How I met my best man....

Wow, I haven't blogged proper (as opposed to Facebook posts) for a long time! Anyway, this is actually a reposting of a Facebook comment that had enough bearing on my personal history to be worth capturing here. A Facebook friend posted:

When someone is doing something EXTREMELY irritating (for instance, clicking their pen incessantly for an hour) how do you say STOP THAT FRICKING BULLSHIT in a nice way, but still letting them know how FRICKING ANNOYED you are??

I just had to respond with:

I actually met the person who was later to be my Best Man that way. This was back in the days where people didn't have their own computers and you used shared terminals to larger computers. My favorite terminal room was fairly secluded, in one of the engineering buildings, and only had three or four terminals, most of which were usually unused. One night when I was trying to do homework there, another guy was also working there. He was tall, pale, and disheveled and kept his coat on even though it wasn't cold inside. He would enter his command and -- while waiting for the computer to respond -- would drum frantically on the keyboard. This got very annoying very fast. I wanted to say something but he looked so creepy I was reluctant. I was pretty sure that coat he refused to take off must have been hiding dozens of deadly weapons. But after a while I decided that life simply wasn't worth it if I had to keep listening to that exasperating drumming. I gathered my courage and said something like: "Excuse me, but that constant drumming is irritating." This led to a longer conversation about the work we were doing and cute girls on campus and such and we ended up close friends.