Can You Hear Me Now?

Although I probably qualify in most respects as a geek (I suppose I could conceivably be a dweeb or even a dork, but I strive for my full potential), I never reached the heights of 70s geekdom, total absorption in Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, I've never played at all and truthfully don't even know much about it, except that about 20 minutes after its invention it became an easy shorthand for all things geek. Ironically I think my fatal flaw from a DnD perspective is probably that I don't have enough imagination to live in a fantasy world... I have a hard enough time imagining my present world. I am quite good at recalling and obsessing over the past, but there isn't a 20-sided die in the world that's going to bring that back to life, except in the loop playing in my own head.

My own personal gaming obsession started in about 1971, when I got a copy of Sports Illustrated Baseball. This was a board game that allowed you to play baseball games between any two actual 1970 team rosters. I loved it immediately and forced several friends to play it (regardless of their level of familiarity/interest in baseball). I became so taken with it that I created my own version, based on the 1974 rosters -- written on lined paper (notebook paper, with all the little lacy edgy things hanging off it), drawing in my own (occasionally-)vertical dividing lines for the columns...

It just occurred to me, why didn't I just use graph paper? Certainly as a junior high student I was aware of its existence....?

In any case, I wore out several green & red colored pencils coloring in little boxes on batting/pitching charts (green for hit, red for out, blue for strikeout). And naturally, by the time I finished all that painstaking work -- and I did finish it, I'm proud to say -- the whole thing was obsolete anyway. I'm not sure what year it actually was, but it sure wasn't 1974.

Then a couple years later, I switched to APBA baseball. I probably would've stuck with SI forever... but since we didn't have internet access in 1977, I had to take what I could find, and I'm pretty sure I stumbled on an ad for APBA in the old Baseball Bulletin. And as with SI, I played with friends every chance I got -- and if I didn't have that chance, I played it "solitaire" and managed both teams.

The best part for me, maybe, was that while I was playing, I was also doing a constant play-by-play -- which as I have previously written, has always been a passion of mine. "That will bring up Dave Kingman, who homered in the fourth for the Mets' only run. He's also struck out in the first and sixth... Here's the pitch from Carlton and it's a HIGH pop fly in the air to short left field... Bowa drifts back onto the outfield grass and squeezes it for the third out. For the Mets, no runs, no hits, no errors and none left on..." Maybe you think you can't see all that just from rolling a big red die and a small white one, then checking the result from a 2"x3" card against a big cardboard chart -- but I could.

I've sort of convinced myself that that was when I got in the habit of talking to myself, although I'm sure my mom could relate tales of muffled paragraphs coming from in utero. One way or the other, I am a confirmed self-talker; almost anyone who's spent any time with me could share an instance of coming upon me engaged in an animated monologue.

It's not as if I can really help it at this point. I'm working 100% from home now, and I don't really have much personal contact with others -- at least till the kids come home, and that puts a whole new spin on "talking to myself".

I do have periodic conference calls and virtual meetings, but most of the time I'm on mute, listening, anyway. But of course I am seldom mute myself; it's certainly far from unusual for me to be commenting on the proceedings to myself -- and as you can imagine, always & only in the strongest possible positive terms O:-).

All of that ranked merely as something between a charming character quirk and a sign of low-grade mental illness... until a call not long ago. I was on with maybe a half-dozen others, sitting on mute, waiting for someone else to "arrive". Then the "real" (home) phone rang, and since I was just waiting anyway, I answered it and handled the call -- on and off in less than a minute.

Then one of my callmates said, "Uh, Mark... we could hear all that. Did you think you were on mute?" Well, I was on mute -- at least according to the switch on my headset cord -- but they could hear me anyway. Apparently my frequent use of the mute switch, along with my constant fidgeting with it when not in a call, had worn down a connection or something so that I was no longer mutable. Immutable, if you will.

Which was fine; the call was routine and I hadn't said anything controversial or rude or... but then I started to think. OK, "think" is an overstatement; "panic" would be more accurate. How long had this been going on? Had I been sitting around making, ah, less-than-affirming remarks about people that they could actually hear?

And:

Why am I a person who would say things on mute that he wouldn't say if he knew he were immutable?

Fortunately the PC phone software I use has its own mute button, so I can override the headset's mute or lack of same. Still trying to find a mute button that will shut off the sound of that last question, however...