Being a user interface programmer, let me say that your worst enemy, after the marketing department, the accounting department, the legal department, middle management, the CEO, the CFO, your compiler vendor, your tool vendors, the people who write the libraries you’re using and your end-users…
…is the user interaction designer.
Often escapees from the career ghettos of art school or desktop publishing, these baskers-in-reflected-high-tech glory somehow managed to create a whole damned usability industry whose alleged purpose is to make computers easier to use but whose real purpose is to save them from a lifelong career of waiting tables. Not smart enough to be programmers, not dumb enough to be safely relegated to tasks like super-sizing your fries, these anal rententives are, as my buddy George puts it, “little dictators — SimCity-sized tyrants — intent on foisting their New Orthodoxy on everyone.”
Oh, relax. I’m just kidding.
But geez, they are annoying, pendantic, self-righteous creatures that absolutely refuse to shut up. May you never be seated next to one on a trans-Pacific flight.
Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.
I’m making it into a T-shirt and wearing it to an HCI conference someday.
Henry Jenkins from Technology Review (“An MIT Enterprise”) wrote about weblogs in the current his current Digital Renaissance column, entitled Blog This. This very blog gets mentioned:
Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution.
…
Most often, bloggers recount everyday experiences, flag interesting stories from online publications and exchange advice on familiar problems. Their sites go by colorful names like Objectionable Content, the Adventures of the [sic] AccordionGuy in the 21st Century, or Eurotrash, which might leave you thinking that these are simply a bunch of obsessed adolescents with too much time and bandwidth.
It may look like a backhanded compliment, and coming from most journalists, it would be. However, Jenkins is the director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, a place famous for seemingly-frivolous pursuits such as the development of the first video game, SpaceWar, to their legendary model railroad club. Silly and pointless as these endeavours may seem, they “sharpened the saws” of those who are shaped and influenced high tech. It’s this background which allows him to see the potential:
Yet something more important may be afoot. At a time when many dot coms have failed, blogging is on the rise. We’re in a lull between waves of commercialization in digital media, and bloggers are seizing the moment, potentially increasing cultural diversity and lowering barriers to cultural participation.
Jenkins notes that there’s a polarization going on in media. At one pole, there’s what Ben Bagdikian’s been warning us about for years: control is held by a smallhandful of very powerful corporations with great reach. You’ll get your 500 channels, but they’ll all have the same thing. At the other end is the Web, noisier than a thousand Istanbul flea markets, with a billion choices and no simple way to separate the gems from the junk. “Bloggers respond to both extremes,” writes Jenkins, “expanding the range of perspectives and, if they’re clever, creating order from the informational chaos.” In an infomation economy, context is the real currency.
Bloggers are lenses through which the information of the Web is focused. Some, like Jim from Objectionable Content and George from Blogaritaville, are powerful microscopes focusing on current events; others, such as this one, are closer in spirit to those novelty spyglasses that came in Cracker Jack boxes that distorted your perspective or made the world look funny. Both have perspectives that you won’t find easily (or maybe at all) in mainstream media and both often aggregate news from broadcasters, print and the Web and interpret it in their own way.
Jenkins suggests that the future of media:
…could depend on the kind of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and these grass-roots intermediaries. Imagine a world where there are two kinds of media power: one comes through media concentration, where any message gains authority simply by being broadcast on network television; the other comes through grass-roots intermediaries, where a message gains visibility only if it is deemed relevant to a loose network of diverse publics. Broadcasting will place issues on the national agenda and define core values; bloggers will reframe those issues for different publics and ensure that everyone has a chance to be heard.
I find this interesting, not only in and of itself, but also because it’s along the lines of the kind of work I’ve been doing for the past two years at the company for which I used to work. We were developing software whose purpose was to find things that were of interest to you, based on the the principle that people for whom you have a high affinity will likely point you to things you find interesting. Blogging acheives roughly the same result; the blogs I like often point me to things I love, whether it be some other Web page or simply something of the blogger’s own creation.
I’ll leave it to Jenkins to close this entry:
As the digital revolution enters a new phase, one based on diminished expectations and dwindling corporate investment, grass-roots intermediaries may have a moment to redefine the public perception of new media and to expand their influence.
So blog this, please.
Duly blogged.
Recommended Reading
The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian. Yes, I’ve already linked to it in the posting above, but it bears repeating. The latest revision covers the reach of traditional media corporations into the Internet.
