
I ran across this old photo taken of me sitting in the cubicle of my first real job. I was the fill-in person in an accounting department for a high-end office furniture dealership. I looked at the pic for a few minutes trying to figure out which was more shocking - my youthful face, the amount of gel I managed to host on my head or that dinosaur behind me we called a computer.
I decided it was the computer and just the sight of that old relic took me back 20 years to a very funny memory...
At the time I was very close with a gal who called herself, L - short for Lynn. For a long spell we were inseparable; she slept on my couch for awhile and we worked together. Well, 'work' wouldn't quite be the word to use for us as we spent so much of our day goofing off and trying to keep one step ahead of trouble.
One night L and I rented a video - some French film that I can't remember the title of - it starred two actors who were hot for each other and about 30 minutes into the film it, like all French films of the time, dissolved into soft-porn.
L and I decided to make the film more interesting as we took on the characters roles, reciting the sub-titles and really making an entertaining evening of it. When we were faced with the first sex scene we panted, grunted and moaned along with them and finally in the throes of passion the French woman did some dirty-talk and L was quick to recite her line. Which she did without realizing that it was so completely raunchy until after she had spoken it. (I would repeat the line here as it is forever burned into my memory but it is too uncomfortably naughty and my mother is reading this...)
After we realized what L had said we both looked at each other in shock. Then we melted into pools of tears from the intense laughter that followed. We rewound the scene a million times and laughed just as hard with each viewing. By the end of the evening we both had tummy-aches from the laughter. And that line stayed with us for weeks. I would call her extension at work and burp it over the phone-line or she'd whip it out while at lunch and we'd once again, die laughing.
Around the same time our company was getting a program added to our computers. It was something new they called - email! Not quite the email system as we know it today. It resembled more of a text message on the bottom of our computer monitors and it didn't have a history of anything received or sent.
Our head computer guy was a frumpy old man well into his 60's and worked mostly out of his home in Arizona. I don't remember how that worked really but we only saw him a few days out of the month. His name was Sam and you couldn't accuse him of having any social graces; he was tremendously odd.
He spent months on the email system and finally one day it was a go... Each person was assigned a number and to send a co-worker an inter-office (no outside world yet) message you had to employ one of those F buttons at the top of your keyboard (yes, they once had a functioning purpose!) and type your message and then wait for a reply. It was kind of funky, this new technology - it'll never catch on.
About the third day into having this new system I heard L laughing on the other side of our shared cubicle partition. Of course I ran over to see what was so funny. She howled, "Like you don't know!" I looked at her blankly and she continued more seriously, "You didn't get my email? Don't mess with me asshole!"
She ran over to my computer hoping that it was delayed and once she realized that she had probably sent it to the wrong person she told me that she had sent me that filthy phrase from the French film, "Oh Chuck, I don't know who I could have sent that to." She grew panicked, "What if it was the owner? I'm so fired right now."
A few minutes passed and L got a reply from frumpy old Sam in Arizona that simply asked, "Huh?"
She left it alone and called in sick on the day of his next visit.
PS: A photo of L and I on the next page.
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