Senility Now!

When I was about nine years old, I wrote a series of first person mysteries which prominently featured the phrase "and then I, the great detective, ..." before some lengthy piece of exposition multiple times in each story.

Sadly, all those stories have been lost to humanity, and my writing style has changed*, but I work with someone who reminds me of this type of storytelling almost every day. He insists upon giving the blow-by-blow of all his bug fixes, including false starts and unnecessary detours. If he's really proud of his work, or especially perplexed, you get to hear the same story as he goes from cubicle to cubicle, telling it to everyone. All the non-computer geek people are probably thinking how boring it would be to listen to someone give a monologue about coding, but trust me, it's boring even for the computer people.

Some (okay, most) days I don't have a lot of patience for this sort of thing.

Anyhow, I do try to be somewhat polite. Jeff used to chant George's mantra "Serenity now" every once in a while. That didn't help.

My mom has a necklace which has a little silver ball that makes a nice little tinkling sound. It was originally called a serenity ball, but somewhere along the line she referred to it as a "senility" ball, and that's the name that stuck.

So, now you know. If you happen to pass my cubicle at the right time, you may hear the cry "Senility now!"

Because let's be honest, at least I have a shot at senility someday...


* (Now my fiction is mostly written in third person.)