Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention. Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.
As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities. This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.
When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.
Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace. Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on. In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.
For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you. It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass. All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.
*
“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”
“We’re getting to that.” He waved.
*
The First Incident in January when, due to a serious cock-up by the church, all the hosts Father Pat received were moldering and spoiled and probably would have killed someone if he’d actually fed anyone them. But it was the first mass of the year, when a peak number of people came in after vowing to got to church more for new year’s. He couldn’t NOT have communion.
“I’ll bake.” offered Maria, the parish secretary and probably the best baker in the county. “So we have hosts. Jesus will understand.”
Father Patrick, not one to pass up the chance at Maria’s cooking, immediately agreed.
A Host is supposed to be composed solely of unleavened wheat flour and water, which is why they taste terrible. It’s a theological point of some importance relating to Exodus or something but Maria had an important theological counterpoint: Jesus both divine and loves all his children, ergo, Jesus would neither be a nasty bland cracker nor want his children to suffer as such and so instead, she made Mexican wedding cookies.
They were a SPECTACULAR hit. Many praises were heaped upon father patrick for the Much Better Wafers and that they’d be sure to show up next week as long as Maria kept making them. Father Patrick figuring that hey, anything that gets people in the doors is good and really, if it was turning into Jesus once inside the parishioner, did it really matter what the wafers were made of? So he continued to let Maria bake the Hosts, and encouraged her to try out new flavors, like nutmeg and cinnamon.
This went on swimmingly for a few weeks until The Bishop showed up for a surprise visit the same week Maria decided to experiment with rainbow sprinkles.
Dad remembers hearing the bishop through the windows roaring “THE HOLY BODY OF CHRIST DOES! NOT! CONTAIN! RAINBOW! SPRINKLES!”
The matter went clean up to The Archbishop, who decided that while Pat was probably right to not feed spoiled hosts to his parish, he should attend some remedial classes to remember what Communion was all about, so that if it happened again, he’s come up with a more suitable substitute.
Father Patrick returned in late March, full of spite and some fascinating new ideas.
*
“Is this where the Cannibalism happens?” Six-year-old me asked, eager to get to the good parts.
*
At his remedial classes, the teacher had stressed the importance of transubstantiation, aka “That bit where the wafer and wine, Actually, Literally, become the flesh of Jesus Christ and we expect you to swallow.” Also on the syllabus was understanding the importance of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice.
“So, I was thinking about Easter Service.” Said father Patrick one afternoon while dad was doing his computer science homework at the church because his dorm was a barely-standing fire hazard and the library was where you went to have sex.
“Well, we do re-enactments for christmas. Why not on easter? Why not re-enact the crucifixion of Christ right here? Make it real for everyone. Trauma’s great for bonding a community together.”
“Who’s playing Jesus?” asked Maria, always one for a good laugh.
“That’s the thing- A Host, it doesn’t look much like flesh, right? Doesn’t look like much of anything, really. Not great for reinforcing one’s belief.
What if, instead, we- and I mean you, Maria, I can’t cook to save my life- make a man-sized loaf of bread, maybe in the shape of a T, and we have some of the boys dress up as romans and whip the bread and we pour the wine on so it’s bleeding and them- then we make a big wooden cross and actually nail the bread to it with, I don’t know, railroad spikes, more wine all over. And we raise the cross, all while telling the story of the crucifixion.”
He paused to take a drink, Maria slowly crumpling onto the floor in horrified laughter and Dad now thoroughly distracted from his homework.
“Then we lower the cross, and invite everyone who wants to take communion up to tear a hunk of Jesus off. Just descend into his corpse like vultures. I think that’d really be a good bonding experience for the church.” he nodded thoughtfully. “The hard, part, I suppose, will be finding enough romans.”
“I WANNA BE LONGINUS.” bellowed my father, barreling into the room.
And so, the plan was hatched. Dad hit up every other guy in the Church and eventually rounded up four more romans, three of them from the Education Department of Cal Poly, and one guy from Chemistry, who just liked to watch things burn.
