... when you are trying to recall something and hear 
in your head: "parity error at address..."

...when you're writing a homework assignment, and get 
the end of the line in the middle of a sentence, tack 
on a '\', and continue writing on the next line.

... when you pick up a rootbeer and read the label as 
"High Res" not Hires...

... when you try to click on a picture in a book to 
zoom in on it to see it better.

... when you want a "Reboot button" for humans.

... when questions about your work crash your memory 
cycles.

... when even extensive physical injuries (due to 
sharp desk edges, pencils, etc) are second to pressing
"RETURN" to continue a foreground process before 
maintaining the wound.

... when you think of the lyrics of "Jump! Jump!" by 
Kris Kross and wonder if they can be assembled.....

... when you start typing semi-colons at the end of 
sentences instead of full stops;

... when you start wondering why you can't download 
the lecture currently on the blackboard.

... when you can't wake up in the morning because 
you forgot to push a return address on the stack the 
night before.

... when you try booting the machine you're sleeping 
next to when you wake up before you realize it's an 
actual woman.

... when you approach a VAX to put a disk in and 
after several attempts realize it's a professor.

... when you start thinking things like "my load 
averages seem to be running high", "the scheduler's 
going to die any moment", "I'm running out of swap 
space" and "better kill off some low-priority user 
processes".

... when you're reading a book and try to press the 
space bar to display the next page.

... when you press the wrong elevator button and 
start looking for an "undo" button.

... when you start trying to move the mouse cursor 
to the keyboard so you can click the keys to type in 
some data.

... when you wonder why you can't move the mouse 
cursor over to the next terminal to engage some 
processes.

... when your brain starts processing batches in the 
background while you do other things (ie: 12 hours 
later your neural spellchecker reports a spelling 
mistake in your thesis you already handed in).

... when you address envelopes or dial the phone with 
numeric IPs.

... when you try moving the mouse cursor over to your 
TV to change the channel.

... when new mail in /usr/spool/mail/auj becomes an NMI.

... when the home project you thought would only take 
a weekend has now passed its first decade of development.

... when you're able to recall your Ethernet address at 
a moment's whim.

... when, during class, you come up with "grep homework 
/dev/backpack", and realizing you forgot your backpack 
in the last class you suddenly hear a device failure 
message.

... when you go to the movies and can't get used to the 
film's low refresh rate.

... when you watch birds and try to figure out the 
algorithms that determine their movement.

... when your significant other kisses you and the 
first thing you think is, "Oh oh, priority interrupt!"

... when you go to balance your chequebook and discover 
you've been doing it all in octal.

... when your computers have a higher street value than 
your car.

... when you consider round numbers to be powers of 2 
rather than powers of 10.

... when you wake up night after night recalling your 
dreams in some programming language.

... when you realize you've never seen half of your best 
friends.

... when you're spending the night with your girl and 
it crosses your mind to comment out the code that lets 
her get pregnant.  Then you realize you couldn't possibly 
recompiler her since you don't have her source nor know
where to get a compiler for her, and she'd probably take 
up a few gigs of space at least (100megs if she's a blonde).

... when you've been playing with fork() bombs, and when 
your alarm clock goes off you think it's spawning new 
alarm clock processes and you have to kill the alarm to 
keep it from filling up the process table; the only
problem was the monitor process wasn't killed and every 
time a ring_alarm() process was killed 9 minutes would 
pass before it spawns a new ring_alarm() process.

... when you wish you could 'sleep 24000 &'.

... when while bringing a window to the front of an object 
on your screen, you realize the object is a post-it note.

... when you're in art class and after making a mistake on 
the drawing you frantically start looking for the undo button 
on the paper.

... when you begin pronouncing "by the way" as "bee tee 
double you".

... when you've been low-level debugging ethernets for a 
week and when you notice two people at a table trying to 
pick up the same container of butter and you ask them if 
they're using the correct CSMA/CD algorithm to avoid a 
recollision.

