Jen Mann - People I Want to Punch in the Throat: Competitive Crafters, Drop-Off Despots, and Other Suburban Scourges

A Ballantine Books eBook Edition

Copyright 2014 by Jen Mann

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

B ALLANTINE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN -P UBLICATION D ATA

Mann, Jen.
People I want to punch in the throat : competitive crafters, drop-off despots, and other suburban scourges / Jen Mann.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-345-54983-9 (paperback)ISBN 978-0-345-54998-3 (ebook)
1. Suburban lifeHumor. 2. SuburbanitesUnited StatesHumor.
I. Title.
PN6231.S8M36 2014
818.602dc23 2014024031

www.ballantinebooks.com

Jacket design: Joseph Perez
Jacket image: George Baier

v3.1

Believe it or not, Im happily married to a guy who doesnt mind the fact that Ive never set foot in a CrossFit class and that I own good Crocs and bad Crocs. He overlooks my unfortunate shoe choice and I dont mind that he follows me through the house flipping off lights to save money or gets his hair cut only when he has a coupon.

I know right about now youre feeling some twinges of jealousy. Youre thinking to yourself: That sounds like a match made in heaven! or How do I catch a guy like that? Well, let me tell you how we met.

In 1996 or so, I bought my first home computer. It was some sort of IBM product. If I was some weird computer nerd, I would be able to tell you all about the ROM and RAM this machine had. All I know is that it was black when every other model was off-white. When I was perusing models with the sales guy who was blathering on and on about what it could do, all I could think was how much better the black would look in my home office than the ugly off-white. Im that kind of nerd.

I needed a computer because I was going to write a novel, you see. Ha! Im still stuck on the first sentence: It was a dark and stormy night .

I got the computer home and unpacked it and found that it included a disk, or was it a disc? I cant remember. Anyway, it was for a free trial of America Online. Remember AOL? Im sure the Internet had been around for years at that point, but Id been at school in Bumblefuck, Iowa, where I barely had phone service, let alone Internet, and as I stated above, I was not a computer nerd (just a regular nerd), so I didnt know what the hell AOL was exactly. I read the description and decided I should try it. For someone like me, who really couldnt comprehend the Internet, it sounded like the perfect introduction.

I hooked up my computer, plugged it into a phone jack, and went online for the first time. These were the days of dial-up, so Id log in and send AOL off to find an open line, and then Id have time to get some dinner, put on my jammies, and maybe even throw in a load of laundry before Id hear: Youve got mail!

AOL was so smart. Even the first time I logged in I had mail. It was just a welcome letter from them, but it was still mail and I loved to hear that voice announce every time I logged on. It was like crack for me. I was hooked. So long, social life!

Ha! As if I really had a social life to lose! In those days, I was living on my own and working at a shitty job. Most of my friends were married at that point and I didnt feel like being a third wheel. My life was pretty much: get up, go to work, come home, watch whatever crappy show was on TV (this was before DVRs, so you had to watch whatever was on plus the commercialsit totally sucked balls), and go to bed. Get up the next day and repeat.

I quickly discovered that many people went on AOL to chat. There were tons of chat rooms to choose from based on your interests. Everything from dog grooming to knitting to S&M. You could also search through profiles to see who was online and send them an instant message (IM) to see if they wanted to chat privately.

For the first few weeks I would jump around from one chat room to another. Every time you entered a chat room somebody would IM you with a/s/l? Thats douchebag-speak for age/sex/location. The hard-core douchebags would add What are you wearing? to the list. The annoying thing was, all of this information was in my profile (except my attire), but those dipshits were too lazy to look. It just seemed so show-us-your-tits to me. Ugh.

As soon as Id enter a chat room, Id get bombarded with IMs asking me my age and location. I was very popular, and I couldnt figure out why, because this had never been the case in the outside world. Id reply, and then half the time the next question was: What are you wearing? I didnt know enough to lie, so Id reply: Sweatpants. My chat partner would go silent. Not the answer they were hoping for I guess.

I tried a local chat room a couple of times. Supposedly everyone in that room lives in the same city, and you go there mostly to hook up with local strangers. It creeped me out, because I didnt like the idea of running into someone I might actually know. I could just see my neighbor IMing me, a/s/l/naked? The guys in the local rooms also put a lot of pressure on you to meet IRL (in real life), so I tended to stay away.

I liked hanging out in the twentysomethings room, which was full of, well, twentysomething people from all over the world. Most of the people in there were cool and they never asked me if I was naked or if I wanted to meet IRL. I spent many evenings chatting/typing with people.