long time, no see

Jennifer is just starting to climb out from under the massive pile of whatever that was created by her employer deciding that they needed a shiny new email and calendar system.  We have lots of tales from that process, plus a few stories of our own cat-escapades and other random occurrences to share.  We're going to try to get back in blog-mode, and here's a little anecdote about how obsession with being right can lead to rather ridiculous conclusions.

Jennifer went to school with a guy named Joe Doe.*  Not a close friend or anything, just someone she knew, and hasn't seen since high school.  Jennifer's mom goes to the same church as Joe's parents.   A couple of years ago, Mom mentioned to Jennifer that Joe's brother and "Suzy Que's daughter" were getting married.  Jennifer said "oh, is that Sally Que?" Mom said she couldn't remember Suzy's daughter's name, but she was pretty sure it wasn't Sally.  "Ok," said Jennifer.  "I just remember that I want to school with someone named Sally Que, and it's not a terribly common name.  Maybe it's her sister."  Mom said she was pretty sure Suzy only has one daughter.  Whatever, Jennifer really didn't care.  And to be perfectly honest, she was pretty sure she went to some school with someone named Sally Que, but she really wasn't sure if it was high school or college.

A few months ago, Mom mentions that Joe's brother and Suzy's daughter had a baby (she still hasn't figured out either of their firstnames).  So, at Christmas Jennifer is sitting in church when a passel of people walks in.  The passel included Joe, a guy who looked a lot like him, a young woman carrying a baby and several parent/grandparent age people.  We can all deduce who they are.  We should probably mention at this point that Jennifer's mom is always telling her this sort of thing: who got married, who died, who had a kid, etc. etc.  When it involves someone Jennifer actually knows she might be mildly to actually interested, but when it's so-and-so's brother's cousin married such-and-such's uncle's grandmother, that's nice and all, but Jennifer doesn't get overly excited about it.

Then Jennifer's mom came over and asked Jennifer "Do you recognize Mrs. Doe, Joe's mom?" Jennifer replied "Well, technically, no, since I've never seen the woman before in my life.  But I recognized Joe.  And figured out that the guy who looks like his brother is probably, you know, his brother.  So the woman with the baby is most likely Suzy's daughter."  "Oh, that reminds me," says mom, "I finally found out her name.  It's Emily.  Does she look like the person you knew?"  Since Jennifer couldn't say for sure where she knew the name from, of course, she had only a vague recollection of what she looked like.  They both appeared to be human, caucasian females, but other than that Jennifer couldn't say for sure.

By the time they got home, Mom's odd fixation on whether or not Jennifer knew Emily had started to really bug Jennifer.  So, she went and found her high school yearbook, and sure enough, there was a girl in her class named Sally Que.  She looked sort of like this Emily person.  Since it's been almost 20 years since the high school picture was taken, it was possible that it was the same person, or that they were related.  Jennifer showed the picture to her mom and said maybe they're cousins or something.  She thought that would be the end of it.  But, no.

Jennifer's mom looks at the picture and says "well, it does look like her.  Maybe she changed her name."  Huh?  Yeah, that's likely.  At this point Jennifer's brother joins the conversation and says, "no, Emily Que was in my grade.  And her name has always been Emily." But Mom wouldn't let it go.  She started to speculate that maybe the picture was in the wrong section of the yearbook.  Or maybe she changed her name and then changed it back....

Or maybe it's a different person!

This debate is actually still going on.  Well, it's not really a debate b/c both Jennifer and her brother refuse to participate, even though Mom keeps coming up with wacky explanations to make Sally and Emily the same person.  At one point Jennifer said, "okay, sure.  She started school and was named Emily, then she somehow managed to skip four grades and started going to classes in the new grade with the name Sally.  But skipping all those grades didn't work out, so instead of going to college, she went back and repeated high school with her original class, and went back to using the name Emily."

Maybe she was in some sort of ineffective witness protection program.

Or maybe it's a different person!!!

*Obviously, the names have been changed.  Except possibly Emily.  Jennifer can't remember what her name is.