Conversation as I was leaving the Pru today

[beowabbit]

Random person on the street: Do you know how to run computers?
Me: What?
Random person: Do you know how to run computers?
Me: [worrying I might be about to ask me to help with a virus or missing DLL or something] If they're not Windows computers.
Random Person: No, I mean, do you know how to drive a computer on the Information Highway? Bring up all those pages and stuff? You know, pages?
Me: Uh, yeah. Why?
Random Person: Cause I just learned how to do that at an expo up there. [with genuine enthusiasm, as though he were telling me he'd won the lottery] That's a good thing to know!

Comments

[missdimple.livejournal.com]

If I didn't know you better, I would think that you were totally making this up! It was fun to hear about, though. It made me laugh.

[beowabbit]

If I didn't know you better, I would think that you were totally making this up!

Actually, I find there's enough wackiness in the real world that I don't need to make stuff like this up.

I'm guessing he was homeless (although if so, he was doing well by homeless standards), and that maybe it was an expo intended to give people skills to escape homelessness. What threw me was that he came up to me so deliberately on a crowded sidewalk -- I was thinking maybe he was somebody I'd bumped into at work or something. I mean, I wasn't wearing my pocket protector or carrying a slide rule, and my horn-rimmed glasses weren't patched with white cloth tape or anything, so how did he pick me out as a geek? But I think it was just random. He was quite friendly and cheerful, though.