sashinka | observation orientated, with a twist of lime | a blog

More Fiction...

I call Joshua late on Wednesday night. He's a night person, like me; I know he'll be watching reruns of LA Law on cable, surfing the internet, getting his people in the US to call him. He's like the Chief Executive of his own address book, that guy.

“Hey, Talia, good to hear from you. How’s it going with, er, Martin?”

He pauses while recollecting Martin’s name, as if he’s retrieving it from a vast mental database. I wonder, briefly, how many people he knows.

It’s a constant game, that Jewish who-do-you-know, and it gets tiring. At parties, at work, at family occasions, there’s a dull backdrop of white-noise, buzzing away saying “isn’t he Marissa’s cousin who married that lawyer from Liverpool? You know Marissa, she used to go out with my brother’s former business partner.” Quite often, when you meet people, you go through an initial “who do we know in common” protocol, and it can be quite time consuming. Not to mention dull.

I think there’s a way around this. I’ve developed, but not yet patented, the concept for a new technology which would solve this problem. It’s a utility that you can download to your handheld/PDA gadgetery, called JewishGeography v2.3. it works like this: when you meet someone, you beam your palms at each other, and the technology merge-purges your address books, and comes up with the thirty six people you know in common. You can then work through them, in alphabetical order, saving a huge amount of wasted time on people you don’t actually both know. Of course there’s the perennial Jonny Cohen/David Levy problem: there are a certain number of people who have a one-to-many relationship with the same name. So there are like twenty David Levys. JGv2.3 would keep a website version-controlling these multiple personalities, so Jonny Cohen would become JonnyCohenUK23. obviously users would have to update this regularly, but I think it could be a winner.

Joshua’s still waiting for me to answer him.

“Yeah, OK. He’s, y’know, nice. Course he’s a bit too nice-jewish-boy for me, but it’s ok for now. Don’t tell anyone I said that, OK?”

“Sure, yeah. Why are you going out with him if you don’t like him?”