katiedidFounder

An original from November 2000 with 639 comments to her name, Katie Onorato was the kind of person who could calculate the exact weight of fifty hot dogs in pounds — "if a package of hot dogs is 16 oz. and there are 8 in a package, then each hot dog is about 2 oz." — and in the very next breath admit she had no idea what an operating system was. When iwz posted a news item explaining it, Katie fired back: "Ian, I love how you put it in simple terms '(the thing that makes the Start button show up).' Is THAT what an operating system is?" That combination — sharp enough to know exactly what she was doing, self-deprecating enough to make you think otherwise — was Katie's entire operating frequency. She worked at a radio station at Centenary College, studied Computer Information Systems, got her AAS degree, and once posted an entire C++ sorting algorithm in the musings just to prove she could. And yet she also spent an afternoon trying to install WinRAR and confessed to being "slightly impressed that I managed to get that far."

Her relationship with rocksupastar (Mike Schiano) was one of eZabel's great love stories — tender, funny, exhaustively documented, and refreshingly honest. They coded "I love you" as "459" from the telephone keypad so the forums wouldn't gag, though everyone figured it out anyway. He surprised her with flowers at work and she journaled every detail of the office's reaction: "they kept asking why I got the flowers. Some even asked if it was for my birthday tomorrow... they know I don't celebrate my birthday, but they thought that maybe mike does, so that's why he sent them. HAHAHAHA!!!!" Her favorite gift he ever gave her was a turtle ring wrapped with a bow and fastened with a turtle pin — "cause I like turtles" — and a Wallace and Grommit pop-up book from an early date. Simple and romantic, just like them. Pre-dating, their biggest running joke was accusing each other of stalking: "I walked into the assembly and he said 'ugh, what are you stalking me?!!' It was dumb, but it stuck." Her journal the week before their October 2003 wedding was one of the most emotionally honest pieces on the site — "I cannot predict how I will handle being a wife and dealing with new responsibilities" — written by someone who had genuinely never fantasized about her wedding day as a child and was startled to find she wanted nothing else. They later divorced, but the way she wrote about that period — the excitement, the nervousness, the Russian teacakes she insisted on baking for the rehearsal dinner — remains something real and worth reading.

Katie's friendships were the scaffolding of her eZabel life. Diana (web-toedchloe) was her best friend, the person she could tell everything to about Mike and life and work frustrations. delliott101 (Dave Elliott) was like the reliable older brother in the congregation — the one who outed Mike as Katie's boyfriend in the Who's Who thread when Mike tried to play it cool, prompting magnum to demand Mike get beaten "a few times with a wet noodle." punkprincess (Tina) was her sleepover companion — Katie once dug up a photo of the two of them in matching pajama bottoms with Tina's very red hair "nicely complimented by the animal print ear warmer I made." socalgal was her top interaction partner by a wide margin. And when superhero asked about her rafting trip, Katie delivered a full incident report: one hour in, she hit a rock and went flying out, but what she couldn't stop laughing about was Livy's scream — "every time I think of her scream I can't stop laughing!! She was so worried for me so the rest of the time I managed to fall INTO the raft."

She had opinions about everything and shared them with a precision that was either endearing or slightly terrifying depending on your tolerance for organizational clarity. Paperclips? "I hate having the small ridged, small smooth, large ridged, and large smooth all thrown into the same container." Wedding costs? She could rattle off every item in a $100-per-plate cocktail hour menu from Assorted Mini Quiche to Marinated Calamari Salad and explain exactly why it was a reasonable price. eBay seller etiquette? She quoted a seller's response to a buyer complaint verbatim — "BOO HOO, BOO HOO, BOO HOO, request an invoice next time" — with absolute delight. JW dating sites? "A rose is a rose is a rose... just because we were warned about 'chat rooms' and not specifically about 'dating websites' doesn't mean it isn't something a true Christian should avoid." A coworker swapping out her four-year-old office chair over the weekend without permission sent her into a journalistic fury that fivezero predicted could only be resolved by deploying her "catty cake face" to restore order. She was a vegetarian who converted Mike to spinach-avocado quesadillas so completely that he begged to have them every night — "he looked at it and said 'what is this crap, spinach?' LOL" — and she cycled through tea-then-coffee-then-tea phases with zero apology, purely because it was nice to sip a warm beverage with the AC blowing down her neck at work.

There was a lovely consistency to Katie: the woman who walked Route 46 in work clothes after her car broke down in Netcong, called Mike in a panic, and somehow turned the whole thing into a love story when they moved to Village Green two years later. The woman who went to a friend's annual ping pong tournament and loved "shocking the guys and making them sweat." The woman who, after getting internet access at her own desk for the first time — "I had it for 10 minutes and it already saved me three trips to the other room" — immediately resolved not to abuse the privilege, even as she knew she'd spend weeks explaining the new copier to her coworkers. She was self-aware enough to laugh at her own occasional uptightness, honest enough to journal about the pressure of everyone being too involved in her life, and funny enough to propose to Mike on eZabel with a three-word journal entry: "Mike, I love you. will you marry me?" She never performed being thoughtful — she just was.

eZabel Personality Type: ISFJ — "The Quiet Anchor." Warmly practical, quietly principled, deeply loyal, and far funnier than her organizational instincts would suggest — the woman who kept the paperclips sorted and the people around her grounded.