The crassness of the last frame aside, “today’s Ctrl+Alt+Del”:http://cad-comic.com/comic.php?d=20070917 actually makes me laugh because I can remember writing notes like that back when I was an insecure and outcast fifth grader. I’d recently transferred from a private Christian school into the public school system, and I was _very_ naive about the way people outside Christian circles worked. Aside from one bully in the Christian school I’d previously attended, I’d really had no idea just how mean and cruel other children could be.

By the fifth grade, kids already have well-established social groups and cliques – and they don’t always take to outsiders and strangers very easily, especially ones that are self-righteous, introverted nerds like I was. I really didn’t have more than one or two real friends during the fifth and sixth grade years, but shortly after entering the fifth grade, I’d made what I realize now was a pretty lame attempt at getting some more friends.

During our free time one class day, I’d written up a bunch of notes for everyone in my class that was something to the effect of, “Will you be my friend? Yes or no.” I got a lot of yeses and just about as many nos, even though in the long-run, most of the yeses still didn’t really go out of their way to get to know me. It wasn’t terribly funny to me then, but fortunately I can laugh about it now, which is why this Ctrl+Alt+Del strip makes me laugh. It takes something I relate to intimately and pushes it to an extreme that I find highly amusing.

Oh, and circling the ‘or’ – yeah, that’s something I would do, just to be a smartass.