When I was in college, I initially had a job at a fast-food restaurant. I usually worked close, so I drove home after midnight. Being a little zoned, I edged over the speed limit a bit. I got pulled over twice, only going twelve and thirteen miles per hour over. But at eighteen years old with a provisional license, this was enough to lose all my points and get suspended.

By the time my suspension hearing came up, I had a new office job at the college, and a new quarter had started. We needed four PE classes to graduate, and my college offered Skiing, so I’d taken that. I’d gone to one class (held at a local ski area about an hour out of town). But at my hearing the next day, the hearing officer had no mercy and gave me a three-month suspension.

I initially thought that I’d just keep driving, making sure not to get any unwanted attention. But my brother cautioned me that getting caught driving on a suspended license would be expensive. I then had a thought about appealing to the hearing officer. 

I went back to his office and asked to speak to him. I told him I had a class off-campus and really needed to be able to drive to it. He then asked the fateful question:

Hearing Officer: “What class do you have off-campus?”

Me: “Um… skiing.”

Hearing Officer: *Laughing.* “You’re kidding!? I’d be laughed out of a job if I let you have a license to go skiing!”

I slunk out of his office. So, I couldn’t continue to drive to class, and I didn’t have any friends who were in the class. So, I dropped the skiing class.

My brother happened to be friends with the instructor of the skiing class. He asked me months later if I didn’t like my instructor. I reminded him that my license had been suspended and I couldn’t drive to class. He then said I should’ve hitchhiked. I told him I’d rather miss skiing instead of being murdered by someone who picks up hitchhikers.

I have a legal issue in Colorado to deal with just before I plan to move to Northern Virginia. I have to fill out a form detailing where exactly I am moving to. For information, Virginia cities are independent of any counties, even if they’re surrounded by a county.

Me: “City? Alexandria. County? N/A. State? Virginia. ZIP code? 22312. There.”

I hand the form to the clerk.

Clerk: “Hmmm… What do you mean by ‘N/A’ in the ‘County’ blank? Is that an abbreviation?”

Me: “I guess. It means ‘not applicable’. Alexandria is an independent city.”

Clerk: “What does that mean?”

Me: “It’s not in any county. It’s independent of them.”

Clerk: “That’s not possible. It has to be in a county.”

This is before smartphones, so I can’t pull up a map. Instead, I sketch the geography as I explain.

Me: “Look. This blob is the City of Alexandria. This area to the north is Arlington County. To the south and west is Fairfax County. And to the east, across the Potomac River, is the District of Columbia.”

Clerk: “The district of what?”

Me: “District of Columbia. DC. Washington, DC. The capital of the United States.”

Clerk: “Washington, DC, is not in Virginia.”

Me: “Yes, I know. It’s just across the river from Alexandria and Arlington.”

Clerk: “No, it’s an island in the ‘Lantic Ocean.”

Me: *Giving up* “Whatever. In any case, you can see that Alexandria is not a part of either Arlington or Fairfax County. It’s independent.”

The clerk starts putting my information into the computer.

Clerk: “No, you see, when I leave ‘County’ blank, I get an error.”

Me: “Fine. Just put ‘Alexandria’ in for the county, too.”

The workaround worked, inaccurate as it might be. I was just glad I didn’t have to explain other areas on my sketch that were Maryland.

In one of my higher-level computer classes, our professor assigned three problems out of our textbook. They were at the end of chapter 11: problems 21, 22, and 23. The format the book’s author chose to label their problems was chapter number, dash, and then problem number.

So, when my professor wrote the assignment on the board, he simply wrote, “Do the following problems: 11-21, 11-22, and 11-23.”

At the end of class, I came up to his desk with a notebook sheet with my name, date, and the answers to the problems. I had simply written: “-10, -11, -12”

He laughed. I still had to do the real problems.

When I went to college, the school computer being used was a DEC PDP-11/70, a so-called “minicomputer” that actually took up a special air-conditioned room full of cabinets, waist-high disk drives, and tape drives. Students logged onto the computer in an adjacent room (computer lab), which had dozens of dumb terminals attached to the PDP (Programmed Data Processor) through cables running under the raised floor. The terminals with CRTs (monitors) we used were leftovers from the 1960s and ‘70s, so they were on their last legs, but they mostly worked. When one failed, we’d just replace it with one from storage instead of trying to get it fixed.

I was a lab aide for this computer. My main job was helping students use the equipment, and if I happened to know the language they were programming in, I would help them.

At one point, one of the CRTs was giving out. It would do the odd thing of stretching out the middle half of the displayed text to the full height of the screen, thus losing the first and last quarters of the display. (The text was still there, just not visible.) I would usually jostle the terminal until the CRT went back to normal and showed the full screen.

One day, a student came over to my desk, panicked because she was using that particular terminal when it started to act up. She didn’t want to lose her work (no real chance of that), so she asked for my help.

I strolled over to her seat, and like Fonzie on Happy Days, I blew on my left fist and bonked the top of the terminal like The Fonz did to jukeboxes. The screen popped back to normal, showing the student’s work. She was amazed, and I just strolled back to my desk as cool as possible.

When I was growing up, my mom would occasionally cook liver for dinner. The first time I tried it, I hated it; it was mealy and bitter. I just didn’t see what the rest of my family loved about it.

Mom would also cook bacon as a topping for the liver, a la mushrooms on steak. I would eat the bacon but leave the liver. She would try to cajole me into eating some liver, and some nights, I would take a bite or two to appease her. But I still loathed it.

One night, she cooked some spinach as our vegetable side dish. I loved spinach and would put butter and/or lemon juice on it. But then, I noticed that my dad’s plate didn’t have any spinach. I asked my mom about it after dinner, and she said Dad didn’t like spinach.

Me: “Well, I don’t like liver, and you still insist that I try to eat some. So, why doesn’t he need to eat spinach?”

Seeing my logic — and not one to just dismiss me by saying, “Because I said so!” — she agreed that on nights with spinach, Dad wouldn’t have to eat any, and on liver nights, I wouldn’t have to eat liver.

The bonus on top of this deal: she would cook extra bacon for me to eat instead of liver. That was a win-win for me.