This, being a play, naturally meant that there was a rehearsal, and test Bread jesus. Maria had decided that if they were going to start being extra-literal, she needed to make the most lifelike Bread jesus possible, and made a distressingly buff and human-proportioned Jesus by Advanced bread-braiding, complete with plaited hair, quail’s-egg-and-raisin eyes, bready muscle groups, and an eight-pack because why not make the lord completely shredded?* She also made the important theological decision that since Jesus loves everyone and was happy to die in spite of all his suffering, he should be smiling, and had a toothy corn-kernel smile. He was Wonderful and Terrifying all at once.
“Maria,” asked Father Patrick after a few minutes of delighted and horrified cooing over Jesus’ toothy grin and abdominals. “Why is he wearing a tea-towel?
“Well, he’s the Son of God. A Man. With all that entails.” She said, pointedly staring at Father Patrick while everyone stared at the suspiciously lumpy tea-towel. “And he might have… burnt, slightly.”
Everyone nodded and agreed that the tea-towel was the best course of action. The rehearsal goes splendidly and everyone agrees that this is the most delicious Jesus they’ve ever had.
*
Easter Sunday arrives and the Church is PACKED, from the more lapsed Catholics showing up for a high holiday, parents visiting for spring break and a whole horde of newcomers who had gotten wind that something was up and they ought to come.
Dad is a lanky as hell 21-year old composed mostly of technical jargon and acne but he is STOKED to be playing Longinus, the roman that speared Jesus on the cross, because he gets to do the BEST technical effect in the whole parade. Since he came in at the end me missed a good portion of the sermon, but did hear the “oooh” from the crowd as the massive cross was dragged in by the other Romans, followed by horrified gasps and high screams and a discernible “What the FUCK” as they brought in Bread Jesus 2.0, whipping him enthusiastically, and hammering him into the cross, the sound of wine splashing onto the floor loud in the terrified silence of that Parishioners.
Finally Father Patrick gets to the part about Longinus, and Dad comes sprinting down the aisle as hard as he can, because in order for Bread Jesus to be seen by everyone, his middle had to be about 10 feet off the ground, so Dad had to run, shrieking latin curses, down the length of the church, with a big honking spear and take a flying leap at Jesus in order to spear him in the gut.
Please take moment to imagine you are some normal god-fearing catholic who has decided to visit little bobby or maybe patricia at college and you’re all going to church together like a nice family and this Fucking madman has decided to go all Silence of the Lambs on mass and now there’s some sort of underfed translucently pale man in ill-fitting Roman armor and cape flying at a horrifying glutinous effigy of your lord and savior, with an actual fucking spear, screaming like a madman. Don’t you feel yourself drawing closer to God already? Defensively, perhaps, like an octopus trying to ooze itself into a crevice against the horrors of the ocean.
However, two things happen that were not planned on
1. Dad misses. In his defense, Bread Jesus is close to but not quite the size of a man- more like the size of a doughy teenager, and his middle is a small target 10 feet up in the air and dad is has a computer science minor, not an athletics scholarship. He misses by about 8 inches and instead very solidly stabs Bread Jesus right through the groin, leaving a big hole in Maria’s tea-towel and the spear jutting out at a decidedly… attentive angle, as Bread Jesus’s Bread Dick drops to the floor with a splat. Nobody notices this, however because
2. In rehearsal, Dad had managed to get the spear right in jesus’s navel but neither Father Patrick nor the other romans could get the wine up there to make his middle appropriately bloodied.
Maria come up with the Genius solution that since wine is made of grapes and Jam is made of grapes, she could make a jelly-filled Jesus for Dad to stab. There was a normal-sized test loaf and when dad stabbed it on the table, it had a nicely gooey dribbling effect.
However, this time the loaf was torso-sized, still hot from the oven and upright, so when dad speared the very end of the loaf, all the steam-pressured jam had collected at the bottom and a spray of lukewarm smuckers exploded out from bread jesus, turning the first three pews into a splash zone of symbolic entrails.
There was a hot, sticky minute of complete silence in the church after that.
Then, Father Patrick indicated it was time for the cross to be lowered, and continued on with the normal preparations of the Host, he himself covered in hot smuckers, as though nothing particularly ordinary was occuring, quietly kicking the bread-dick under the altar. At the end of it all, Father Patrick and invited everyone up with the Last Oration:
“Thou, O God, has kindly allowed us to have a part in this Holy Sacrifice; for this we give Thee thanks. Accept it now to Thy glory and be ever mindful of our weakness. Amen.”