There’s been a recent spate of writeups on blogging. Check out various articles from:
Unfortunately, I know very little German, most of it from hanging out with my friends Liz and Nasreen, a very quick lesson in the language taught to me by my charming date in Prague and from “Nightcrawler“, the German member of the X-Men. I turned to Babelfish for assistance.
Ach! Ist ein long, long way to go
Even when people are doing the translating, the meaning often gets mangled or lost. The title for the Scorsese movie Mean Streets once got translated to Greek as “Bad Roads”. I remember laughing at a magazine advertisement for the German-made CD-burning software called Toast (an excellent piece of Mac software, I might add). The headline read “Not only with bacon do you catch mice.” Later it was explained to me that it was a direct translation of a German colloquialism. What they meant to say was “there’s more than one way to do it”; the closest English equivalent might be “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”.
Computers are much worse, since they pretty much rely on lookup tables and some pre-programmed rules for grammar. However, the results provide for the kind of amusement you can’t get from a human translator.
The headline translates as “In The Character Teddies: Curtain On For Peekabooty”. It’s followed by this paragraph:
That once as “Hackerbrowser” concerned Peek a Booty had its first public appearance. As “Privacy Tool” is to occur to “Booty” censorship in all world. The final phase of the development becomes the balancing act between attention and proscription.
As Babelfish would put it, I become in the state of confusion.
When a human translator runs across a word that doesn’t translate, I imagine s/he tries to express the meaning of the word by using an explanatory phrase. For instance, the German word schadenfreude would have to be expalined as “delight in other people’s misfortunes”. Babelfish doesn’t have this capability and simply leaves the word as it appears in the original document. Combined with its dubious translations, you get gems like this:
No miracle thus that DC stopped being a group of hackers: Cult OF the DEAD Cow understands itself now as a “prominent developer about Internet Sicherheits Tools”. And DC develops naturally no software, which smells after “Hacking”.
I’m guessing from context (something that Babelfish can’t do) that sicherheits means security. And I’ve been in a couple of poorly-ventilated computer rooms that did smell after hacking.
What about my muck?
My favourite line in the translation is this howler:
Those grew on deVillas muck and quite cult-suspiciously
I swear, nothing grows on my muck. I wash it daily.
I think it’s a reference to the bears I drew for the user interface. I think what they really meant to say is that the bears are great mascots and will become popular icons in computer culture. I hope, anyway.
They did their homework
What doesn’t require translation is the research they did in writing the article. Despite the fact that the Peekabooty site doesn’t have any links to Paul’s or my Web sites nor any pictures of the bears (yet), they managed to find some graphics for the story. They got an image of Boodles the bear — his original name, taken from the gin — and added the caption “nice competition for the Linux Tux” . From a photo on Paul’s site, they made a photo of me and Paul with phreaker legend Captain Crunch. They cropped out The Register’s Andrew Orlowski, who appears in the original photo.
I looked around for any mention of my accordion playing, but there wan’t any. Hmmm. You’d think the Germans would be poopin’ their pants with joy over that.
Thanks, Liz!
Luckily, help is on the way. My friend Liz “Bunny” Phillips is going to translate it for me. I can hardly wait to read it in non-mangled English. Thanks, Liz, and I’ll buy you drinks for the favour!
It’s a nice sunny day. I think I’ll go wash my muck and then go outside.
Recommended Reading
If you want to see the article as translated by Babelfish, copy this URL…
The scene:About 1:30 a.m. on Castro Street, Mountain View’s main strip. Jill and I are outside Molly McGee’s.
We’d been drinking and dancing for a while. We left as soon as the DJ started playing the Grease Megamix, a crime that should be punishable by public execution followed by public peeing-on. It’s that bad.
I wonder how Jamie Zawinski managed to live here without losing his mind.
A group of drunk partygoers — an even mix of men and women — see the accordion and ask the question that most ninety-nine out of one hundred people ask: “Do you know how to play that thing?” I prove that I can by breaking into a couple of popular tunes.
After a couple of tunes, I stop to talk to the group. One of the women is pressing on the keys repeatedly and getting frustrated.
Her: It’s not making any sound!
Me: Of course not.
Her (annoyed, as if I’m playing some kind of joke on her): Why not?
Me: Because I’m not squeezing the bellows right now.
Her: What?
