You know you're obsessed with getting into YC when...
10) You custom tailored your application demo with Paul Graham in mind. When discussing your demo with your cofounder, you've started your sentences with "When Paul Graham visits the site..."
9) You've spent many late night arguing with your cofounder about the exact wording of each answer to the application questions. You copied and pasted into MS Word so that you can do a word count on your answers.
8) You had a mini panic attack when you hit the "save" button on your application and got presented with an expired link message. Then you were really relieved when you hit the back button and realized that because you use Firefox, the form data is still there.
7) You've marked November 3 on your calendar
6) You scrutinize every word that Paul Graham writes on Hacker News
5) You click on "pg" and click on "submissions" to read all the submissions that Paul Graham has made....and then you click on "comments" to read all the comments that he made and then the original submissions to those comments.
4) You are very careful about the comments that you post on Hacker News because you're afraid that Paul Graham will think you're stupid and that it will be the reason for you not getting accepted into YC.
3) You compulsively check your demo because you're paranoid that your server will crash right when Paul Graham visits your site.
2) You've searched your email inbox for "Paul Graham" just in case your accidentally overlooked an email from him
1) You check your server logs on a daily basis to look for a non-familiar IP Address. When you find one, you do an IP Lookup to see if it originated from Boston. Then you get disappointed when you realize it's some random crawler probing your site, or worse yet, you realize it was you visiting your own site.
I decided to write this because I was driving home tonight and starting thinking about all the crazy things that I've done with my coworker over the last 4 weeks trying to get an interview with YCombinator. It culminated today when, during work, my cofounder and I realized that our demo was offline because his cable modem had died. Fearing that PG would visit our non-functioning demo today, we skipped lunch and quickly drove to his home and moved his Mac Mini server to my girlfriend's dorm room at Stanford, whom I had called 30 minutes earlier to beg to use her internet connection until October 18th. We picked up some fast food on the way home and made it back just in time for my 1:00pm meeting. What a crazy day!
Feel free to submit your own stories. Good luck to everyone!