…And everybody came up, shuffling like terrified zombies, pinching off tiny bits at first but then the madness took them and they began tearing apart bread jesus by the handful, weeping as they partook, scattered prayers and begging for forgiveness. The whole congregation was kneeling about the altar, tearful and united in their guilt and their need for God.
*
“IS CHURCH ALWAYS LIKE THAT?” six-year-old me asked, absolutely stoked. I’d convert on the spot if I got a show like that.
“No, it’s normally bland wafers and lots of chanting in latin.”
“Well that’s boring as hell.” I remember muttering and Dad snorting the coffee he was drinking out of his nose.
*
As people filed silently out of the Church to a gloriously sunny California afternoon, faces wan and smeared with wine and jam, Father patrick turned to Maria and asked “You don’t think that was too much, do you?”
“No.” Said Maria with a sarcastic deadpan so intense it was hard to tell from sincerity.
It was the exact same tone she used when the Archbishop and Six other high clergy showed up, clutching a letter someone had written, Livid and almost foaming at the mouth, demanding to know if such blasphemy had transpired.
“No. That’s crazy.” She said, staring down the archbishop like he was an idiot.
“Such imaginations some people have!” Said Father Patrick, much less convincingly.
“And you- you didn’t… Spear an effigy of our lord and savior?” the archbishop demanded of my father.
“Do I look like I can jump that high?” Dad asked, having in the interim been drafted for 51 days then nearly died of pneumonia from it, and therefore no longer afraid of the Church, the Law or God.
Somewhat relieved that he’d only received the extremely detailed ramblings of a doddering parishioner, the Archbishop sat down and complemented Maria on her most excellent Mexican Wedding Cookies, may he please have another plate for his nerves? Perhaps the ones with sprinkles?
Dad went on to help build the internet, Father Patrick converted to Buddhism and Maria became a Nun.
*For those of you wondering, Jesus was made of Challah.
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I AM LITERALLY WEEPING AND WHEEZING AS I LAUGH UNCONTROLLABLY FUCK.
BRB DONATING TO YOUR KO-FI
Tag: gallusrostromegalus
Close Encounters Of The Idiot Kind
Welcome to another family Lore! Content warnings for Insects, drug use (medical, not illicit), aliens, alcohol mention, really poor life choices and leather.
As usual, all the names have been changed to protect people’s privacy. If you want to share this story on other sites, PLEASE include a link back to the original post! Thank you, and enjoy:
A couple Octobers ago, I had to do some yard work.
One of the side effects of mom keeping a stocked bird feeder is that the sides of the driveway and entire section of front yard that touches the street have been seeded with several hundred sunflowers by the birds, who like lunch to go apparently. It’s really nice- they don’t need any more water than summer thunderstorms bring and make a pretty privacy shade between my parent’s house and the street. It’s full of birds and butterflies and local bees and is just generally awesome.
Until about October.
Once we have the first frost, the sunflowers start to die, slowly collapsing under their own weight and the lovely birds and butterflies all scarper because the yellow jackets have realized that they can chew holes in the stems of the dying sunflowers and lap up delicious sugary plant juice. Being big fans of Sugar water, the wasps then defend their sunflower stalks with the vigilance and aggression to rival a dragon on it’s hoard. My family is pretty live and let live when it comes to wildlife but ALL of us are very allergic to yellow jacket stings, so this is a bit of a problem.
Since the Yellow Jackets are very territorial and tend to just stick with their favorite snack, we theorize that if we just lop the stems off and pile them in the back corner of the yard, all the wasps will stay over there and we can use the driveway again in peace. It’s a family plan of action, but since mom was recovering from hip surgery, dad is even more allergic than most of us and my sister was in the Philippines, it was a job for Me, specifically.
The Yellow Jackets would be angry with me moving their sugar buffet, naturally. I could barely go out the get the mail as it was, God help me if I started thrashing the sunflowers. So I did some research, and came up with a plan.
Firstly, Yellow Jacket stingers aren’t that long and can be repelled with sufficiently heavy clothing, like my mom’s old motorcycle jacket, gloves and chaps. If it can repel gravel flying at you at 70 miles an hour, it can probably stop an angry wasp or twenty, right? Lacking her helmet, my choice of facial protection is a plastic respirator, reflective swim goggles and a gimp mask from the props closet.