Me: The accordion is just a big harmonica with buttons and an air bag. Sound doesn’t come our of a harmonica by itself; you have to blow air into it to make noise. Same here, except you squeeze the bellows to move air over the reeds.
Her (impressed by my extremely basic science): Wow.
One of the guys: Dude, you’re not from around here, are you? What brings you down here?
Me: I’m visiting my friend Jill [I point to Jill] and am attending a conference in San Francisco tomorrow.
Guy: We’re all from around here. Most of us work at Lockheed.
Her: I’m a mechanical engineer there.
Me (thinking): I am never ever boarding a Lockheed plane again.
I had a bone to pick with San Francisco. The entire damned seven-by-seven miles of the city from the yuppie ghetto of the Marina to the no-man’s land known as South San Francisco. (Don’t get me started on the Valley — especially San Jose.)
It’s not any one thing that brought about the rift between me and what I like to call “The Richest city in the Third World”, but a combination of its many annoyances:
It’s all that, along with what happened to me during my abruptly terminated stay in the city.
Westward ho!
Like most of my stories, it starts with an accordion. One of its many powers is to attract job offers, and in 2000, it got me promoted from programmer to programmer-and-developer-relations-guy. In a fit of needing to be where the action is, the company decided to open a San Francisco office and send its best or loudest spokespeople — namely Cory, me and our white-guy-who-drops-a-lot-of-black-urban-lingo-for-street-cred Chief Strategist — down there to shill our not-yet-existent and often-changing product. There was a short period, maybe a day or two, where I was leaning towards turning down the transfer when my then-girlfriend sagely pointed out this important fact: if I didn’t at least give it a try, I would regret it later.
I moved to San Francisco on December 28th, 2000. I was put in charge of taking care of the corporate apartment, a two-bedroom townhouse in a complex right by Alamo Square Park, whose Victorian houses you’ve probably seen in San Francisco pictures and postcards, as well as the opening shot for the intro to the TV series Full House (brr). The company was constantly sending people from Toronto to San Francisco, and the bean-counters figured that it would be cheaper to maintain a corporate apartment than to book them into hotels. My caretaker role meant that I lived rent-free in a new place equidistant from Soma, the Haight, the Marina and downtown. It was an arrangement not unlike the way Higgins looked after Robin Masters’ estate in Magnum, P.I., the differences being that I was not a stuffy Englishman and my Hawaiian shirt collection puts me in the Magnum fashion camp. (I suppose that Cory was my Robin Masters.)
The E! True Hollywood Story Turning Point, or: It All Goes Wrong
My girlfriend at the time and I were maintaining a long-distance relationship and had decided to shorten that distance considerably. She moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco in early March. About a week and a half later, horrified at everything about the city that makes Cory refer to it as “San Fran-scarcity”, she told me how much she hated the place and that she suddenly had some very serious doubts about the relationship. I asked her to think it over. After all, she hadn’t been there two weeks and it may just be a case of homesickness. I tried to tell her that although it’s not New York — no city is — it wasn’t as if she were suddenly moving to a cardboard box in downtown Calcutta. However, after a couple of hours of talking it over with her, it seemed that she was determined to flake out and I was resigned to the fact that she was going to move back. She booked a flight home for the following Monday.
That weekend could’ve been a miserable one, but it wasn’t. I “officially” broke up with her on Thursday, thereby demoting my status back to “um friend“, a role that made her considerably more comfortable. We spent a very debauched St. Patrick’s Day weekend weekend painting the town red. The bars were serving Irish whiskey, Guinness and green beer, the street parties were great raucous affairs, and playing The Wild Rover on the accordion got us a lot of free drinks. It was one of my better turn-lemons-into-lemonade moments.
Monday was difficult, to say the least. I took her to the airport, said goodbye to her and watched her plane disappear, A few hours shy of two weeks after she’d arrived in San Francisco, she was gone. It was the lowest I’d felt in a very long time.
I didn’t even get the chance to take a couple of days off to cry in my beer; the company had scheduled a series of very important meetings with to-die-for clients: an on-line auction company of some repute and a portal whose name is an expression of glee. I’d written some user interface prototypes that I would be demonstrating at these meetings, as well as talking tech with their developers. I spent the rest of the week putting on my happy face and burying my woes with demos and work.
