It was only three memes at View from the Porch, and yet I felt targeted.
Back around the turn of the century, I was a technical writer with prodigious output even though I am not a home-row touch-typist (even today).
One Friday afternoon, my password came to the end of its 90-day lifetime, so I changed the password last thing before I left (never do this on a Friday, by the way, nor install wonky software that requires a reboot and might brick your machine and you can’t remember what might have caused it come Monday morning).
On Monday, I was one of the first in the office as 7am start times were my wont back in the old days. I sat down in the empty office and tried to log in. I tried the password I thought I’d set on Friday afternoon, but it didn’t work. I tried again to see if I’d mistyped it. I slowed down and looked at every key as I typed it. Nothing.
So I waited in an empty office for two and a half hours for the hardware guy to come in to reset my password again. He then noticed that something was wrong with my keyboard. On Friday afternoon, after I left, El Guapo had popped off a couple of keys on my keyboard and had, anomg other things, had switched the n and m keys, and I was not a touch-typist, so I looked at them when I typed the password, and I was not familiar enough with keyboards to spot what was off. Oh, the laughs they had at my expense.
The story made it all the way to the C-Suite when the inside sales guy was on a trip to New York. Apparently, my name came up, and the originator of the Dosso Double-Snap (snapping one’s fingers twice when excited, a thing I still do today on occasion) told that story. Whereupon the company’s co-founder said, “He typed all that documentation with these fingers!” and wagged his index fingers in the air. To be honest, my method was kinda touch-typing, but not home row ASDF JKL;. I have gotten faster, and I can even type things I’m looking at, like book pages for book report quotes and whatnot. But, yeah, 3000+ pages of software manuals with mostly the first two fingers of each hand and the thumb sometimes for the space bar.
Jeez, Louise, I’ve seen references to fedora-wearing overly chivalrous young men (they say “M’lady” or “My lady,” see?) at Founding Questions, too, so I guess this is something of an archetype or more like a punchline, and when I see it, I cringe a bit inside. Literally, I figuratively cringe, not just recoil which is I guess what the kids these days mean when they say cringe.
Ah, gentle reader. I got my trenchcoat for Christmas 1993, and I got my first fedora a couple of weeks later at Donge’s down on Third Street in Milwaukee. I was more influenced by old movies with Bogart and Grant (still am, I’d like to think) than anything else–and fedoras had a brief resurgence amongst some people with television programs like Crime Story and The Hat Squad.
And, ah, yes, I did have an inflated sense of chivalry due to my exposure to medieval poetry and whatnot. So I would have been–and I was–that demonstrative in that fashion (one such story coming later). I suppose I affected a bit to portray a role to cover my natural shyness reticence. If you press me to admit it.
But, jeez Louise, I couldn’t have been following some pattern in popular culture from the 1980s? Certainly not from the John Hughes movies–I had not seen them yet. I WAS NOT DUCKY.
I’d like to think I was sui generis, but apparently not. Ah, me.
Meanwhile, this weekend, I got a new Alpine hat because I was at a German festival over in Lawrence County. I have reached an age, apparently having reached a half-C, where I think I might look okay in a stubby-brimmed hat. Also, it was a fund raiser, but there were not many opportunities to lay out greenbacks for the Lions Club and its endeavours, so I had to invent reasons to give.
But I still where my classic wide-brimmed fedora or wide-brimmed Panama hat out, so maybe not, m’lady.
There’s a third meme in the post, but I do not understand it. Otherwise, it might have been a trifecta of defensiveness. Or is it mocking my lack of understanding?
The whole world is not about me. But the Internet is.
