BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

123-4567?

987-6543?

566-3714?

I’ll be honest… I actually had some trouble deciding what title to use for this blog entry. (By the way – it will become apparent in about 4.33632 seconds that this entry is NOT about Jenny by Tommy Tutone…)

Other possible titles were:

1. “Been There, Done That…”
2. “Neener, Neener, We Were Here First…”
3. “She’s Got Legs…”
4. “160? Is That All I Get?”
5. “Blackberry? Isn’t That A Kind Of Cobbler?”

Of course, #3 was my personal favorite, but I suspect that was pretty obvious. As to how any of these potential titles fit in with 867-5309, or even how 867-5309 fits in with this blog entry for that matter…well, read on and I’m betting it will make sense at some point…

Of course, you know me. The “when” it will make sense might be a long time coming – reading-wise, that is – so, you might want to hit the restroom, refill your coffee, then get comfortable. Don’t worry, I’ll wait…

(do do, do Doo, do da, DOOOOO… do do, do Doo, DOOOP, Do doodle doodle, do do, do da, Doo, do do, DOOOOO, DOOP, Do doodle doodle DOOP, Do doooooo….) [give me a break… have you ever tried to convert the Jeopardy theme music to text? It ain’t easy, let me tell ya’…]

Okay, so everyone back? Got your drinks? Settled in? Good…

So… Since we are on the subject of converting things to text, I had occasion to spend a bit of time text messaging the other day. Now, I realize that a whole raft of you are adopting your best sarcastic voice and saying, “Yeah, good on ya’, Sellars. So you texted… You want a medal or something?”

Well… not a medal per se… How about if I put it into perspective.  You see, E K and I have cell phones… (Okay, okay, bite your tongues for a second here, I realize that’s not a big deal or anything)… The truth is, I have had a “mobile phone” since they were bigger than a breadbox and stayed permanently attached to your car. It was one of those technician things… Then, years later I upgraded to a bag phone – anyone remember those? Same as the car phone, but they stuffed all the crap into a glorified purse so you could drag it around with you. As an aside, I never did have one of the “pocket bricks” that were the size of a loaf of bread and qualified as the original “Cell Phone”… I just waited until cells were the size of double Whopper™ so that I wouldn’t have to wear a back brace while carrying it. (I’d already done enough of that lugging around the bag phone)… Of course, these days cell phones are only about a half inch shy of being the same thing as the communicator on Star Trek: The Next Generation… Just slap your chest and talk away… But, we aren’t there just yet.

Still, what started out as a somewhat flawed communications device attached to my car with a curly-q antenna has now morphed into this little flip open gizmo thingy about the size of a pack of cigarettes – actually, a little bit smaller I guess – that has eleventy-buh-jillion ring tones, takes pictures, surfs the web, acts like a PDA, and generally makes my life miserable…  And, of course, that is only because I am not packing around the latest and greatest innovation in personal communication such as a “chocolate covered blackberry moto razor iSomething-or-another”. Neither is E K. If we were, then we could probably fly the space shuttle remotely while listening to 47 gigabytes of MP3’s on top of all that stuff…

Now, I realize that may seem a bit odd – us not having the latest and greatest I mean – what with us both being techie types, even though I’ve retired from that segment of my life – well… in a professional sense, anyway… I still keep my finger in just in case I have to fall back on something… But, there goes that chicken again.

The point is, E K uses her cell primarily for work and emergencies. I use mine primarily for being able to call my girls – E K and the munchkin, obviously – when I am on the road touring and for emergencies. So, what does that mean? Well, pretty much it just means that we have a fairly basic calling plan. Ex-tee-ump minutes per month and that’s pretty much the extent of it. Therefore, we don’t “text” like most folks out there. For one, it costs us money. For two, well, we figure you call, say what you have to say, and there you go.

Now, it’s true that sometimes being able to send the equivalent of an “email” or “instant message” is an attractive option. I am more than willing to admit that fact. Perhaps the person you are trying to contact is in the middle of something and all you need to do is deliver a quick, “gonna be late for dinner” or something like that. So, I can see the allure. But, it’s just not something E K and I have ever really done…

So, here we are back around to the fact that I did do some texting the other day… No, I’m still not asking for a medal, but I think maybe you can see where this is kinda like getting your grandmother to try chicken tikka masala for the first time. It was a big deal for me to do this… Old dog, new trick… yadda yadda…

Anyway, I suspect by now you are figuring that something obviously had to  exert some manner of influence upon me in order to force a situation where this whole texting thing would happen. Well, you’re correct. As it happens it was the FBI.

