Strange Conversations: Part Ninety-Nine

This is what happens when you live with a hardcore geek.

To make more sense of this, we were watching The West Wing (season three) during dinner, but it was one of those episodes where Aaron Sorkin “writes back” to his critics (in this instance, unconvincingly, about his sexism. I was left with the impression that, apparently, only ugly women—regardless of their intelligence—are frustrated by Sorkin’s particular brand of gender relations, which puts me in my place, I suppose) so I insisted on a break.

I’d not been in the study—which, remember, is some ten feet from the living room—two minutes when this popped up on the Gmail chat function:

NICK: They did have muffins but I did not have any.
ME: What? What? Where? Whem? When, even? Who is this? What the hell is happening? Ack!
NICK: Just responding to something you wrote yesterday.
ME: What? I wrote what where?
NICK: Treena? Are you ok?
ME: No! I don’t know what’s happening!
(Nick comes into the study with his iPhone)
NICK: See, I’ll show you what I’m talking about.
(Shows me some fairly banal chat we had yesterday about him not having a muffin with his coffee)
NICK: See, nothing worth panicking about.

Now, Nick has claimed for years that my mulling a conversation over in my head and then saying, some half an hour later, “And you know what else annoys me?” is the most irritating thing it is possible for one’s partner to do.

I maintain that saving chats on the iPhone and then picking them up thirty hours after they’ve ended is much, much worse.