I can’t remember the concatenation of thoughts that brought me to this particular memory as I was getting ready this morning. Every now and then I think of this memory from what is now twenty-five years ago and it always makes me smile.
I was in college, working at IBM as a co-op. I’d been working there for a while and had a lot of friends in the large software product group I was working for. I’d been dating the same person for the majority of the time I’d been working there but the relationship had waned and he and I had decided to part ways.
I remember sitting in my office telling a co-worker who had stopped by about the recent split when this guy (his name was Bob) suddenly stuck his head into the door of my office and said, “you’re single?” I said something clever like, “yeah” and he said, “do you want to go out?”
Wasn’t this guy older? I mean I knew he wasn’t one of the co-ops because we all hung out together and knew each other. He didn’t look that old but heck, I was still in college and everyone not in college seemed really old to me. I looked at him and said back, “how old are you?” Unfazed, he replied, “I’m twenty-eight.”
Twenty-eight didn’t seem that bad. It was under thirty and I was twenty-two and he had been a nice enough guy from the times I’d interacted with him at work even though I didn’t know him well. And hell, I was on the rebound, so why not? I said sure, gave him my number and said to call me about the weekend since I was at loose ends.
He did call, I think later that evening after work. And then he told me the truth. He was very nice about it, saying he liked me and was interested in going out but when he told me how old he was he had said in a much lower voice a second half to the sentence which was, “I’m twenty-eight…in HEX.”
OH…okay then. I did the quick math in my head. This was nerdy computer stuff. He and I worked in software development, so this was a fairly simple translation code. Hexadecimal is base 16. Everything we humans do is in Decimal, or base 10, for our numbers. Computers don’t like decimal math on account of it not being binary enough. Hexadecimal makes a computer much happier (not to mention the programmer).
Back to the problem at hand. The first digit of 28 is a two, which in decimal would mean twenty, but in hexadecimal would mean 2*16 or 32. The second digit of eight is just an eight, but it has to be added to the 32, so 32 + 8 = 40.
This guy was forty years old. I was twenty-two—he was almost double my age. I don’t know why I asked him what I did next. I had been quickly doing some birth year math. I was born in 1970, which meant he was eighteen when I was born. So I asked him, “how were the 60’s?” He told me, “they were pretty wild”.
And then he said he understood if I didn’t want to go out, what with the age deception and all. I thought he was pretty clever and honest so I told him the date was still on. We didn’t work out, but I’ll never forget how he asked me out.
The Big Boy Update: My son asked us in the car yesterday, “do we celebrate spring cleaning?” My husband explained that, “Mom does about eight times a year.”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter came downstairs this morning without getting dressed for school. She didn’t want to go back up. She tried, “but it’s creepy up there” and “but my legs are tired” and then realized she wasn’t getting breakfast and would have to go to school in her pajamas and without shoes in the cold and changed her mind on not going back upstairs.
No comments:
Post a Comment