High Tech, Blown Away

I have seen this guy for a while.  He's a real techie: hides in his basement, does a lot of sophisticated software consulting.  He comes to see me because his wife hopes I can teach him to be verbal, which he can be if you talk about his stuff, but that bores her.

Anyway, that's not the topic.

He is working with his new Apple, and to be good he is trying to do things that relate to the family.  So he puts together pictures of his son and himself.  On the new Apple software there is a dazzling new feature that allows you to highlight a face and click on it.  Then the machine will scan all of the 2100 or so pictures you have in your iPhoto and it will pull up all the pictures with that face in it.  Amazing stuff.

So he does that for him and his son and about fifty pictures of them appear.  Then he sees, among the pictures, that there are two very old photos from when he was a kid, and the focus of the app is on a guy who was a friend of the family.  He enlarges the shot of the guy wearing a dark suit, then he enlarges a shot of himself dressed in a similar fashion.  Then he examines the pictures and he said to himself that the software is pretty good, because he sees how similar they look.  Then he goes back to putting together a family album and the event fades away.

Two weeks alter he is talking to his mother, and he tells her that he will send her the album, and she is all happy and they are joking around.  In that spirit he tells her about the picture of the old family friend, and he says, without thinking really,that from the looks of it, that guy could have been his father.

Suddenly, the phone goes silent.  After a long pause his mother says: "I really don't want to go into that."

The guy is 41 years old.  Even though his life is exactly the same, it has suddenly become totally different.