(Waiting patiently for the surprised gasps to settle…)

Okay… not to worry. It wasn’t the FBI as in the whole Federal Bureau of Investigation or me being in some kind of trouble (at least, not that they’ve told me about). It was a friend who works for the FBI. He was in town on business, but had some free time and wanted to hook up for lunch and to catch up, etc… As it happens, he texts quite a bit, so that is how he contacted me. And, me not knowing if he was in the middle of a meeting or some such, found it necessary to “answer” him by texting back instead of just calling.

Well, as you might guess, this presented a bit of an obstacle for me… As we’ve already established, I don’t text. Never really have…  So I had no idea where to start. Still, I spent 25+ years as a computer tech, so it shouldn’t be all that hard to figure out.

Following the prompts I pressed the button to reply and it gave me a blank little screen that awaited my message. At this point in one of those flash back-flash forward moments I found myself wanting to pull a “Scotty” from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and just start talking to the damn thing. (Hmmmm… Nostalgia moment… I’m pretty sure I took E K to see that movie at the Northwest Plaza cinema back in ’86 shortly after we moved in together… I know, ignore the chicken, Sellars! Ignore the chicken!) Well, obviously I knew better than to babble at it, so I started poking around on the keys to make letters appear. After spending what was, I am absolutely certain, way too long to create a simple text message I succeeded in getting it sent. At this point, I was fairly proud of myself.

Seconds later, however, I was faced with receiving his reply, which in turn, deserved a reply… A bit longer reply.

Of course, I only had 160 characters. Well, that’s how it works on MY phone, at least… For all I know the rest of you texters out there can read this entire blog entry on your phone. (As an aside, are at least a couple of those potential titles starting to make sense yet?)

So, can you see where this is heading? Yeah, I know… The thing is, I didn’t want to do it, but I had no choice. Yes. I had to instantly teach myself a second language… Text Speak. I proceeded to reply with all of the necessary information required, however, I taught myself how to misspell things on the fly. I left out vowels, I replaced entire syllables with numeric values, I abbreviated, truncated, masticated, ameliorated, integrated, intimated, and generally adulterated the written word, all for the purpose of getting my point across in as few a characters and as quickly as possible. (the quickly part has to do with a whole ‘nother issue better left unblogged.)

Well, I don’t mind telling you, it was painful.

Really. I kept wanting to go back and fix the spelling errors and the like because the message looked like a teenage girl was sending a giggle-gram to her BFF (yeah, it seriously scares me that I know what a BFF is… I blame those cell phone commercials)…

But, I couldn’t… Fix the errors, that is… For one, I only had 160 characters to work with. For two, I would have been typing all day, being the inexperienced texter that I am. And, for three, I have no idea how they charge for these text messages, but I was already racking up enough of a bill as it was. If it was by the character, I would have been in deep crap…

I know… Right now you are saying to yourself, “Okay, Sellars… This little diatribe pretty much explains the “160” title and even the “Blackberry” title… But, what the hell does it have to do with the other three? Especially the one about legs?”

Glad you asked.

It was after I had labored over sending this series of text messages back and forth with my friend that something dawned on me. Kids today have this whole texting thing pretty damn easy… And, I mean besides the obvious part. You see, it was in that moment I realized I had been here, done this, worn a hole in the T-Shirt, long before the bulk of the “text generation” was even a glimmer in parental eyes.

You see, way back in the day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and all that jazz – yeah, way back in the 80’s, we technicians carried numeric pagers. (before that we carried “beepers” that simply alerted us to call an answering service, but there goes a chicken again…) Numeric pagers were a marvel to us – yeah, I know, they even have text pagers these days. E K still carries on of those too… But, back to the numerics… They were a marvel to us because we could dial a number and punch in a number to call, so that the person being paged knew who to call instead of that extra step of calling the service, then calling the number, etc, etc… Remember, back then we didn’t have cell phones, we had to stop and find a payphone.

Okay… So we sent numbers to pagers… B F D… What does that have to do with anything? Well, being the industrious little geeks we were, we started figuring out little shortcuts. Anyone here ever watch Millennium? (that Megan Gallagher… man, I tell you…) My example here is that the main character, Frank Black, would get a simple page – “2000”. That was all it took and he would know the number to call. Well, us geeky types way back when were doing that sort of secret code paging even before Millennium came along…

It started simply enough – numeric codes established by service departments that would mean something to the tech receiving the page. Stuff like:

911 – Call the shop immediately

XXX-XXXX99 – (phone number appended with 99) Call this number ASAP.