... when you start looking for a backscroll for some 
information that just scrolled by and you realize you're 
watching TV.

... when you start to disassemble a phone number.

... when you dream you're parsing C code and while 
reading in #include files you realize one's missing.  
Having nothing to do but aborting the compilation you end
 up waking up.  And having this happen 5 nights at a time.

... when you make phone calls and instead of dialing the 
phone you dial your keyboard's numeric keypad.

... when a post-it-note's sitting on the table and you 
get frustrated because you can't find the "R" key on it to 
read it.

... when you start counting on your fingers in binary 
instead of decimal.

... when you start cheating counting by converting to octal 
first.

... when you cut a phone number in a window and try pasting it 
to the telephone to dial out.

... when you start dreaming code.

... when your excuse for not wanting to get up after being 
woken up by a SO is, "You can't open me as a static window... 
I'm an EVENT!"

... when your alarm clock goes off and you're sitting in 
your dream trying to find the keyboard command to turn it off.

... when someone sticks a post-it note on your screen and 
you try to lower it behind some other windows.

... when someone's standing in your way and you try to click 
on them with your finger to minimize them.

... when you realize you don't like your haircut and you 
tell the barber to undelete and try it again.

... when you're dreaming about something non-computer related 
and you hit an RTE and wake up.

... when you walk up to a monitor with a picture of the 
operator's girlfriend on it and notice what a neat GIF it is.

... when you begin to use the loading period for programs to 
catch up on needed sleep.

... when your fingers start typing commands for you without 
your consent.

... when the funniest joke you come up with has the punch 
line: "But what if it was in hex?"

... when the people around you thought the joke was funny 
too.

... when you try logging into an Archie server to find your 
keys.

... when you enclose comments in your class notes with 
"/* */" or precede them with #'s.

... when you parts order from a catalog and give the 
operator your email address.

... when putting a happy-face on a piece of paper is 
drawing it sideways.

... when you think you can store anything on a floppy 
(videotapes, leftovers, relatives, etc) for later retrieval.

... when you put a "reply-to" line or "carbon copy" lines 
on an envelope before you mail it.

... when you have to convert to binary or hex for complex 
math operations (divide, multiply, add, etc).

... when you worry if people will notice the extra spaces 
at the end of a line of text you're printing out.

... when the postcards you send to friends while you're 
on vacation are scanned first and then sent UUEncoded in 
email.

... when you start worrying about malloc()ing too much RAM 
by hitting the snooze bar on your alarm clock too often before 
you get up.

... when you get in an elevator and double-press the button 
for the floor you want.

... when your first thought when arriving at your car is 
"grep keys /dev/pockets".

... when recipes or directions begin to look like C, 
Pascal or (even worse) ASM coding.

... when you're doing math and suddenly find yourself 
writing "add [value],10".

... when you try to finger someone's phone number to see 
if they're in. 

... when your notes in other courses are becoming coding 
algorithms by your own hand.

... when you want to find where the sausages are in the 
supermarket so you say aloud, "cd /;find | grep sausages" 
and realize that not only is everyone looking at you but 
that supermarkets don't have root directories.

... when you end up converting numbers to hex to do math 
because you can't remember how decimal works.

... when someone gives you an email address on paper and 
you try cutting and pasting it to you email client.

... when you have a nightmare in which an endless printout 
contains bugs you have to hunt down.

... when you look at a phone number suffix and try to figure 
out the permissions it represents.  You're even more of a 
hacker when you can spout off the permissions for any four 
digit number without thinking.

... when your alphabet starts beginning with "@", you start 
counting at "0", or the number immediately following "9" is 
"A".

... when you look in your address book (paper based) for a 
phone number and 'realize' you haven't typed it in yet.

... when you set the alarm clock before you go to sleep 
and an alarm window pops up in the middle of the dream; 
then you wake up and your alarm clock immediately goes off.