Turn on, sign in, drop out

I got John’s message while searching for top hats on eBay. Buying and ordering top hats on eBay is an obsession of mine – I’m certain we all have them, obsessions. Mine is quite harmless, I believe. Ann, for instance, watches YouTube videos about Mexican drug dealers of the 80’s. Peter is seriously into this wicked message board dedicated to Nazi architecture. As for Sam– well, Sam keeps voting for his favourite Hungarian Playboy Playmates using different IP-addresses.     

Anyway: John’s message. I heard a vibrating click on my computer, which meant there was a new e-mail to check. I knew the message was from John before I even clicked my way to the mailbox: John is the old-fashioned sort. Poor bugger, of all my friends he is the only one who still uses e-mails. The message had this lazy but inevitable ‘none’ as a title and was in capital letters. The whole thing contained five words as well as an endless row of smileys. The words were: BAD CONNECTION – BUT GOT ACCESS.

This was, of course, some news. My first reaction was that I simply had to reach him right away. But my initial idea, which was Skype, wasn’t too good: John wouldn’t be on Skype. He practically never was, which was the reason why so many people kept ‘unfriending’ him on Facebook. I’ve long resolved against it – ever since he let me know he could hack the system and get occasional access. Not often, mind you, but at this moment in time 'occasionally' seems good enough. John is a crafty bugger, possibly the craftiest in our town, and I have to hang on to him. So I clicked ‘reply’ and wrote him an e-mail full of hopeless typos. I’m saying ‘hopeless’, because not even my illegally downloaded Google Grammar Checker could identify most of the words I was after. But what does it matter?..

I gave it another think. Bloody hell, John got access. Somewhere below the coffee-stained keyboard my limbs are getting all tingly. I am genuinely excited.  He’d been desperately looking for the connection for about a week or two, so mentioning that the connection is bad is like telling the loser that all he gets is the third prize.

This access is a sensitive issue. Take Ann. Like a good girl she is, Ann doesn’t even believe this connection exists. Peter thinks it’s possible, but he tweeted yesterday that he thinks we don’t need it. Sam doesn’t seem to give a damn.

But I do. You see, if the connection does exist, then there is still hope.

I’m blogging now, blogging like mad – my fingertips hard and checked like they belong to a guitar player. Except I can’t do so much as a single chord.   

John hasn’t replied yet, and there’s a huge part of me that hates him for that. Because if you aren’t there at somebody’s first whistle, then what is this all for? But there is another part, too, that knows that John can’t be around if the connection really does work properly. And I so hope that it does. In my impeccably pixelated cyber dreams, amid ugly porn stars and beautiful avatars, there’s this scene when I open my front door, take a breath of fresh air, and drown happily in a swarm of eBay top hats waiting for me on the threshold.