I thought I might have mentioned the story about Curt, the guy who ran the Didde-Glaser printing press next to mine on second shift, somewhere along the line, but I cannot find it on the blog. Curt would come in at 3pm when the rest of us were getting off, and he was known to come in with a bit of a buzz. As he explained it to me, he would go down by the lake for lunch and sometimes have a six-pack somehow and then it was time for work. Of course, he was carrying on a tradition–some of the old-timers (they were all old-timers at the print shop which was over 100 years old by the time I worked there 1996 to 1998) would bring in six packs and drink them while they worked. Not a thing by the 1990s, and not a thing I would do working with industrial machines that could rip your arm off.
But sometime in the middle of my stint there, I was telling Curt all about how much you could find out about a person in the Internet. Bear in mind, this was 1997ish. And I was on America Online, the last company to buy Time Warner and die (I’d short Netflix if I could about now).
I came in with a printed (surely sheet-fed by then and not dot-matrix, but one never knows) pages including his address and a map to his house. And I asked him if that was his address even though the electric bill had a different first name.
It was his kid’s name–when he couldn’t make the payment, the electric company cut him off, and he had it reconnected in his kid’s name. As a certain segment of the population was wont to do in those days where the internet was in its infancy and all the things were not yet connected.
I thought about this yesterday when I mentioned to my oldest son, who is old enough to sign contracts now, that if he registered for a free trial of Fox One or whatever, we could watch the Packers game. I couldn’t do it because I’d used the free trial to watch the Packers game two or three weeks ago. I cancelled the trial before half time because it was not going well for the Packers.
And he did, so we watched the football game. Well, the boys watched the first half of it, and I stuck until the bitter and disappointing end.
But for a brief moment, I was just like Curt, briefly. I hadn’t thought of him for many years, maybe a decade ago. When I searched the Internet for him again then I found his obituary and was momentarily shaken. Because in my memory, he’s younger than I am now.
