Hollywood goes to Instant Messenger

In which our Hero is reminded just you keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your coworkers away from your instant messaging account

“I’m calling you now” popped on my screen as an IM from Hollywood. I’d just pulled the window to the top of the stack as my phone started to ring. One of these days I’m going to smack that boy.

I really should have figured this out years ago, back when The Admiral discovered in me a similarly geeky technical peer (which I gather may be scarcer around his parts). And ever since, we’ve been on the phone or IM sometimes for long stretches. For a period of time, the ex, who I used to call “the Girl” would call him “The Boy,” for how much attention he seemed to require of me.

I get it, in a way. He’s a geek like I am, with not a lot of other such in his circle of friends or colleagues. And so when we were stranded in Seattle with nought but the barren intellectual wasteland that comes of a team of business analysts, obviously we hit it off. Add to that the fact that as the guys at the pointy end, we tended to be there longer hours than the rest of the team, we tended to hit dinner together, and such.

He’s a good guy. A man of his word, and a loyal friend. It’s just that he’s just more gregarious than 10 of me. And so we talked regularly, by phone or IM. And then, when our former mutual employer gave him a tasking that allowed him to work from home, well, then he started to get just a little bit of cabin fever. Which meant that as his friend, online a fair bit, I tended to get a lot of conversation from him.

And I don’t mind at all. He’s a bright guy, like-minded in his geekery remember, so exchanging notes with him is frequently educational, entertaining and thought provoking. Occasionally expensive as he gets me excited about some toy or another. But with him being in the ready contact of instant messaging, suddenly it went from conversations about what we were up to, to narratives. “I’m stuck on this.” “Just tried that”

I am a strong believer in taking lessons from the people around me as a way of accelerating my own path, but at the point that he’s messaging about every step of his diagnostic process, it’s a little bit distracting from my own thinks and goals and such. I don’t actually fault him, because I know the value of talking out a problem. Hell, any technical person worth her salt will tell you a dozen stories of asking someone for help with a problem only to stop halfway through the explanation because “Oh, I just realized what it is.” Articulating makes you think about a problem differently.

So I get it. And I do it. But day-to-day, an ongoing narrative is actually nearly as exciting as you might think. Fortunately for both of us, he has a sense of humour and realizes that I’m actually working on other stuff, so he doesn’t take offense when I excuse myself or just wander off because someone has demanded my attention at the office.

And now, Hollywood has realized that I’ve usually got an instant messenger running. So he’s taken to messaging me. Not in the entirely useful ways like when he’s asking if I’m ready to go to lunch or to go home, you know, “instant communication” kind of contexts. No. He talks to me when one of us is out of the office and he’s bored.

Like I said, the man is practically my brother, so he’s entitled to a fair degree of attention. But at the same time, I spend the entire day at work with him, eat about every meal with him, go on snack runs and such with him. (People comment about us hanging out together all the time, and I feel a little embarrassed because in general I do prefer to mix up my socializing a little more (well, okay, actually, I prefer to do a little antisocializing and make a point of having lunch alone once or twice a week when I’m on other projects), but hell, I prefer his company to pretty much everybody else at the office)

But instant messaging is a different context. And english isn’t his first language, though fifteen years of talking to him has left me with a healthy respect for his sense of humour. But in a chat window, he’s got me feeling just a little bit out of sorts from the start.

So suddenly, as I’m going to my generally earlier bed-time, I get a message: “Hello”

And for some reason it freaks me out every time. Especially our standard greeting is “Hey” and Hello is so formal. And it’s late. So why is he talking to me? Has something bad happened?

In the end the reason that he IM’d that he wanted to call was to gossip about something second-hand, inconsequential and ambiguous, that sounded great in principle but then when you take the principals involved, it’s far more likely to mean something else entirely. (sigh)

It’ll be fine. He’s a good guy. It’s just… weird.

Ack.

Also, Ack.

Aside:

I was singing to Nocturne today. But she was asleep so I think I got away with it.

“Be kind to your web-footed friends,
for a duck may be somebody’s mother….”

(curiously, I used to sing to her plenty, but at one point she was actually awake and after that I got very self-conscious)