A Message From God?
Manna or cookie crumbs? Some real-life humor for your inbox.
There I was, typing away on a rainy Saturday afternoon, expressing myself freely to no one in particular, as I am prone to do. And, after a bit of typing, I looked up at the screen to see what I had wrought (since I still can't type particularly well without looking at the keys). And I noticed what looked like a strange, encrypted message from beyond.
Whoa. That would be a weird way for God to speak to me. Then again, I suppose burning bushes in the Sinai peninsula are pretty strange too. So I looked closer. And I realized that the numeral "4" appeared after every "u". Was this a sign??? Should I go find my Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring??? Alas, I quickly realized that, old as I am, I'm not old enough to own a Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring.
Radar engaged, I typed on, figuring that, after a certain point, the spirit in question would tire of my indifference. I mean, I do have a backspace key. And old me can be quite the pig-headed utilitarian pragmatist nowadays. But the 4's persisted, like ants on a morning countertop with gooey jelly residue, after a late night cheat-fest with some rye toast.. And then it hit me. U4!!! God was telling me to start a band twice as good as U2!!! That must be it! But, sigh, the excitement quickly faded, as I realized that God might be powerful enough to morph a quiet introvert like Moses into a powerful public speaker, giver of the law, and Plenipotentiary to His People, but even The Almighty can’t turn me into Bono.
So… having ruled out U4 the Megaband as a late in life epiphany from the heavens, I looked for other possible causes. One possibility -- though admittedly farfetched compared to God telling me to start U4 the Megaband -- was "maybe there's something wrong with the ‘U’ key”. That seemed dumb and unlikely, but I figured I would pry off the "U" key just in case.
So I did. Expecting to see some black plastic, what I saw instead was... I don't know... bread crumbs? No! It was manna!!!! It's true! God was speaking to me after all!!!
So I excitedly pulled all the keys from the keyboard, to see what other messages might await. And I slowly realized that this was not manna, but a more prosaic substance known from the Yiddish as schmutz. A decade or so of schmutz. Well, at least there was a weak linguistic tie to ancient Israel. So I had that goin' for me. Which is nice.
Resigned to my more practical but very boring diagnosis, I cleaned out the innards of the keyboard, afflicted as it was from the onslaught of a software developer's stray granola, cookie crumbs and hair loss. I turned to my handy dandy air blower, which I bought a number of years back after finally growing tired of paying for compressed air (what an insane racket that is...). And it saved me once again, although some of the stuff was a kind of gloopy super-schmutz, requiring some alcohol and a Q-Tip. But whatever. And then I reassembled it, thanking God the entire time that I had taken a photo before pulling all the keys (since heaven knows that I still can't tell you how a standard keyboard is arranged, at least off the top of my head -- and this thing has a bunch of newfangled, special-purpose Logitech keys anyway).
After dealing with an intransigent space bar, it was time to flip the On switch and type some u's. The 4's had disappeared. And I was struck with ambivalence. Apparently, God had stopped speaking to me through my keyboard. So sad. I guess it’s time to seek fundamental spiritual meaning through other channels. But the keyboard had so much promise. U4 the Megaband would have been epic.
hilariously relatable on many levels... Great writing Tom!