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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34674"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34675,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34674\/revisions\/34675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}