they can be radiated - I told him. But X persisted: "Are you *sure*? You seem to have a *lot* of hits on your counter." I told him that the count should be about thirty. He said that over 100 were showing, and I found this rather hard to believe.
So, at about 2:00 am, I checked my page. In fact, I found not 100 hits, but a number closer to 42,030. I laughed. For several minutes I continued to laugh, and stumbled up the Stairway to Heaven (quite literally), falling on the floor at the top of the stairs. X seemed quite astonished to hear the count.
For a while the count continued to grow at an alarming rate, until at about 3:30, the hits simply stopped.
The next morning, I discovered that my page now had an average of 2,120 hits per day over its lifetime. This was quite impressive considering the average the day before had been less than 2. The next morning I also learned that X had been having a bit of fun with macros. Not only had he run a macro to hit my page continuously for three hours, but he had the program simply increment my graphical counter without accessing my page itself at all. Therefore, not only did those 43,705 people who read my page that night not exist, but the fictitious visitors didn't even bother to look at my page!
And that's the (only) reason my counter once read
.