I’ve always had a mind like Velcro for information. I used to go down rabbit holes before smartphones made it so easy to facilitate that practice; as a kid, even, I’d spend afternoons in the library reading up on any given topic that tickled my fancy. (The explosion of the Web and universal access actually made me excited at the idea of everyone having the world’s collective knowledge at their fingertips. Holy shit was I wrong about how that was gonna play out.)
The result was an astonishing amount of useless data crammed into my gray. I love Jeopardy and I’m absolutely lethal at Trivial Pursuit, to the point where my second wife stopped playing her favorite board game with me. (She had gotten kind of used to being the smartest person in the room by a country mile, and she got this idea in her head that our marriage was going to be the typical sitcom clever wife-dumb husband trope. When I could hold my own, it kind of put her on tilt. It culminated in a game one night where I jumped out to a huge lead and then tried desperately to throw it without looking like I was throwing it, as she didn’t handle losing well. Eventually it became a bit too obvious what I was doing, so the weekly tradition was unceremoniously and without comment retired.)
Her siblings, though, enjoyed challenging me. One of the regular routines was for someone to just casually drop a topic into conversation to see if I had some random knowledge about it. Without thinking, I’d take a comment about the space program and wax verbose about Apollo-era cancelled projects, or turn a mention of cowboy movies into a biography of an obscure gunman who was the Kevin Bacon of the Old West, or even branch off from a discussion about interior décor to talk about how cultures tend to discover and name colors in the exact same order.
When I picked up my first official IT job, the first week I was there, I was introduced to the pastime of sharing useless tidbits under the banner “Fub Fact Friday.” It was so named because the initiator of the practice was a) a font of random knowledge and b) a bit of a klutz typist. So that Friday, he threw a few into the group chat, and I took it as a bit of a challenge and I soon got a rep as something of a storyteller.
So I think I’ll continue the practice here. Jayson, this one’s for you.