Paper trail

The first thing everyone asks is if people at work read my blog, and what they're always surprised to find out is that on the morning after an update, 9 to 10am is known here as "Pete Hour" -- the time where a good handful of my coworkers all take turns spitting coffee onto their computer monitors and then festively running into each others offices or cubicles to high-five each other and discuss, on company time, my place in watercooler history. Some of that is not exaggerated.

As much as I sometimes resent being pigeonholed as The Blog Guy, nothing inflates my head better than the Monday mornings in the elevator where my boss tries to initiate smalltalk by asking what I did over the weekend, quickly followed by a voice from behind us that says, incredulously: "OMG DIDN'T YOU READ HIS LAST BLOG?! IT WAS A TEARJERKER!!!"

Now, it's occurred to me for a while that I may not be alone, that somewhere in our office there's a quiet, self-effacing blogger that no one knows about, so sometimes I'll type a coworker's name into Google to see if they also have a tell-all blog or whatnot.

I had no luck until a few days ago when I did a search on an accountant who started last week. Turns out she's got a LiveJournal. I nodded grimly to myself, did an atypical amount of typing, chugged lustily at a cola, murmured "I'm in," pumped my fist in the air and said "Yessss!" -- really every hacker movie cliche I could think of. Actually, I did none of those things.

The blog wasn't super-intimate or anything, but I felt like I knew way more about this person than I should -- even though all that info was out there for the taking -- and my creepy-factor was totally at 2.3 or 2.4 tops.

During this morning's Pete Hour, this guy down the hall joked that the reason I hadn't blogged about him yet was because I respected him so much, so I replied that I actually had blogged about him before but he didn't know it. I was only kidding, but he took it seriously and scoured my archives until finally concluding that he was the Misuser Of The Word Literally (which he wasn't).

I told him repeatedly to stop looking, that it really wasn't him, that there aren't Easter eggs scattered throughout my archives. I said: "Subtext rearranged is buttsex." But he wouldn't buy it. His cheeks started trembling.

Then the new accountant started showing interest in our conversation by peeking her head into the cubicle and smiling and saying, "Look at Mr. Popular! I guess blogging isn't a waste of time after all." I took that as some sort of sign, an acknowledgment that she was my internet brethren. So I decided to make a reference to her blog that only she would understand, winking knowingly and going, "I, too, have wondered what happened to the mole on Ewan McGregor's forehead, and miss it greatly."

The new accountant shot me a funny look, then slowly pulled her head out of the cubicle... which just about gave me a heart attack. Why did I say that?! Do I ever think before I talk?! How on earth did I assume that would be appropriate?!

But it turns out, that wasn't even her blog. It belongs to some precocious teenager from Pennsylvania WHO HAS THE SAME FIRST AND LAST NAME. The new accountant only looked at me funny because I made no sense and was just being plain weird. Which is acceptable, because as I believe it was Whitman who once said, "'Tis better to be a weird talker, than a creepy stalker."