At the end of that week, it was decided that I should fly back to Toronto for a couple of weeks to meet with the rest of the team that would be developing the 1.0 version of our software. About a week into my visit to Toronto, the company laid off a dozen people in Toronto, cancelled the lease on our San Francisco office, and downsized the San Francsico team to just me and Cory, who would work out of an office at our VC’s headquarters in Palo Alto.
I saw which way the wind was blowing and decided it would be better for me (and even earn me some points with management) if I volunteered to move back to Toronto. They thought it was a good idea, but said that they couldn’t spare me for enough time for me to fly back and pack my stuff. They dispatched our office manager Amy to pack up the office and my apartment and ship it back. About five weeks after I had come to Toronto for a visit, an moving truck packed with all the evidence that I’d ever lived in San Francisco brought my stuff to Toronto. Within the span of four months, I had moved from Toronto to San Francisco and back again.
I spent a week in an “I’m not supposed to be here!” daze. Having lost a girlfriend and then being involuntarily displaced, I felt as if I’d been harshly dumped by San Francisco too. The bitch!
From that point on, I associated San Francisco with unpleasant memories and heartbreak, as if I’d been through some kind of neo-Pavlovian negative reinforcement experiment in which the city was the gerbil cage (whose liner needs changing very badly).
The Return
Just over a week ago, I made my first trip to San Francisco since my abrupt move back to Toronto. I was there to present Peekabooty at CodeCon, do some developer relations with the various hackers who would be attending, and maybe even make my peace with the city.
(Yes, I realize I’m anthropomorphizing a seven-by-seven mile clump of hilly land, its people and its human urine- and feces-stained sidewalks. Don’t tell me you haven’t done something similar.)
Cory gave me the keys to his apartment, where I dropped off all my stuff save the accordion. I had plenty of time to kill before meeting Jillzilla for dinner, so I decided to spent the afternoon walking about the city that was supposed to be my home.
I stopped by Brain Wash, and old hangout of mine located across the street from the old office. Its back half is a laundromat and its front half is a cafe. I’ve eaten just about everything on their menu, spent many afternoons writing prototype software at their tables and even did a couple of accordion-assisted stand-up routines at their regular amateur comedy nights. (For the brave or the shameless, performing in front of an audience is a great way to meet people if you’re new in town.)
The place was silent. Normally, the sounds of the kitchen, stereo and washing machines fill the place. Something wrong happened with the power grid, leaving the entire block without electricity.
Amy, one of the cute punkish staff, was talking to a co-worker. I used to fantasize about her, wearing nothing but Doc Martens, softly kicking me in the head. But I digress.
“It’s too quiet here. If I don’t hear some music soon, I’m going to go crazy,” she complained as I walked in the door.
That was my cue. I switched the accordion from backpack mode to ready-to-rock mode, unstrapped the bellows and said “Did someone say music?”
San Francisco, you are forgiven. (Now, if you can do something about your personal hygiene…)
Next: The bustling metropolis known as downtown Mountain View, CodeCon, children trust me, matter and panty-matter and entertaining a room full of naked women.
It’s just like one of those old Tom Vu commercials!
Setting the scene
The second day of CodeCon was followed by a dinner at Don Ramon’s, a Mexican restaurant two blocks from the DNA Lounge.
After dinner, those of us who hung out on the #infoanarchy IRC channel decided to have our own little gathering.
Lisa did the legwork and found a place: Butter, which is across the street from the DNA Lounge. Butter is a cute little space with a “trailer park” theme with decor you’d expect, and the bar snacks are tater tots, TV dinners and marshmallows that you can roast yourself over canned heat.
That night, they projected the H.R. Pufnstuf movie, a couple of Land of the Lost episodes and National Lampoon’s Vacation onto the walls.
We went to Butter straight after dinner, so by the time 10:30 had rolled around, we’d already been there for three hours. Our party was winding down and people were making various plans to go elsewhere.
I didn’t know my evening had only just begun.
Note: The names of people who weren’t at CodeCon — namely the names of the stagette girls and the fratboys — have been changed.
“Can you play that thing?”
Even for me, this was kind of unusual.
“Can you play that thing?” she asked.
“Sure,” I replied. Oh mighty accordion, I thank you for sending me yet another victim. And so cute, too!
“Is it your birthday?” It was a reasonable guess. ” Can I play Happy Birthday for you?”
“No,” she replied. “It’s my stagette!”
Duuuuuh. I should’ve guessed that, judging from the outfit.
I played the first verse of Billy Idol’s White Wedding in response. She sang along, waving the dildo as if it were a conductor’s baton.
