Chas's Revenge

A lot of us are using Word Verification these days. Spam comments are irritating and most of us don't want to deal with all the deleting they make necessary. And, come on, we sometimes have fun with the verifications and the word associations they bring up.

One day I was on Susie's site. One of the WFs I came along was not any particular word, mostly a jumble of consonants, but it did remind me of an incident from some years earlier.

When Ichabod and I lived in Grand Haven we used to hang out with a buddy from work, Chas. Chas was working in the engineering department at that time. He and a young guy from that department had a friendly rivalry going. They enjoyed playing tricks on each other.

One Friday night the three of us had been hanging out and doing a little drinking. Ichabod was showing Chas his text-to-speech software. You would type in a sentence and the computer would say it back in that monotone computer type of talk. Ichabod's favorite sentence to have it say was, "(Squirl) eats kitty litter with a fork."

Well, the three of us tended to get silly when we were together. It didn't matter if we were drinking or not. But somehow we decided we needed to leave the young engineer a message on his voice mail.

Ichabod typed in random letters so that it sounded like a very garbled message. He spelled the guy's name in, phonetically, once or twice and a few words that were pertinent to the product our company sells.

I think Chas almost peed his pants the next Monday. He could hear the guy asking everybody around to come listen to his message. It was hard to understand and he thought maybe someone could decipher it.

I'm not sure how long Chas let him go before he burst out laughing. He told him we'd played a prank on him and the message was meaningless. I don't believe the young guy thought it was as funny as we did.