“I hate her, I positively and completely hate her.” I said to Jonathan. (Who, like I said, was my boyfriend)
We were sitting in a nice restaurant having dinner. Yet, I could think of nothing more pleasant to bring than Erisa and her idiosyncrasies.
“Jenn, Taylor seems to be fond of her, so she cannot be all bad. Maybe she just sees you as a stereotype.”
“Well,” I told him, “I’m not going to stop liking Atomic Kitten, just because she thinks they are a girly band. And I am a girl, damn it!”
“I have a better idea: why don’t you prove to her that you’re competent as a programmer? She seems to like Taylor, even though we both know that he likes Atomic Kitten and all the other girly bands as much as you.”
“Well, maybe you’re right. I still have time on this weekend, I could try learning HTML and getting most of my homepage done. I think the next week won’t be so busy and so I can tweak it even more.”
“Right, maybe that way you’ll earn her respect.”
And so I did. I studied HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and its CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) thing. I created a homepage with:
Some information about myself. My bio, my C.V.
Pictures of myself and my family.
Some jokes and quotations I was fond of.
Links to books that I liked.
Links to my friends’ web-pages.
Some rants and raves about movies I’ve been to.
Some pages about the Power Puff Girls, Atomic Kitten and Britney Spears. (I added them to tease Erisa)
All of this with a nice style — I played with the colours endlessly to get them right — and everything. It was actually quite fun, and I found myself doing it when I got too tired of doing homework.
Eventually, I had a lot to show for. When Saturday came, I showed it to Erisa.
“Not bad.” she said, “Not bad at all. Good content, nice style; nice , portable markup. You have validated everything right?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now let’s upload it. I happen to have my own private place on the Internet, for which I’m paying good money. I’ll give you an account there, if you promise not to abuse it. Wait a sec! Thinking about it, there’s no way someone like you will know how to abuse it.”
“Hmmpppfff…” I said.
“In any case, let me sit in front of the computer for a second.”
We switched places, she opened up this weird window full of monospaced text, typed a few obscure commands, and after about 10 minutes, she said: “here you go. Your username is ‘jennray’ and your password is the same as one on this computer. Now, I’ll write a script that will upload it to the server, if you just type the password. Meanwhile, just take it for granted. Later on, I’ll explain what it does, but we still have a lot of ground to cover beforehand.”
I was beginning to like her.
“Another thing - our Linux User Group (or LUG for short) gathers around every first and third Wednesday of the month at 17:00 at the local university. You should come and get to know Linux better by listening to the presentations that people give there.”
Wow! These Linux guys have nothing to do twice a month, than attend a presentation about it. But, then I thought about graduating from somewhere nice like Harvard or Berkeley and I said, “OK, I’ll come.”
“Heh, the other girls there are more similar to you than to me.”
“Man, I am relieved.”
“You should be, girlfriend!”
“My name’s Jennifer.”
“Listen, Blondie, I couldn’t care less about you or the whole culture and values you represent. I’m just a geek who is trying to make the world a better place. What have you done for the world recently?”
“Heh”, I snapped at her, “at least I care about myself enough to dress properly, and to look my best, and to care about other people. You, on the other hand, make me miserable, so I would not call it making the world a better place.”
“Tough luck, Blondie. Your feelings are not facts, and you cannot sue me for making you miserable. I have plenty of friends whom I seem to bring a lot of joy to.”
“Who, like your boyfriend?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend and haven’t had one for a long time. I’m still dating guys, though.”
“Do they call you back?”
“Not usually, and that’s because I ask them not to.”
“You’re pathetic.”
“At least I don’t need your help in learning how to hack.”
“Which reminds me,” she added, “if you want to get your money’s worth, you’d better want us to continue the lesson, instead of ping-ponging accusations between ourselves. Shall we go on?”
I stopped liking her after this twist of the conversation.