I believe it was a sometime in the summer of 2001, a few weeks after I moved into my first apartment, my phone rang. I answered it, and a guy says, “Hey Steve, it’s Tom.”
I didn’t know any
Toms, so I asked, “Who?”
He replied, “Tom,”
slightly angrily.
I took a moment
and thought. I had gone to school with a
Tom, but I hadn’t spoken to him in a decade or so, and there was no way he
could have gotten this number. “Who?”
“Karen’s brother,”
he almost shouted.
I almost shouted
back, “Who the fuck is Karen,” but I stopped myself and said I think he had the
wrong number. I think in the following
months there was a message or two on my machine for the other Steve, so apparently
our numbers were very close.
Anyway, a few
weeks ago I put up a post asking “What’s the weirdest conversation you’ve had?”
and I gave a condensed version of that story.
A few days after I did that, I came across an old blog post I had done that
resulted from that incident. Apparently,
I was trying to come up with a very short story, and I came up with an idea:
The story was set in one of those dystopian futures where people have numbers instead of names, for example, A517 or A to his friends. Well, A sits down to a “genuine, vat-grown steak” when his comm buzzes. He answers and someone goes, “Hey A, it’s T.” A doesn’t know any Ts, so T explains he works with R at the clone factory.
A still doesn’t know who T is, so T in frustration asks, “This is A571, right?”
“No, I’m A517.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I guess I have the wrong number.”
Now, I know the
first draft – let alone the rough outline – of everything sucks, but I highly
doubt any amount of editing could turn that into something … halfway good.
I wrote that in my
notebook, and then forgot about it. Some
years later, I was flipping through my notebook and saw it, and wrote up the
blog where I was thinking about an author putting out a collection of their
terrible stories, and what would be a good title for it. And I wondered if how we react to our bad
stories could be some sort of personality test for writers.
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