The Whole Damned Story

[ornoth]

Twenty-two years ago, I was just minding my own business.

At the consulting company where I worked, I had just finished developing BankBoston’s HomeLink & OfficeLink banking applications, and was about to roll onto a new project for a local startup.

I received an email from some new hire who was moving our (land-line!) telephones to the new team area. As you might expect, she ended by saying that anyone having concerns should call her at extension 1366.

Just one problem there: x1366 was my phone number!

I immediately emailed her back and discovered that she’d accidentally typed my extension (1366) by transposing the digits of her own (1633). Not an auspicious first impression for a new hire fresh out of college, whom I was going to have to work with on my next project!

And that’s how I met your mother...

Despite starting off in decidedly bizarre fashion, once I met Inna in person, I decided to cultivate a friendship. At work I orchestrated time together under the pretenses of tutoring her on web design and speaking to my coworkers individually about team morale.

I charmed her with hair down to my hips and bizarre boyish antics. I ran the team’s junk food fund—known as “SnackLand”—and wrote a web app so the team could vote on what they wanted to buy. When I ordered a new bicycle, I had it shipped to work in a box, assembled it, and rode it around the office space in my consultant’s white shirt & tie, despite bikes not being allowed inside the building. The security guards freaked out when I eventually brought it down to the ground floor to ride home!

But with Inna, the deal was sealed when I persuaded her to come to my place after work to meet my cat Puggle: the fluffiest longhaired creamsicle you could ever meet. From that point forward, we were an item.

Not a public one, mind you. We kept our romantic involvement strictly a secret at work for some time, only exchanging furtive kisses when we were alone in the elevator between floors. It wasn’t something we wanted people to know at first, but we’d eventually let the proverbial cat out of the bag.

In the meantime, we spent a lot of time together. I was still into Boston’s local music scene, and we went to countless live music shows.

One of our early dates will always stand out in particular. We were having dinner at Brown Sugar Cafe, a neighborhood Thai place, looking for something to do for the evening. I was lamenting that there were no good bands playing, only some stupid punk band calling themselves “The Damned”.

Little did I know, but The Damned were Inna’s teenage idol band, an aging English group whom she’d been following for more than a decade, but had never seen live. It was as if I’d waved a magic wand and made her dreams come true by turning three Fenway rats into her favorite brooding goth heartthrob singer Dave Vanian, drunk buttocks-exhibiting glam guitarist “Captain Sensible”, and (perhaps least of a transformation) a back-alley waste product drummer called “Rat Scabies”.

Needless to say, within a couple hours we were off to Axis for an evening of noise, profanity, and unsolicited exposure to middle-aged man-butt.

In those early days, neither of us made particularly desirable partners, and our relationship was very off-and-on for the next seven years, until Inna moved back to Pittsburgh. We remained best friends—with occasional benefits—for another ten years while we both matured into adults capable of tolerance, compromise, and forgiveness.

When the obscene Hell-spawned winter of 2014-2015 prompted me to leave my beloved Boston, Inna suggested I come to Pittsburgh to see if we could stand living with one another.

With four years of cohab now under our belts, we’ve settled in to a stable, lasting partnership. The future’s a bit up in the air right now due to the Corona virus, but we’re confident and comfortable facing whatever comes up together.