Saving Face
Way back I wrote about a truck driver for my local lumberyard whom I described as looking like a toothless, tattooed pirate, with a beard but no peg leg. Given his looks and his job, I was flabbergasted by his knowledge of digital cameras and laptop computers, until I found out that he’d also written significant software for some major Boston firms way back in the C++ days. He’d tired of computers and suits, but not of work, and drove trucks to busy.
The blog post was one of my what-an-idiot-I-can-be stories, which happens to be my favorite kind. However, because I’d added a link to his wife’s high level Flashy website, she’d followed my tracks back to the story and roasted my ass with a fiery email. How can I call her husband toothless? How can I make fun of his tattoos? She’d missed the premise of my story.
There are really smart talented people out there and they don’t all come in BMW’s with a Harvard degree stapled to their foreheads. Readers of the blog, and Adam in particular, know I’ve embarrassed myself in the past by jumping to similar wrong-headed conclusions.
I tried to explain to her that I didn’t really think John looked like a pirate (He wasn’t toothless, he didn’t have that many tattoos), and that I embellish my stories to keep the attention of the three people reading them. Didn’t matter. Lobbing reason at her was like bouncing tennis balls off the hull of a battleship. She was religious, she said, and she didn’t want other people thinking unkind thoughts of her spouse. No, I don’t know what being born again has to do with protecting your reputation against cyberspace writers.
Because I was going to have face John, whom I liked, I apologized and I pulled the story from my website.
We met only once , months after his wife’s email, and neither of us said a thing. He showed no anger, but I did notice he’d filled those empty spaces in his not-so pearly whites. Since then he’s fallen to the deep cuts of an industry in trouble.
Great title. The original was a good story — we love watching you lampoon yourself almost as much as you do — and it’s nice to know the fences are partly mended. Tempting to imagine these technologically public conversations don’t get overheard, but we’ve plenty of evidence to the contrary …
Comment by adam — March 22, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
Maybe you should password-protect Mainecourse? Think of the juicy stories you could write if you knew that the favored few would be your only readers!
Comment by rakkity — March 22, 2008 @ 2:25 pm
You know how sometimes, saying or thinking “I told you so” feels good? This is NOT one of those times. I’m very sad. (But maybe you could put the post back up, without the link? jk)
Comment by jennifer — March 22, 2008 @ 2:44 pm
If I password protected this site then we’d lose those serendipitous readers flying Google Air.
I’ll repost it if and when I find it. Instead of leaving in on the website in draft, not published form, I hit delete.
Comment by michael — March 23, 2008 @ 11:49 am
Oh Michael! If only she knew you like we do she would be proud of her husband instead of being angry at you for her husband’s physical characteristics (that he chose to display to the world. Paging Dr. Freud!) That is just pure irony. In your self deprecating manner, you reach out to slap yourself and you get slapped twice! Poor thing, But do keep up your very frank observations and commentary. This is great stuff. I’m sure it smarts, but this is just darn entertaining. Post her letter too!
Comment by Jen — March 24, 2008 @ 7:16 am
Here’s the original intentional posted where Google fears to tread:
There is the me that lives in my mind and then there is the real me. Lately, all too often, the youthful guy with springy steps minding his own business as he glides along his self-made mobius strip runs into the short guy with skin like wet plywood whose gait can’t be distinguished from the early morning mall walkers.
Monday it happened again. A matter antimatter collision at the twist in the strip. John, called Terry, because there were already three Johns working at the lumberyard, pulled up to my job on Central St. to deliver an otherwise small-truck-crushing load of mahogany decking. I’d met John once before, and that’s when he’d told me about his son’s wedding, the one performed on a sand bar off the coast of Maine.
A hundred and fifty boats surrounded the the mini island on which assembled the guests, a band, chairs, tables, a sumptuous banquet, justice of the peace and happy couple. All perfectly timed so that the last chair disappeared before the tip of the sandbar sank below the cool Atlantic.
As John hopped down from his idling truck I said, “Just last night I told my wife about the wedding.â€
“You mean my son’s?â€
“On the sandbar.â€
“i liked mine too, on the schooner.â€
John has a Captain Ahaby-look with tattoos on both arms, a diamond stud, no front teeth, a scraggly beard, but two good legs. And it’s his distinctive looks that prompted this collision with myself.
“I’m taking a long weekend. I’m going to Quechee Vermont to see the balloon festival.†John said.
“I hope you have a camera.â€
“I’ve got quite a few, but the one I use most is the Nikon D100.â€
My brother has the D200 and it’s a near professional grade unit. Hannah’s dad as well as BirdBrain use Nikon 70’s – very impressive digital cameras. That meant the 100 had to be somewhere in between, but it couldn’t because that would mean… .
“You have a computer?†I ask.
“I sometimes bring my laptop so I can upload my photos. But I have five two gig memory cards and often the photos never get transferred. I’ll throw them back into the camera for a slideshow once in a while.â€
“My brother has the D200.â€
“That’s a good camera but I like mine. I’ve got a 40 to 400 zoom lens that cost me sixteen hundred, and a smaller one, an 18 to 120 that I use all the time. I’ve image stabilization so I don’t have to use a tripod.â€
You see, above all, the springy step guy is an open minded, nonjudgmental feet-floating-feet-off-the-floor bleeding-heart liberal. But my brain wouldn’t synch the high tech talk with a guy with no front teeth. Flustered I said, “ Who do you talk to about this stuff? Do your friends have digital cameras?â€
But Terry continued, “ I also have a Nikon F5 film camera and I bought my wife a new pocket-sized Nikon.â€
“I mean do they understand this stuff?†I stuttered.
After every paragraph of techospiel, I added this thing about his friends, and instantly regretted it, but I couldn’t stop myself. Painfully self-aware but out of control I added, “You know, at our age some people can’t keep up with computers and such.â€
John smiled and continued to talk about his cameras. Soon he was onto accessories I didn’t know about and all I could do was repeat myself about how his toothless friends must sit around and wait for the information storm to pass. Until we talked about that digital companion piece, the computer. It seems that John hasn’t always driven trucks.
“I was a computer programmer. I knew five languages. Cobol, Pascal, Fortran, RPG 1 and RPG 2 . RPG is the old punch card language. I programmed Filene’s first accounting software and it was my program that ran the Tobin Bridge’s toll collecting system.
Comment by michael — March 24, 2008 @ 8:40 am
I don’t know why his wife felt a need to upbraid you — you had plenty of self-inflicted body bruises as it were … Still a great yarn — thanks for the recap!
Comment by el Kib — March 24, 2008 @ 10:55 am
OOOOO Michael! You know if you don’t open your mouth you would have no place to put your foot. But please keep it open. This is priceless. Love the line (and this is the one that got to her I’ll wager), “and all I could do was repeat myself about how his toothless friends must sit around and wait for the information storm to pass.” Pure gold. You know that uncomfortable humor that makes everyone else squirm? Me likey…
Comment by Jen — March 24, 2008 @ 2:07 pm
Ahab was no pirate. Stick to your first drafts.
Comment by rakkity — March 26, 2008 @ 10:52 pm