The Great Peanut Recall

As all you regular readers know, I packed up the homestead and moved to Fort TomCollins about 2.5 years ago. We've all been substantially happier since the move, but every now and then something sets off a twinge of nostalgia. Yes, there are a few things I miss about San Schmose, and it's not just that every liquor store sells porn (in both print and DVD form in your better liquor stores). No, I miss the people. Particularly that one kind of people that you don't find at The Company in Fort TomCollins.

Yup. I'm talking about gullible people.

See, in San Schmose you have a lot of people that we used to call "foreigners," and these people come from cultures that apparently lack any tradition of "yanking your chain" or "putting you on". Or, possibly, their command of the English language is such that they don't pick up on the telegraphed signs of a good tall tale. Not that gullible people are, strictly speaking, required to be foreign. It's just that in my line of work, pretty much everyone I ever met in San Schmose was foreign, so perhaps I'm overgeneralizing.

Now, the other explanation could be that back at my old The Company location, I was revered for my sage wisdom, and so those that didn't work with me closely enough to really get to know me actually thought I was capable of being serious, and thus were easily duped. Whereas here in Fort TomCollins, I'm just another in a long line of people who were either run out of town at their old sites or, if they're local, simply given from their company to mine in order to jettison dead wood from the bottom line. So nobody takes anyone seriously around these parts.

Now the thing that gets me is when someone I have known for literally years and with whom I have worked on a day-to-day basis on multiple projects still hangs on my every word. This has got to be scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel gullible. And yet, there it is.

Why, just last week I was IMing this old chap that I'll call "Peanut,"and he was raving about what a genius I was with my blogging. (See, already you're starting to see my point.) And we were also having a good chuckle over Angry Thespian's latest leftwing poetry rant a bit, too. Eventually, talk turned to how I had said this about Dear Leader:

"Off-the-cuff, he has nothing but incoherent, emotional blather and substanceless philibustering."

He said something about how filibustering is spelled with an 'f' and not a 'ph'. I just love, by the way, when people criticize my spelling. Especially since upgrading to Firefox 3.0, where the on-the-fly spelling checker works so much less reliably than it did in 2.0. It takes a very simple mind to criticize spelling.

So I looked it up, and he was right. I edited the post a re-posted it. Then I stonewalled. "Yes, of course it's spelled with an 'f'. That's how I have it."

Peanut: "I see it spelled 'ph'."

Me, CherkyB: "Are you using IE or firefox??"

Peanut: "Google Chrome."

Chrome? God, this is too easy.

Me, CherkyB: "Hmmm. Try IE or Firefox. Chrome has this stupid spellchecker thing built in that autocorrects web pages."

Peanut: "Holy crap. On IE, it sez filibustering. Incredible."

Me, CherkyB: "You know, there may be another explanation for this. Try hitting 'refresh' in chrome. Refresh turns off the autocorrect. If it still says 'ph,' then it isn't the autocorrect."

Peanut: "Refresh ==> fili. Genius."

It's like shooting a fish in a barrel. I almost feel guilty playing against such a minor league team. Like Kathy Griffin slapping down a heckling 3rd grader.

But, still, I gotta say it was fun. The most fun I had all week, actually. So this is my cheery post.

The experience also made me wonder what ever happened to Peanut's smiley little sidekick, "Jeeters." He was a happy little new hire until we learned how easy it was to control him. Then we worked him to near death and he quit. I actually miss him at work cuz the stuff he used to bang out in one day takes our genius crew a minimum of three weeks to agree to do, and then another three to actually do, then two to be convinced they did it wrong, and then another two to correct it. Poor Jeeters. He's probably an alcoholic by now. I can't remember if I tried to teach him how to drink or not. I tried to teach Peanut and failed. That Peanut is as dense as a mesquite stump.