Fame, of a sort

[mystories]

When I was in high school, I'd write silly programs that would attempt to do crude animations by playing with the text characters on the screens. There was one that drew a "diving board" made of underscores, and the cursor would bounce up and down on it, and then fall through. Another made a boxy plane, labeled "747", shudder across the screen. All of these were available to the other students using the county's computer system. And all of them would proudly proclaim that they had been written by me.

A few years later, I was signing up for classes, and the woman at the registration desk paused in her task of busily keying in my information. She looked up at me, and asked "Are you THE John Rehwinkel?" This caught me off guard, as I was unaware of being famous at all, or anyone else with my name for that matter. So I asked her what she meant, and she explained that she remembered the name from the silly animations she'd seen on the computer at high school. It was a good feeling.