An audience of two

A few weeks back 42nd and Treadmill hired a man, tall, lanky and youngish, to work one of the Customer Service stations, which might have been a wise decision, given the tendency of some of our more obnoxious customers to try to drive the female staff to tears or worse; I have to figure that anyone who can face down a clutch of murdering insurgents has nothing to fear from that bunch. (Surely whatever they're paying him, it isn't enough; I've answered phones there before, and it is a dispiriting experience at best.) In an effort to get an answer for one of the callers, he wandered into my den of inequity earlier this week — for some reason, they always call during break time — spotted the open MT interface, put two and 3.21 together, and asked, "You write that?" Apparently he'd discovered the site during his none-too-copious free time in the Land of Sand. I am, of course, always surprised to find that anyone reads this stuff.

Cut to this afternoon, while I'm filling up my grocery basket. I have a weekly Anti-Shyness Exercise, if you will, which calls for me to strike up a conversation with at least one woman I don't know. This has generally not been difficult, but the ginormous pre-Easter crowd presented obstacles of its own. And then one thing happened which hadn't previously: the woman I don't know struck up the conversation with me. Turned out to be a reader of this very site, who recognized me from a photo I'd left over at MySpace. (Whether this is a defense of MySpace, or a major security issue, is left as an exercise for the student.) We stretched this into a discussion long enough to inculcate despair in shoppers who just wanted a loaf of bread, dammit, because I am, of course, always surprised to find that anyone reads this stuff.