QUESTION: Where do the characters go when I use the backspace or delete
key on my PC?

ANSWER: If you must know, the characters can go to different places,
depending on whom you ask:

1) The Catholic's approach to characters:

The nice characters go to character heaven, where life is good. The
characters are bathed in the light of happiness, all their troubles are
soothed, and there's not a delete key, eraser, or white-out bottle in
sight. Most of the nice characters are A's and I's, those that have
never been, er, involved with other characters. Often, you'll see A's or I's
with N's or T's. These are characters in love: monogamous on the page,
together again after deletion. You'll see quite a few Q's too. They seem
to feel particularly guilty for no good reason.

The naughty characters are punished for their sins. In case you were
wondering what the difference between a nice character and a naughty
character is, I'll tell you. Naughty characters are those involved in
the creation of *naughty* words, such as "breast," "sex," "objectivity," and
depending upon usage, words such as "feminism," "reproductive freedom,"
"contraception," and "science." You may ask, and rightly so, why the
characters are blamed for the words they assemble, when in fact they are
not responsible for their own configuration. But we feel that a
character  has an obligation to oppose any naughtiness in its own
configuration. If it truly felt guilty about the word it was forming, it would rebel.

2) The Buddhist's Explanation:

If a character has lived rightly, and its karma is good, then after it
has been deleted it will be reincarnated as a different, higher
character. Those funny characters above the numbers on your keyboard
will  become numbers, numbers will become letters, lower-case letters will
become upper-case, and the most righteous and good of letters will
become C's. Why C, you ask? Who knows, but C it is! If a character's karma is
not so good, then it will move down the above scale, ultimately becoming
the lowest of characters, a space.

3) The 20th Century bitter cynical nihilist explanation:

Who cares? All characters are the same, swirling in a vast sea of
meaningless nothingness. It doesn't really matter if they're on the
page, deleted, undeleted, underlined, etc. It's all the same. More characters

should delete themselves. (nihilist characters are easy to identify.
They're usually pale and tragic, and they smoke a lot.)

4) The Mac user's explanation:

All the characters written on a PC and then deleted go straight to PC
hell. If you're using a PC, you can probably see the deleted characters,
because you're in PC hell also.

5) Stephen King's explanation:

Every time you hit the key you unleash a tiny monster inside the cursor,
who tears the poor unsuspecting characters to shreds, drinks their
blood, then eats them, bones and all. Hah, hah, hah!

6) Dave Barry's explanation:

The deleted characters are shipped to Battle Creek, Michigan, where
they're made into Pop-Tart filling; this explains why Pop-Tarts are so
flammable, while cheap imitations are not as flammable. I'm not making
any of this up.

7) IBM's explanation:

The characters are not real. They exist only on the screen when they are
needed, as concepts, so to delete them is merely to de-conceptualize
them. Get a life.

8) Environmentalist's Explanation:

You've been DELETING them???? Can't you hear them SCREAMING??? Why don't
you go CLUB some BABY SEALS while wearing a MINK, you pig!!!!!!