XXX-XXXX – (just a phone number) Call this number, moderate priority.

XXX-XXXX00 – (phone number appended with 00) Call this number, low priority.

Of course, anything that starts out simply will eventually end up with layers of complexity that overwhelm the innate simpleness. Especially when electronics geeks are involved. Before long, more numbers were being added on to mean other things – almost like police call codes.

Then, it got really scary.

Anyone here remember that old joke you do with a calculator? The one where you tell a story while punching in a calculation for each element of the tale, and at the end you hit the = sign and have the punchline, which  is 71011345? or 55378008? (for those of you too young to remember this geekdom moment, if you turned the calculator upside down and looked at the display, the digital LED would be spelling out SHELL OIL or BOOB LESS… (it’s far more obvious with 7 segment LED’s than this particular font…)

So, did we spend the day saying SHELL OIL to one another, or calling each other BOOB LESS? Well, not really. There are actually a very limited number of things you can spell with inverted seven segment lettering, but we did manage to come up with a few initials that meant something.

And, what does this have to do with legs?

I knew you were going to ask that… Back when E K and I were dating, as well as during our cohabitation and early years of our marriage, there were times when I just wanted to let her know I was thinking about her. However, since there were no cell phones, and with her being in the field taking service calls that made it a bit hard. I didn’t want to cause her to pull over at a pay phone just for that.

Yeah, and?

I’m getting there… I’m getting there… As I’ve said many times before, I’m a leg guy, and E K has a fantastic pair said appendages. So, one of my fond nicknames for her, back then and even today, was/is LEGS.

Yeah, so you have a cutesy nickname for E K… Big deal… Just get to the point, Sellars…

Patience is a virtue, ya’know…

Well, to be honest I figured y’all would have been all over it by now…  But, just to cover all the bases, it’s as simple as this: Whenever I wanted to tell my dear and lovely I was thinking about her, I would simply page her with the following number: 5663714

On an upside down numeric pager that’s ancient, “First Generation Text Speak” for hi leggs:

Yeah, I know, the second “g” seems unnecessary, but remember, as mentioned in the Mahwage blog entries, she always wore Leggs brand stockings. Plus, without the extra digit in there, the “phone number” looked incomplete. And, well, since the pager belonged to the company it was our way of being “covert”…

I mean, what with E K actually being a sexy, dangerous, femme fatale secret agent* and all…

More to come…

Murv

* Regarding E K’s secret agent status. See blog entry: “Kay…Eeee Kay…” March 12, 2009

Wellllll, it seems the topic of Wendy’s struck a chord with many of you. I’ve received many comments and emails asking me to tell the story now instead of waiting until I come off the road.

We are still in Sanford, Maine, but right now Morrison is waxing prophetic about various things to a room full of folks (i.e. she’s giving a workshop and I’m not)…Sooooo, that means I actually have a little free time between signing books for folks. It’s probably the only free time I will have until we reach the end of the tour so I thought I’d drop in and run off at the mouth myself.

Big surprise, right? (Grin)

So, here’s the thing…I like hamburgers. Cheeseburgers, actually. Now, given a choice I will go for a really good restaurant style burger, but I don’t always have that opportunity. In a pinch, I’ll go for a fast food burger, and that includes Wendy’s. Now, of course, they have the odd notion (much like White Castle or Krystal’s) that hamburgers are square. This is something that I have problems wrapping my head around (yes, I know they stack and ship easier that way, but hamburger are round, cornbread are square where I come from…) Still, as fast food burgers go, Wendy’s makes an edible “sammich”. And, White Castles (i.e. belly bombers, sliders, whatever) are just horribly addictive. This is one of the reasons why I am inclined to believe there is something terribly evil about square hamburgers.

Anyhow, this book tour started in Nashville, TN…Burns, actually…And that was great. I’ll talk more about that leg of the trip when I do the flying pigs blog…Stop number two, however, was Indianapolis, IN. We started out on Monday last (5/21) with a fairly leisurely drive to Indiana from St. Louis. We hooked up with one of our favorite folks, Edain McCoy, who was gracious enough to open her home to us.

After the gig at Inner Path that evening, we were hungry. Now, something I’ve rambled about in the past is the fact that when authors get together they kibbitz and commiserate. Since we hadn’t seen Edain for some time, we decided we would all go back to her place, get in our “jammies”, order a pizza, and then visit for a few hours before grabbing some sleep.