“You have to meet my friends!” she exclaimed, pulling me towards the other side of the room, where eight attractive and tipsy women were greedily downing blue Jello shots from a tray. They took turns posing with me for pictures and a couple even tried the accordion on.
Brandon walked up to me and said “My God, Joey, you weren’t lying about the accordion.”
“It has powers that science cannot yet explain,” I replied.
Invited
The bride-to-be took me by the arm and said “Hey, Accordion Guy, we’ve got a limo coming to pick us up and take us to a few more bars. There’s lots of free booze and I have cute friends as you can see. Wanna come along?”
Lisa overheard this and whispered in my ear: “I think you should go.”
Duh.
The stagette’s timing was perfect. Our #infoanarchy party was winding down, with many people deciding to go home. Most of us were already standing outside Butter’s front door when the limo pulled up. I waved a triumphant goodbye to my friends and climbed into the limo.
All aboard!
Eight or nine girls, along with three other guys they’d picked up at Butter climbed aboard. Both girls and guys were cast from the same mold — the girls were skinny blondes and brunettes in party dresses and the guys were fratboys with brush cuts wearing Gap clothes. They could’ve easily been extras from the American Pie movies.
One of the girls had the last name Stiffler, which she was never referred to as until that movie had come out. I couldn’t resist the obvious joke: “This one time? At band camp? I took my accordion…”
The limo had a bar stocked with some terribly sour sparkling wine that the girls didn’t seem to mind. After a glass of that rotgut, I switched to the only other option: ice-cold cans of Bud, which was what the Frat Boys — my mental name for them — had also chosen.
“Dude,” asked Fratboy One, the tallest of them, “where’d you learn to play accordion like that?”
“I learned by playing for beer money and fun on the street.”
“Dude. That’s so sweet. I can tell it’s a real chick magnet. Dude, I gotta get me an accordion! That would so rule! The ladies love musicians. Look at fuckin’ Durst from Limp Bizkit; he’s like dating porno actresses an’ strippers an’ shit!”
“I’m soooo there, bro,” I answered, as I did a little conversational impedance-matching.
As the limo zigzagged through SoMa, we took turns sticking our heads out the sunroof in pairs and yelling incoherently. Some of the girls were drinking the low-grade champagne out of the fittest guy’s navel.
I should hit the gym more often, I thought.
Oh. My. God.
After my turn at the sunroof, I found a seat and seconds later, Lisa, the bride to be, sat in my lap, put an arm around me and asked what I was doing at Butter and where I got into accordion playing.
“I’m down here from Toronto to speak at a hacker conference,” I replied. I chose the phrase “hacker conference” deliberately; it has that certain bad-boy cachet that “programming conference” lacks.
“Whoo!” she exclaimed as she both arms around me and looked me straight in the eye. “You’re not dangerous or anything, are you?”
Suddenly the popular myth that all hackers are criminals didn’t seem like such a bad thing.
The bride-to-be bows out
The limo pulled up to the south side of the Metreon building and came to a halt. We left the limo and entered a bar with a packed dance floor playing Top 40 dance hits. We didn’t stay longer than half an hour, after which we piled into the limo and went to Asia SF, where we toasted Lisa with Jagermeister shots.
Forty-five minutes after that, we boarded the limo for the last time and ended up a a place whose name I believe was Cloud Eight. Lisa was looking a little rough.
“Water,” she croaked, while a friend supported her. She and two of her friends went towards the washrooms at the back of the club.
With the bride-to-be about to throw up and the limo’s contract over, it looked as though the party was going to break up even though it was only one o’clock.
“Dude,” Fratboy One said. “Lisa’s ’bout to call it a night, but some of these girls are still ready to go. I think Sara really likes you, dude. I’d be entering the dragon if I were you, bro.”
Thanks for the props for my mackin’ Asian style, dude.
After going to the back to check up on Lisa and hearing violent retching coming from behind the women’s washroom door, we decided to gather those who still wanted to party and go elsewhere. It was down to me, the three fratboys and three of the women — Stiffler, Cheryl and Max. The girls and one of the fratboys got into one cab, while I got into another with Fratboy One and Fratboy Three.
“Dude!” said Fratboy Three. “This rocks! A limo full of chicks!”
“Fuck yeah!” said Fratboy One, “And we got the Accordion Guy rockin’ the box! You made the evening, dude!”
