I guess I should thank you, my first boss in my first real job, for helping me along my own leftward journey. If I had headed straight for a job in Metrowest and missed out on all of those trips on the 70A bus through Watertown to a job that didn’t pay enough for rent, education and health insurance, I might not have really gotten a sense of how hard it is to get by in the world or seen the true faces of Boston or met the true working poor. So thanks for helping me find the inner-Marx to go with my inner-Nietzsche.

Your becoming more nerdy is similar to Karl Marx’s moving to the left.

Phil L

To be honest, I’d gotten really tired of the limited screen space on my beautiful Lacie monitor. The color is great and consistent, but the screen is so tiny compared to my widescreen MacBook Pro and the 24″ widescreen monitor I use at work. Using Photoshop is so much easier with a bigger desktop.

The Man My company was selling off some of the old 19″ flat-screen LCDs for cheap, so I bought one. They advertised that they would sell surplus monitors from 11:00 to 2:00. Thinking I had a meeting at 11:00 — I didn’t — I showed up fifteen minutes early. The first 54 people got tickets; and there were only a few people behind me. I think about eighty to a hundred people went home without monitors.

Four years ago at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting, I impersonated a radiologist in a GE workshop. Each workstation had three 24″ monitors turned on end. It was a slow time of the day, so everybody got the chance to play with tens of thousands of dollars of hardware and software; but I was clearly the only one relying on eleventh grade anatomy to zoom around someone’s virtual colonoscopy.