I wasn't going to write this story because I think it was a super crappy thing for me to do and I'm not particularly proud of it. Then I told the story to a friend the other day and cracked up so much that I realized I had to write it.
Many years ago, when I was still in college, I was perhaps even more prone to prankery than I am now. I sat at a friends house, bored, playing with the stupid utilities that came with all Macintosh computers. One of them was the text to speech application. After the obligatory profanities, I got down to business. I called Pizza Hut and tried to type fast enough to carry on a conversation. It wasn't quite doable. The clerk on the other end got frustrated and eventually, with an air of resignation, said, "Ma'am (it was a woman's voice on the program), do you just want a pizza for free?".
I cackled with glee (not synthesized) and gave a phony address. My friends and I laughed and rejoiced until we realized that our trophy was sent to someone else's house. Then we felt cheated.
Mandeville.
I looked at the route that Google Maps gave me to drive my RV back to Austin. The route went right past Mandeville, Louisiana. That's where Katya lives.
I hadn't seen her in years. We broke up four years ago, and I only saw her once since then, three years ago. She randomly showed up with her fiancee and took all of the big stuff she'd left at my house. Her fiancee apologized as we carried her bed frame that I'd been sleeping on for a year to his car.