My parents do political comedy theater. The gimp mask isn’t even in the top 10 of weird shit they have in the props closet.
Next, they’re sensitive to strong odors and most bug sprays, so I douse my idiot ass in high-grade DEET, completely failing to read the warning label about not exposing yourself to fumes for extended periods of time OR remembering that I am on bipolar medication that leaves me supremely fucked up when exposed to DEET.
Additionally, it’s widely recommended that you take benadryl beforehand if you think you’re going to be exposed to an allergen. It’s NOT recommended to take anything like benadryl at all, ever if you’ve got any kind of dopamine/serotonin problems, like the aforementioned Bipolar Disorder.
Also, the best tool for hacking hundreds of overgrown sunflowers off at the base is a Machete. That’s like, an actual fact, not me being an idiot, for once. I collect my machete, Brutus, from his usual place in the back of the Ford POS.
Finally, Yellow Jackets are exclusively Diurnal and sluggish when it’s cold out, so I’m gonna take my stoned, leather-clad, machete-wielding ass out there in the middle of the night to do this. Since my hands will be full of Machete and Sunflowers, I won’t have a free hand for a flashlight, so I take my dad’s oversize book lamp and clip it to the back of my jacket collar.
So, you know. Totally Normal sight if you happen to be up at 3 AM.
And for about the first… half hour or so it actually goes great. The DEET hasn’t leaked into the respirator yet, I’m slashing away and making good progress on the sunflowers and the wasps are sluggishly crawling over me, half-hearted buzzes of rage, but can’t find a way in through the head-to-toe leather. Most of them are distracted by the light, crawling distractedly over the lamp and occasionally across my goggles, looking as bufuddled as an arthopod can look. I’m a fucking genius.
I start to feel giddy with success. I have outwitted an entire swarm of insects! I am engaging in successful terraforming! Given that one sting could send me to the ER, I am dancing with death iteslf! It’s 3AM and nobody else is out, so I decide to start singing. I have the voice of a tone-deaf crow and I pick Bean Pháidin by Planxty to sing, probably for the tempo. My half-assed attempt at gaelic and off-key corvid voice probably sound extra hilarious through the respirator.
It is at this time that Todd comes out.
The more sensible among you were probably wondering earlier why the hell my family just didn’t ask a neighbor or hire a service to come clear them if we’re all allergic.
1. Absolutely nobody short of an exterminator will come out once the word “wasps” is said and that’s expensive.
2. My neighbors consist of:
- Mr. Drossel, the Lawyer who while a legal genius, is somewhat lacking in the physical coordination department can’t be trusted with anything sharper or larger than a spoon
- The Stoffels, who are good and competent people but were away in Uganda at the time.
- An old folks home full of Alzheimer’s patients
- Todd
Todd is in his forties and probably reasonably competent with yard tools but there is little love lost between my family and Todd- He’s trained his dog to shit in my parent’s yard so he doesn’t have to pick up after it, parks his horse trailer in the middle of the road so traffic can’t get through, throws semi-weekly house parties that have to be broken up by the cops and leave broken glass everythwere and mows his lawn at 11 PM.
Additionally, Todd is prone to the mental complications of many a mediocre man, namely that he would much rather live in a paranoid an dangerous constructed reality wherein he is the subject of many fictional persecutions because that means he’s Important rather than admit that his life is pretty ok and that he’s not doing anything that would warrant men in black suits chasing after his ass. If there’s a conspiracy theory out there that could potentially be worked into a victim complex, Todd believes it hook, line and sinker.
I am alerted to Todd’s presence by a soft, awed “Oh my god.”
I turn around to find him standing in the middle of the road wearing a t-shirt, boxers that need adjusting to hide his penis better and a single flip-flop. I can smell nothing but DEET and my own marinating flesh but it’s a fair bet he’s been into the Pabst Blue Ribbon again. We stand in silence for a moment, one of the several dozen wasps swarming on me making the best go it can at my respirator in a misguided effort to sting me inside my nostrils. I am about to speak up and assure him that I am only doing horticulture and not felonies when he interrupts.
“You’re an ALIEN.” He gapes.
