Ch. 1: Paperboy
I was out there on the front steps of the new house, just sitting there, doing nothing, kicking with my toes at the grass growing through the cracks in the sidewalk. I was dusty from working all morning, and I felt like I was melting. No, not melting. Sublimating. Late August afternoon heat, and the air so dry that a young woman like me can't even glow -- just evaporates before it can even begin to make your skin glisten.
When my mother and I moved here from South Dakota last week, my father's things were conspicuously absent from the moving van. He said he needed to stay behind to clean things up and sell the house. But he didn't send a single box of his stuff with us.
Mom says it's because he's a geek and an ascetic. He literally owns nothing that he doesn't use every day. I'm not so sure. They've been having a lot of arguments, and it seems like, at least half my friends back home, their parents are divorced now.
He did let me bring the servers I do most of my work on, to use here. His servers, of course, are there. It just feels so strange logging in to his research servers remotely.
Oh. I'm a geek, too. I set up the new computer room here in the extra bedroom. All by myself. False floor and walls, insulation, air conditioning, wiring. I did it.
The county inspector was surprised when he asked who had done the work, but I showed him my apprentice papers and Dad's plans that I worked from.
Mom insists that I should formally finish real, brick and mortar high school, so I haven't had time to be certified as a journeyman yet. But Dad's a master electrician where we moved from and he did the blueprints, and the computer room really isn't that complicated.
The inspector made us shut down the computer room until a real electrician came out to "finish the job". Mom said she told us so. Nanner-nanner.
At Dad's suggestion, I swept the whole house and the mains for taps and bugs after he left, but there were none that my tools or eyes could find.
And that's why I was outside kicking the grass on the front sidewalk instead of inside working in the cool, regulated air of our new computer room. Master electricians have schedules, and no one has an opening for three weeks. No air conditioned computer lab in the house for us until after school starts.
School is another thing I am not looking forward to, and Mom just laughs it off. She so does not want me to be a geek.
Mom says the new school will be good for me. The sun, too.
I'm glad connecting to the internet doesn't require a full computer room. But there's only so much you can do with a notebook PC and a desk fan. Maybe the notebook doesn't need the extra fan, but the human does, in this heat. So I left Mom to do her mail and went outside to sit down and see what the real world looked like in the hot August afternoon in our new neighborhood.
I heard the sound of newspapers plopping onto porches and looked up the street. Yeah, there's so little traffic that you can actually hear a newspaper plop all the way from the corner, and our street is a long one -- at least a soccer field either direction from the house.
There was a boy, walking with a load of newspapers in his shoulder bags, front and back, headed our way. I was surprised. No. I was shocked. Floored, Mom would say. What kind of boy would you expect to be doing such a thing? In this heat? A geek?
Like me?
I could see the red hair from the end of the street. As he got closer, I could tell he was not your average geek. Wavy hair, freckles, clear complexion, nicely defined face. No glasses to tape.
I don't wear glasses. Dad makes me take care of my eyes. But he does, complete with tape over the parts that break from dropping them all the time.
And he was sweating. The paperboy, not Dad. You'd have to be superhuman not to sweat. He had to be superhuman, just walking with that load of newspapers in that heat.
He waved, and suddenly I remembered I was wearing one of my grungier tank tops and loose running shorts still dusty from the work in the computer room, and barefoot. Dust in my hair, too. Not to mention sticky from the sublimation.
Barefoot's a plus, as long as I'm not standing on the hot sidewalk. But I am not such a geek that I don't care what I look like when I meet the new superpaperboy.
"Hi!"
"Hello." I was trying to be cool, anyway.
"You're the new family here?"
Ohmigosh, he was going to try to sell us a subscription. "Uh, well, ..." And his eyes ... were, uhm, still are, ... so ... blue.
"Must be. I've been wanting to catch you at home, to see if you need hardcopy."
We'd been out most days during the afternoon. There was a lot of paperwork to take care of, and I went with Mom to help her get it right. Two heads are better than one.
"We get ours on the 'net."
"Great. We have a 'net edition, too. Virtual coupons and stuff. Neighborhood SNS. Lemme give you the URL."
Why not? It'd give me a little more time to evaluate him. Maybe on the skinny side, but delivering newspapers didn't seem to have made him a wimp.
He fished in his pocket and handed me an one-page flyer. "My name's Rusty. I run the neighborhood servers."
I retrieved my jaw. And my tongue. Not my brain. "My name's Cheryl. I'm a geek."
I couldn't have said that. Just drop all my defenses.
He didn't miss a beat. "Cool. My mail address is on there too, ping me. Gotta get the rest of these out." And he raised his hand as if to bump fists, but shifted to a half wave when my hand didn't move, and turned and continued down the street. Looked back once and gave me a grin and another wave.
I stood up under auto-pilot and went inside to show Mom the flyer.
"Oh. The ISP mentioned this. It's one of the bundled services." Mom looked up at me and smiled dryly. "And he's good looking?"
All my defenses.
Ch. 2: UDP Packets
Backup at https://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2017/10/bk-phr-01-paperboy.html.
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