There are times when you find yourself with the absolute perfect one-liner, like the universe is playing the straight man for you and is waiting with an “Uhuh?” smile on it’s face for you to deliver the line. I don’t mean when something happens and only later do you think of the perfect thing to say. No, I mean those moments when strange cosmic coincidences and strange planetary radiations align to give you the gift of the funniest thing you have ever said.
This is a story about my friend Joey, or really it isn’t. Joey isn’t his name. This story makes him look kind of bad and he’s a really good guy (would really do anything he had to f0r his friends) so I changed his name. I’m not a total a&&hole.
Now, Joey was a good guy, like I said, but he had this talent for saying the absolutely worst thing he could in any given situation. It wasn’t that he was a dick, he just would. He was so enthusiastic that he’d burst in with the first thing he thought of and for some reason it would sound horrible and made him look really stupid. He wasn’t stupid, far from it, but he just kept unintentionally saying the worst things he possibly could. He couldn’t stop either. He had to say it. He’d pop if he tried to hold it in. Not malicious or perverse, just that enthusiastic.
Everybody in this group of friends knew what was going on with Joey. Nobody really thought anything bad about him. They knew what a good guy he was, but they also knew the next thing out of his mouth might very well look like a complete imbecile. As a result, he almost kind of had a Chunk from Goonies status. Everybody loved him, but they were definitely going to F&<k with him.
Chunk is actually a pretty apt comparision. He wasn’t fat by any means, but he wasn’t the thinnest guy. Really, he was actually a pretty regular weight lifter. His thickness was probably more muscle than anything else. Regardless, the standard response to anything Joey said was: “Shut up, Joey. You’re fat.” The jokes about fatness were endless. It was really just a signal that he’d said something crack-headed again. At one point he said what he actually weighed. The friend talking to him shot back that he meant the fat between Joey’s ears.
Anyway, Joey’s fatness/non-fatness isn’t really the story here. What is the story is that he called me up 0ne night. This was in the full height of the Napster boom. Joey was really into music and he was getting everything he could get his hands on. Crazy stuff like rap versions of The Price is Right theme song. He loved it. He was like a kid in a candy store.
Unfortunately, his computer was a piece of crap. He had quickly filled up his hard drive. He called me around 11 at night or so wanting to get a new hard drive. I was a comp sci major at the time, so I guess that made sense. I told him I’d go with him the next day to D.I.T. (at the time, a decent computer parts store in Omaha) and we’d get him a new hard drive. I’d even help him put it in, since he didn’t know much about computers. That wasn’t good enough. He was so jazzed about this, like a little kid, that he had to go right then. He said he was going to Walmart, of all places, to get the hard drive. I didn’t even know if Walmart sold hard drives, but I told him what he should get if he was insistent- though I did tell him I thought he wouldn’t have much choice and would probably pay more.
Well, Walmart must have had one. He called me the next night, frantic. He’d bought the drive and put it in himself, but he insisted something was wrong. He insisted I told him to get the wrong drive. I got him to calm down and describe the situation. I could probably help him fix it if he could actually calmly tell me what the problem was. That’s when he told me that instead of a 4o gigabyte drive like he purchased, his new drive was showing up on his computer as twenty separate 2 gigabyte drives.
Now, computer people may be laughing already. They may not, but they may. To explain, hard driver are formatted for use according to a file system. This means (in a very simplified form) that some mapping is made of the drive so that stuff stored there actually means something, i.e. the computer knew what bits go together into what files.
At this time one of the prevalent file systems to format hard drives by was called New Technology File System, refered to as NTFS by computer people who use acronyms for everything. This replaced the older File Allocation Table that had previously been commonly used. One of the problems with one of the earlier forms of the File Allocation Table, File Allocation Table 16, was that it only could have drives of up to 2 gigabytes. It was so old that bigger drives than that hadn’t been possible. This was fixed in File Allocation Table 32, but File Allocation Table 16 still had this problem.
When Joey said his 40 gigabyte drive was showing up as twenty separate 2 gigabyte drives, I knew that his system had just automatically formatted them as File Allocation Table 16, or FAT16 as is known in comp sci circles instead of FAT32 or NTFS. Instead of telling him that, I realized the grand cosmic coincidence of the situation. I started laughing. It was impossible not to. When he got indignant enough at my laughing I told him: “Joey, you have a FAT problem.”
It was just so perfect. Even the universe had conspired to make fun of Joey, constructing this elaborate series of coincidences and feeding me the line. I’ve never been fed a line like that again. I thank the universe and never expect another like that.
(By the way, don’t worry about Joey. All he had to do was reformat the drives in a more appropriate format and things were good. Took him a couple minutes once I actually explained what the problem really was.)
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