I stand there for a minute. I’m nearly done, but the fumes are getting to me and I’m covered in impotently furious wasps. It’s 4 AM now and I haven’t slept in close to 30 hours. I don’t want to try to explain this to Todd.
“Sure.” I shrug, before going back to the Sunflowers. Why deny this poor man a drunken fantasy?
“I- I’m an important human.” Todd says, still wearing dirty boxers that are falling off his ass and a single flip-flop. “Lots of connections. Government connections.” I slash faster.
“Maybe you don’t speak english.” He realizes after a few more minutes of standing in the road. “You’re from like. Quasar or something.”
He drunkenly watches me for a few more minutes. Normally this would be a cause for worry but I have a machete and he has inadequate footwear so I’m feeling good about my odds. He wanders off, and I take the next load back to the far corner of the yard.
When I come back out he has a camera. Like, one of those cheap disposables that still has film. It’s 2016. I don’t even know where he GOT that thing. And he’s standing out in the road, still in his shorts and a single flip-flop. Man can locate a goddamn kodachrome but can’t find two shoes.
So I do what any chemically altered and sleep-deprived person does, and strike a pose.
Todd goes BANANAS, and starts snapping away on his crappy little camera, and we have ourselves Milkyway’s Next Top Model shoot out there in the yard. I pick up random objects and pretend to be confused by them. I stand on the roof of the car and hold a USB up at the night sky like I’m looking for a cell signal. I fucking vogue because why not.
Todd is crying with happiness. “I KNEW YOU WERE REAL.” He sobs, snapping away. “I’M GONNA BE SO FAMOUS.” He loses his flip-flop in the excitement as I climb on top of the mailbox and make a Peace sign at him.
It’s 4:30 AM and we’re out in the middle of the road and I’m doing my best Tyra Banks despite the fact that I’m 5’2” and wearing motorcycle gear that’s three sizes too big for me when the guys who deliver the paper roll up.
Jamie and Miguel stop the truck, leaning out the window and over the cab (Miguel drives, Jamie stands in the bed and tosses papers out the back because fuck OSHA) at us two morons in the headlights.
“¿Que cojones estás haciendo?” asks Miguel, entirely reasonably.
I pull the mask and goggles off and walk up to the truck. “I was doing yard work and didn’t want to get stung by wasps. I dunno what he’s on about. If you have my paper I can take it in.” I probably look like hell and am still covered in wasps, but I don’t care.
Jamie hands me my paper, I wave bye and go into the house, leaving three extremely confused men in the road.
And that’s how I made, then completely destroyed my neighbor’s night.
If you got a laugh out of this story, please consider Donating to my Tip Jar or PayPal, as telling stories on the internet is my primary source of income.
Evening re-blog to thank everyone who’s donated so far and answer questions.
When I say this is my primary source of income, I mean that due to health concerns, I can’t work a normal job, so this determines whether or not I have money for groceries. So thank you everyone, from the bottom of my heart.
to answer questions: YES, the sunflower stalks were all moved to the back yard and the wasps followed, and nobody got stung. We like having them around, in spite of the allergy, becuase they’re amazing pest-control predators and one of the few things that eats ticks.
Evening Reboggle! Thank you again to all 19 people who have donated so far, so have an Update:
Called Parents to with them happy Valentines, and it’s been so hot this winter the Wasps are already awake and buzzing around the house, and Arwen The Dog has been catching and eating them for funsies. She’s good and spitting out the stingers. Or she’s eating them and doesn’t care. Given that this is the dog that eats snakes and deer bones, probably the latter.
There are also sunflower seedlings out by the driveway.
Nyquil fucks me up every time I take it and furthermore, has the audacity to make me forget what fucking happens every single time. Since taking it at about midnight last night, My day:
- Woke up at 4-6 AM and apparently did the dishes
- Fiance gets up at 8:00AM, allegedly has fully cognizant conversation with me about his plans to stay late and tutor classmates. I don’t remember even being awake.
- at 9:32 AM, my Dad called me and i had a 23-minute phone call with him that I have no recollection of, but apparently I spent most of it discussing the merits and drawbacks of the various tablets my mother is interested in. I was mad about how expensive updating storage capacity was for most of them.