“Sweeeeeeeeet.” I replied.
Fratboy One’s cell phone rang. It was the fratboy in the other car.
“Dude! Dude? No, dude. Aw dude, that’s like out of town. Aw, dude. Talk to them.”
He turned to the cabbie. “One-oh-one, dude! One-oh-one!”
“Where you want me to go?” asked the cabbie.
“Just one-oh-one! We’ll tell you. Just get us to one-oh-one!” Fratboy One turned his attention back to the phone. “Dude. Put her on. Dude. Just put her on. Hello? Who is this? Cheryl? Hey, forget there. Let’s just go back to my place. It’s in Nob Hill, we got a lot of booze, we can turn the music real loud. It’ll be great.”
Fratboy One tuned to the cabbie. “Dude! Change of plans. Washington and Leavenworth!”
Those round-eyes, they’re crazy
As we approached Nob Hill, Fratboy One told the cab driver to pull over at an all-night grocery.
He and Fratboy Three ran out of the cab to buy some beer.
The cabbie turned around to talk to me.
“Those boys crazy. You seem like nice Asian boy, not like them. You are Filipino?”
“Yes.”
“I have many Filipino friends,” said the cabbie, who was Chinese. “They all musicians, like you. But that not your real job?”
“No, I’m a computer programmer.”
“That nice job, even in hard time like now,” he said, nodding. “You friend with these crazy gwei lo?”
“No, I met them tonight.”
“Duuuuuuude!” Fratboy One yelled, coming from the store holding a 24-pack of Sam Adams over his head. “Let’s roll!”
“And gwei lo say we can’t hold liquor,” muttered the cabbie.
Nerds 1, Jocks 0
Fratboy One’s apartment was exactly the way I had envisioned it. Nice Nob Hill building with hardwood floors, hand-me-down furniture from the parental units, framed posters of beer and that cliched black-and-white poster of Grand Central Station, the one with light streaming through the cathedral windows. The entertainment altar was in the centre of the room and was probably the most expensive piece of furniture. The only reading material that could be seen anywhere was ESPN magazine and Maxim.
Fratboy Two made a beeline for the stereo and started flipping through the collection.
“Put on the Oakenfold, dude!” said Fratboy One, who motioned for the rest of us to join him in the kitchen. He started pouring tequila into wine glasses. “I’m all out of shot glasses, dude.”
Max and fratboy three danced to Oakenfold for a while and then disappeared into his room. The rest of us moved over to Fratboy Two’s room, which had a computer stuffed with MP3’s and a nice sound system.
The only other furniture was a snowboard and a bed.
Stiffler and Fratboy Two snuggled up on his computer chair, with her on his lap facing him, her leather-pantsed legs wrapped around him. That left Cheryl, me and Fratboy One, which meant that the math wasn’t going to work out for one of us.
“My feet are killing me,” said Cheryl, as she leaned back on the bed.
“That’s too bad,” said Fratboy One.
Fratboy One was a good-looking guy with your standard all-American features; he probably wasn’t used to having to put in some effort towards getting the ladies’ attention. My own geekdom was about to pay off.
“Hey,” I said, unzipping Cheryl’s boots. I can fix that. “One foot massage, coming up.”
“Sorry if my feet stink. I’ve been dancing all night.”
“Awww, feet. Keep them away from me,” Fratboy One said. Strike two.
“That feels nice,” she said, as I kneaded her feet. They didn’t stink at all.
“So tell me, how’d you get into playing the accordion?”
I told her, during which time Fratboy One grumbled and wandered off into his room.
Nerds 1, Jocks 0.
“Thank you, Accordion Boy”
Stiffler and Fratboy Two were teasing each other in the chair while Cheryl and I lay back and I told her about how the accordion had saved me from a mugging in Prague and she told me about how she and her friends were ripped off by scam artists in Rome. We snuggled for a while until she started to fade.
Stiffler and Fratboy two looked like they were about to use the bed, so I carried her out to the couch, tucked her in and kissed her good night.
“Thank you…Accordion Boy,” she said.
“You’re welcome, Drunk Girl.”
Farewell
The door to Fratboy Two’s room was still open and the couple were still (mostly) decent. I gave Fratboy Two a high-five goodbye and leaned down to whisper in Stiffler’s ear.
“Give him one for me,” I said.
“I will,” she answered, smiling.
I walked out into the streets of Nob Hill and began looking for a cab.
