(no subject)

A regular customer of Andy England's Mac store, where I worked for a year right after college, just called me after finding my (rather out-of-date) online résumé. He was trying to track Andy down, since he quietly closed up his Bangor storefront some time ago. I didn't know where he is or what he's doing, but I did know his full name, so was able to help this fellow with that much. Then we reminisced about the Hermon school system for a little while.

I tell you, I haven't heard an honest Down East accent (besides my dad's) in a long time... it was nice to hear, especially in a phone call from out of the blue.

For the record, I think Andy shrunk back to working out of his home, but I'm not sure. If this guy didn't know, then certainly he has some customer communication issues to deal with. The fellow was a major source of business during my time there, coming in every week with more Macs that the little hellions (or their dopey teachers) had managed to b0rk.

Gaaaaahhhhh

The guy sitting in front of me at O'Naturals got up to use the toilet and revealed his (I am assuming) girlfriend's GIANT FACE on his laptop screen, leering directly at me. Due to my perspective, the face is about where her face would be were she sitting across from the dude, but in that case the image is ever so slightly larger than it ought to be, and (being shot on a beach somewhere) the lighting's all wrong. And of course she's not moving or blinking, just leaning forward and grinning. The total effect is just dreadful, doubtless made worse by my not wearing my glasses.

Also creepy, just in principle. For some reason having a picture of someone on your desktop strikes me as inappropriate, while having, say, a picture of someone on the top of your real-life desk seems perfectly normal to me. I'm not sure why this is. I want to begin by suggesting that one bespeaks a level of obsessedness that I'm not comfortable with, but again I dunno why it'd be so in one and not the other.

I think my favorite example of this involved a former orker whose desktop was a photoshopped montage of their child against a cloudy blue sky. The baby was cut-and-pasted in such a way that it appeared that four of them, all perfectly identical down to pose and expression, were soaring through the air, holding hands. This was actually so preposterous that it was hilarious, but I don't think this person intended it that way.

Now I have to go home because I need to type my company's tax ID into a website and I have it written down on a piece of paper at home and not in my memory. Argh I need a Palm-type device.