Jordan Racey is a desperate man.

His Hotmail inbox, his primary repository of communication with the outside world, is full.  He has wiped it clean six times in the last hour.

Yet it continues to fill.

And fill.

And fill.

The source of Racey's predicament is Bebo.com, which presents itself as a rolling contact update service, in which people and their friends sign up to form a group, which keeps their contact details current.  The concept is not new, but there are myriad internet users who have been wishing for just such a thing for many months now.  As a result, Racey has recieved within the last two weeks emails from no less than eight hundred people who may have known him at some point or not in his life.

"About a week ago the connections started to stretch pretty thin," says Racey.  "Look at this - two days ago, I got Bebo connection invites from former Michigan legislator Bill Bobier, who I saw briefly once on a fourth-grade field trip to Lansing in 1989, and another from a guy named Patrick Mase, who I finally figured out was a classmate of mine at the Mountessori preschool that I attended in York, Pennsylvania when I was three years old.

My only recollection of Patrick was that one day he called me a 'poopie,' and when I asked him what that meant, he said he wasn't sure."

When we asked Racey why he simply didn't knuckle under and claim the crown of this vast kingdom of contact updates that has been laid at his feet, he responded thus:

"Are you kidding?  Look, if there's anything that movies like the 'Matrix' trilogy and 'Terminator 3' have taught me, it's that once you're 'on the grid,' you're never safe.  Never sign up for anything.  Have you seen that movie 'The Net'?  You know, the one with Sandra Bullock?  Man, those people can find you and mess you up.  No way.  No freaking Bebo for me."

When our interviewer suggested that Racey's near-constant use of the internet, instant messaging, and e-mail had already firmly entrenched him "on the grid," he began screaming irrationally and throwing heavy objects.  After Racey had worn himself out and fallen unconscious on his bed about ten minutes later, our interviewer crept back in to examine his Hotmail further.

It now contains upwards of six hundred Bebo emails from persons claiming to be rich Nigerian expatriates, who apparently hope that Racey will keep his contact details updated via Bebo, so that they may continue to entreat him and his rapidly dwindling financial resources to assist them in the recapture of their 'lost oil money' and the distribution of a 'secret cookie recipe,' along with 'some joke's (sic) your (sic) gonna love.'