This is where problem one occurs. Edain lives in a new subdivision that is outside Indianapolis proper, and no one was willing to deliver. Problem 1A is that there isn’t much around her area other than a CVS and a Wendy’s…Since the CVS was closed already (not to mention that we weren’t really all about nuking a frozen dinner), Wendy’s it was…

We all put our shoes back on (yeah, after being on your feet and such at a booksigning it is a great relief to do the patented “Die Hard” practice of kicking off your shoes and walking around making fists with your toes. Fortunately, Hans Gruber hasn’t shown up to chase me yet whenever I have done this…) So, anyway, we climb in the car and head for Wendy’s.

We reach the lovely oasis of square pressed beef patties and park. About the time we reach the door we discover a sign which says “Short Staff – Use Drive Thru – The Management”…Okay, no big deal. We get back in the car and put ourselves into the queue. When we finally reach the menu board a very unhappy sounding voice barks “Can I help you?”

Well, since I was driving I was charged with the duty of dolling out the orders, so I start the first of the three and the voice suddenly barks again, “You’re going to have to wait a minute.”

Okay. Obviously this person is harried here. No biggie, we wait.

And we wait…

And we wait.

Then we waited some more.

Finally, the still rather pissy voice comes back on and says, “Sorry for your wait, what would you like to order.” As an aside, I don’t actually believe she was sorry at all, but that might just be me…Anyway, I tell her, “I have a few orders here,” and then I give her the first. It happens to be Morrison’s and she wants something akin to a double burger with no pickles or ketchup and a side order of left handed wingnuts with flying monkeys. Okay, so I can’t remember her exact order at this point, but suffice it to say I couldn’t get across to Morrison that we weren’t at Burger King and that Wendy’s motto was NOT have it your way. But, Morrison never listens to me anyway, and to be honest that’s not actually an important point.

It was at this point the pissy voice barks back, “Are these going to be all on one order?!”

Okay…My bad. I had used the phrase “a few orders” so I can easily understand the confusion. I replied, “Yes, it’s all one order.”

This was problem two. Miss Piss on the other side of the intercom didn’t let me get even that short sentence completely out of my mouth before once again demanding to know if it was one order or if it was going to be several tickets. As soon as I could get a word in edgewise I said, “No hon, it’s all on one but I just have to get the individual orders from a few different folks in the car.”

Now…I am willing to admit that there might have been a bit of mild exasperation in my voice, but nothing angry or pissy. I even have witnesses to that effect. I am also willing to own the fact that I said “hon”. Maybe that was a problem too, but I am from the South and that is not a particularly abnormal thing to say. Of course, maybe in Indianapolis it is viewed as condescending, I don’t know. If it is, I can only apologize and say that it certainly wasn’t my intention. Either way, I am willing to own those two points and state that if they were the problem I am at fault.

However, I don’t think that was the problem. What I am inclined to believe is that someone didn’t feel like working. Anyhow, Miss Piss proceeds to begin talking over me again. This time, however, she shouts something on the order of, “There’s no reason for you to have an attitude and if you’re going to give me attitude you can just leave!”

Remember, she didn’t “say” this. She SHOUTED this.

We all blinked.

We blinked again.

Even with the highway nearby you could hear a pin drop.

Then we collectively picked up our jaws and reseated them on our faces.

Morrison tells everyone now, after the fact, that she was sitting there counting down because she knew we had about five seconds before the tires would squeal. I don’t doubt this. We know each other fairly well.

Well…About five seconds later, the tires squealed. Not because I was being hot headed, but just the nature of accelerating away across asphalt while turning the wheel. As we pulled from the parking lot, Miss Piss actually hung out of the drive through window and screamed very sarcastically, “Have a nice evening!”

Morrison has perpetuated this story all over Pennsylvania and New England ever since. Everywhere we go she now tells everyone that, “Sellars got her kicked out of a Wendy’s in Indianapolis.” Of course, she does then tell the story so that everyone knows she is just joking about the “kicked out” part.

I have to wonder if Dave Thomas is rolling over in his grave. Who knows…Maybe he will haunt his daughter and while she is surfing the web perhaps she will run across this blog and discover the fresh tarnish on her name.

Oh, and by the way, we did finally get something to eat…We had Taco Bell for dinner that evening, and it was very good. The people working there were even pleasant and polite.

I think I’ll probably visit Taco Bell again. Wendy’s, not so much.

I guess this just proves that square hamburgers really are evil. Something even tells me Miranda probably likes them a lot…

We are off to Long Island tomorrow for an evening book signing and workshop, so I doubt I’ll have much of a chance to post anything more until the end of the tour.

So….Till the next time…

Murv