FUNNY THINGS HAPPENED AMID THE PANDEMIC

 

        Funny things happened while writing my ATABAY blog articles.

Empty Seashells

        She cheated on me, but I pitied her.

    This is not about a love affair. This is about a market vendor who sold me "empty" seashells. Yes, I repeat, "empty" seashells – the edible meat in each seashell was gone, probably consumed, before I bought them. When my wife told me I had brought home "empty" seashells, I thought she was joking. It was an incident like no other, a first-of-its-kind in my market experience.

    That particular night, after I had wrapped up my article, the "racket" fouled up our family dinner – a seashells dish we prepare once in a while due to red tide precaution. The trick appeared ridiculous. It's a one-shot deal – a kind of hit used by big-time scoundrels, like an employee who had run off with millions of cash from the bank and disappeared in a flash. It is such a pity that the seashell vendor ripped me off with too little an amount to pocket -- less than 200 pesos only. It isn't worth it. Not only might she chance any time a buyer who could report her trick to authorities, but she also kept facing up the hard reality that her "victimized" customers would never come back, and most likely each (not me) would badmouth her to other potential customers.

    At the end of the day, what keeps haunting my mind is this heartbreaking picture: the seashell vendor's family of four kids sitting at the dinner table, partaking of my seashells' meat stew – hungrily – like there's no tomorrow. What a pity!

"Virus"

    "What the [expletive]!"

    It was a shocking sight. A "virus" was eating backward all the words I had typed, non-stop, like a Pac-Man of the 80s. Horrified about losing quite a few hours of work, I hit all the keys of my keyboard with my frantic fingers to stop the massive deletion but failed. With no option left, I shut down my computer.

    Right away, I Google the issue and got a load of feedback from various forums with netizens strained by the same mess, like the one that lost 15 pages of work to the massive deletion. One said that the key solution was the Insert key and gave the next series of steps in computerese only a techie would be delighted to trail. A software advisor reacted that he's glad to hear about the Insert key solution, but got no idea why it worked.

    After my crash research, I couldn't help wondering why I saw complaints about this mess as early as eight years ago and yet have dragged on until now. I called up my son Leigh Roy, my one-man technical department, to look into the mess. He found no problem with my computer.

    One early morning, I got into my study room, switched on my computer without turning on the room light. When the computer screen brightened up, I could see the silhouettes of all keys against the background of the bright screen. I spotted one key that sunk – the BackSpace key.

    Eureka! Here's my man-on-the-street theory: after some hard hit, the BackSpace key got stuck and stayed sunk even after having "BackSpaced" the 15 pages of that one poor guy. The Insert key when hit hard many times could unstick, by its feeble quakes, its neighbor BackSpace, hence, the so-called Insert key solution.

    Ever since I bought a new keyboard, I've been looking out for the "pac-man" to turn up again. It could be getting itself into shape for the next fight.

"Hacker"

    Just before I click the "publish" button for my "Seventy-Seven Times" article at my ATABAY blog site, I was doing its final editing when I spotted a missing word between "magna" and "laude" which seemed unlikely for me to have left out during the drafting stage. So, I typed the missing word, and then I looked through my updated article. The word was still missing!    Alarmed, I called my daughter Dionne, my one-person IT department to get down to the basement.

    "Day, something's wrong here," I said anxiously. "I can't edit my article anymore."

    She tried it herself and was taken aback to see the word she just had typed being deleted outright. Unable to believe her eyes, she stopped, looked at me, at a loss for words.

    "What a hacker," she softly said, dumbstruck.

    "Now what?" I said, ill at ease.

    All of a sudden, I saw a coy smile on her face, almost like that of a cat that just swallowed a bird.

"Dy, it's porn; we can't use the word."

"What?" I blurted out as I got mixed feelings -- dazed as to how censorship could be comical, but relieved somehow it's not a hacker.

    "I'll use 'magna [porno] laude'," I told her.

    "Leave it out, as is, Dy, readers themselves can make it out."

    While my blog site censors it, others, like FB, allow it. Well, it's comforting to know I'm in good company.

    A few days later, out of curiosity, I checked my article again and was taken by surprise. My blog site seemed to have found a funny way to solve the glitch – to come up with a new coupled word cumlaude. One can read in my published ATABAY article "Seventy-Seven Times" the new socially palatable term – "magna cumlaude". Amusing.