The More You Know

Sys sits at his computer behind me looking puzzled, "When did XKCD start getting dirty?"

"What are you talking about?" I asked "XKCD has always been like this..."

"No, its always nerdy...not dirty."

"Nerds tend to be pretty dirty..."

Sys shakes his head.

"No, here" I said as I started searching for previous less than family friendly editions and rattling them off.

Sys shakes his head but views the evidence I present. Sys has been the designated high school bitch of my lab for just over a year now, but realistically he's treated like any college intern in my lab despite being only 17. Since he can handle the workload of a college kid he has earned all the privileges that come with it. I sometimes wonder how it is for him to return to the real world where his underlings, the designated high school bitches of other labs at my work, are his classmates.

We're expected to mentor our high school students in exchange for the coffee and copies. On a technical level Sys has probably gained more education than any other student. However, most of the life lessons I hand him are, normally completely inadvertently, more than a little unconventional.

Sys clicks quietly through the links and nods, conceding the point made. I hear the mouse fall silent as he tilts his head and stares at the screen for a moment.

"Pika, I don't get this one."

"Huh?"

"What's a furry?"

Across the lab Bobby chokes a little on his water bottle laughing. Drummer looks at me wondering how I'm going to handle this.

"Well," I said, "this is one of those things that if I tell you it won't make you any happier a person...but you do have an Internet connection so if you're really determined you can look it up yourself."

"What kind of an answer is that?"

"You ever heard the story of Pandora's box?"

Sys sits for a minute and then returned to his work. He typed for a good 120 seconds or so before his typing slowed and he stared at the screen. Then suddenly, he leaned forward and the tempo of the strokes quickened. There was a very slight pause before he leaned back again and shouted to the room, "Ohhh NASTY!"

The whole lab bursts out laughing.

Sys is pretty irritated, "Why did you show me that?"

"Dude," I said, "we totally warned you."

The lab trolled him briefly with a discussion of furries and then the laughter died down. Eventually work resumed. It wasn't until several hours later that I caught Sys shaking his head out of the corner of my eye.

"What's wrong man?"

Sys shakes his head again, "Fuzzies are so nasty."

"Man," Bobby laughed, "at least get the title right."

"There really are many worse things on the internet," Drummer offered cheerfully.

Sys opened his mouth for a moment to ask a question then shut it again and went back to work.

Academia will tell you that the pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of happiness. The Internet has taught me that there are rare sets of circumstances where I beg to differ.