- Felling way more sober than I actually am, attempt to drive to school at 10:12. and spend enough time confused why my keys aren’t working on my car that my neighbor actually comes out of his apartment to ask what I’m doing to his car. I decide to stay home.
- 10:40: Send emails to professors to tell them I’m in no shape to be in class. I think I am eloquent. Upon opening my email later I realize I’ve sent them emails with the subject line “fuckt up” and message: “sorry, love you.”
- Benefits of going to a small college: they know I’ve got exciting drug reactions already and are sick as well and reply with “I understand and hope you are feeling well soon, here is today’s lecture slides” and “lol” respectively.
- ~11- 12:30 : Get lost in neighborhood walking dog. In my defense, it’s 99% off-beige generic prefab housing on nonlinear-bordering-on-noneuclidean streets and Charlie had no interest in going home either.
- 12:30-3:00: Wall
- 3:00 : phone alarm goes off and I suddenly realize fiance was supposed to be home an hour and a half ago. Fly into immediate panic, try to find phone to call him and/or the sherrif becuase he’s obviously dead in a ditch or something. I am holding my phone the whole time.
- 3:16 : Fiance gets home, I cry like a bitch, the dog also cries, everyone has a really bad 15 minutes.
- 3:33 : Realize I haven’t actually ate or drank yet today. Immediately consume a quart of apple cider and plate of taquitos. Make pork chops and potatoes and don’t stop talking about what happens if a werewolf has sex with a dog while shifted the entire time.
- 4:00: pass out on couch to the soothing sounds of Mario Oddesy
- 1AM: Why is it thursday?
The moral of the story is that you should always write down any drug reactions and label medication you should take with a large index card that says “DO NOT TAKE THIS IT FUCKS YOU UP THEN YOU FORGET” in large, friendly letters.
To answer a few questions about this post:
- I didn’t take anything Except the Nyquil the previous night.
- This happens to me with most sinus medication- benadryl, children’s cold meds, nasal sprays etc.
- According to my Psychiatrist, some people with ADHD, Bipolar, Depression or TBI can have really weird reactions to sinus drugs because they fuck with your sleep/wake cycle, though the exact mechanisms are unknown.
- Out here, “Apple Cider” is apple juice made with the skin left in, the boozy stuff is called “Hard Cider”
- “Wall” refers to the act of lying on one’s side, staring at the spackle with nary a thought in one’s skull. It’s soothing, except for the part where you don’t actually feel like anything. 0/10, not reccomended.
- My conclusion is that it results in wolf-hybrids with werehumanism, thank you two people who asked.
So my mom worked as an educational consultant for HP (AKA translating Engineer into Normal Human) and part of her job was working with the overseas translators to make sure everything said approximately the same thing and that all the languages fit on the documentation. And that said documentation looked pretty enough for marketing. marketing would always get real pissy if there was leftover margin space at the end of the instructions, which is to say, One Guy Named Carl would get real pissy over ‘wasted space’ and because they happened to work in the same building, he’d always come bitch to my mother.
For like, an hour.
Eventually, Mom realized that while English, French and nearly all the other languages took up the same amount of space, German always took up 20% more space and Japanese about 20% less. If she included both languages at the end of any documentation, they’d fill up the margin space *perfectly*. So she just started including both languages, regardless of whether or not that documentation would be distributed to Germany or Japan, just so she could fill up the margin space and also Mrs. Yamada at the Kyoto office needed the extra hours.
Carl, who only sort of paid attention to his work, told her he was very pleased that there was no more “wasted paper” despite the fact that most of the documentation was about 20% longer now.
Eventually, all the other documentation coordination people noticed mom’s practice and started including German and Japanese, and started doing it too. Then the inclusion of both languages became Official Documentation. Then it became Standard Practice for HP and any firms it worked with. Then it became the Industry Standard across Silicon Valley. If you open up the user manual on a new computer these days, you’ll often find German and Japanese, right at the end, because it’s a semi-official practice now.
…some 20 years after my mom started this, my fiance got a high school German assignment to translate a piece of formal writing, and he chose the documentation for his new HP laptop. He had fun with that assignment, and it encouraged him to stay in German, eventually travel overseas, and when he met me, we had a lovely conversation in German and I decided he was worth going out with.
Thank you Mom, for finding a way around Carl’s bullshit, and me my husband.
knitting in the dark 