Friday: a funny thing happened at the office... pointless Friday evening waffle
1. When I first started using the internet I looked up my name in what was then the equivalent of Google (Alta Vista, perhaps? I seem to have dumped some trillions of memory cells since then) and found a website run by a woman with exactly the same name. She writes boring soft porn short stories (!) and sells them to magazines, as well as publishing some on the internet. She actually uses my name as her domain name, so friends looking me up on the net have probably been assuming, for the last 10 years or so, that I dumped law and went into porn. If only! :)
Anyway, I was intrigued to find another person with exactly the same name (because my second name is fairly uncommon), and so I dropped her an email to say hello. She didn't reply, and I forgot about it until a couple of years later I conducted the same exercise, found that she was still there and wrote again. Again she didn't reply, and I just wrote it off. A year or so after that, though, I made a visit to her site and saw that she'd updated it to explain that she writes under a number of pseudonyms, one of which is my name. Bizarre coincidence! Perhaps that's why she didn't ever write back.
Anyway (again)... this morning I had a meeting with my boss at work. Before we got into the nuts and bolts of what we were meeting about, he asked whether I had any exciting plans for the weekend. I said not, and told him I planned to do some slobbing around, and possibly a bit of writing. He asked me what writing I was doing, and I told him I write short stories. A smirk immediately crossed his face, and his response was "Are they racy?" That seemed a rather odd response, although not totally out of character for him -- he once visited me in my office, pointed to 2 slightly shrivelled plumbs resting in the fruit bowl and asked whether they were the remains of my latest 'victim' (I've noticed that non-lawyers sometimes have a slightly skewed impression of what we actually get up to) -- and so I asked him whether he was asking if they were pornographic. He got a bit coy then, and said, "No, I meant 'racy'." Well, I'm not sure what the difference is. Anyway, I just assumed it was The Boss being a bit of an idiot until just now I mentioned it to my sister, and she immediately laughed and pointed out that he's probably Googled me and wrongly imagines that I'm the woman who writes the soft-porn stories for various women's magazines! I'm sure she must be right :) I'll have to ask him about it next time I see him. It struck me as rather funny :) The place where I work is a hive of gossip, and it now seems entirely possible that for quite some time all the senior people have been looking at me and wrongly imagining that I'm selling soft het porno stories to Women's Weekly. LOL!
I confess, though, that as I thought about it, whilst driving home, I realised that I wouldn't want colleagues from work stumbling across my LJ and realising who I am. Not that there's much danger of that. None of them seem to take much/any interest in the internet.
2. I mentioned in another ramble on here recently that I seem to be losing the ability to spell. I had to reach for the dictionary just now to check whether 'shrivelled' is spelled with 1 or 2 'l's. My instinct was 2, but somehow it looked wrong when I wrote it that way. It's occurred to me, though, that my speeling difficoolities have probably been brought on by reading so much American English on the internet over the last 10 years or so. Americans tend to use just 1 'l' in that sort of situation, whereas we use 2. 'S' v. 'z' is another difference. I'm relieved to learn that I have an excuse. I'd concluded that I was simply losing my mind.
3. 'Jungle' by ELO. What a monster tune :) When I was a teenager I played this record repeatedly on my little record player for about a week. When I eventually left my bedroom to take a bath my father sneaked in and smashed it. I couldn't afford another, and so I smashed his Django Reinhardt LP in revenge. Yes, I'm really that twisted :) (I confessed years later, and he's forgiven me.)
*dances a happy Friday dance*
Anyway, I was intrigued to find another person with exactly the same name (because my second name is fairly uncommon), and so I dropped her an email to say hello. She didn't reply, and I forgot about it until a couple of years later I conducted the same exercise, found that she was still there and wrote again. Again she didn't reply, and I just wrote it off. A year or so after that, though, I made a visit to her site and saw that she'd updated it to explain that she writes under a number of pseudonyms, one of which is my name. Bizarre coincidence! Perhaps that's why she didn't ever write back.
Anyway (again)... this morning I had a meeting with my boss at work. Before we got into the nuts and bolts of what we were meeting about, he asked whether I had any exciting plans for the weekend. I said not, and told him I planned to do some slobbing around, and possibly a bit of writing. He asked me what writing I was doing, and I told him I write short stories. A smirk immediately crossed his face, and his response was "Are they racy?" That seemed a rather odd response, although not totally out of character for him -- he once visited me in my office, pointed to 2 slightly shrivelled plumbs resting in the fruit bowl and asked whether they were the remains of my latest 'victim' (I've noticed that non-lawyers sometimes have a slightly skewed impression of what we actually get up to) -- and so I asked him whether he was asking if they were pornographic. He got a bit coy then, and said, "No, I meant 'racy'." Well, I'm not sure what the difference is. Anyway, I just assumed it was The Boss being a bit of an idiot until just now I mentioned it to my sister, and she immediately laughed and pointed out that he's probably Googled me and wrongly imagines that I'm the woman who writes the soft-porn stories for various women's magazines! I'm sure she must be right :) I'll have to ask him about it next time I see him. It struck me as rather funny :) The place where I work is a hive of gossip, and it now seems entirely possible that for quite some time all the senior people have been looking at me and wrongly imagining that I'm selling soft het porno stories to Women's Weekly. LOL!
I confess, though, that as I thought about it, whilst driving home, I realised that I wouldn't want colleagues from work stumbling across my LJ and realising who I am. Not that there's much danger of that. None of them seem to take much/any interest in the internet.
2. I mentioned in another ramble on here recently that I seem to be losing the ability to spell. I had to reach for the dictionary just now to check whether 'shrivelled' is spelled with 1 or 2 'l's. My instinct was 2, but somehow it looked wrong when I wrote it that way. It's occurred to me, though, that my speeling difficoolities have probably been brought on by reading so much American English on the internet over the last 10 years or so. Americans tend to use just 1 'l' in that sort of situation, whereas we use 2. 'S' v. 'z' is another difference. I'm relieved to learn that I have an excuse. I'd concluded that I was simply losing my mind.
3. 'Jungle' by ELO. What a monster tune :) When I was a teenager I played this record repeatedly on my little record player for about a week. When I eventually left my bedroom to take a bath my father sneaked in and smashed it. I couldn't afford another, and so I smashed his Django Reinhardt LP in revenge. Yes, I'm really that twisted :) (I confessed years later, and he's forgiven me.)
*dances a happy Friday dance*