What’s one more memory to be repressed among so many others? I had quite successfully gotten rid of this one into the darkest recesses of my brain until late yesterday afternoon driving home from Limerick I heard one of their now archaic songs being played on the radio. The memories all came flooding back. Memories of a more innocent time when I would have merely thought about strangling the offender, not recently where I would draw up an intricate plan and search the yellow pages for hit men.

Back in the day (the day in this case being summer of 1998) I worked in a library doing some very basic training on the use of the internet & email to anyone who might need it. See, very simple innocent times. Among my list of triumphs was a man in his 80’s who within the space of a few visits I had taken from being afraid of computers to actually setting up his own email address and sending messages to his relations overseas. Back when I was a good teacher. Back before I lost all tolerance for anyone that doesn’t understand my mile-a-minute spoken explanations of the way things work and how things should be.

There was one though. There’s always one. A Pakistani girl, no more than 13 or 14 at the time, who would visit the library a few times a week with her mother. While her mother would busy herself staring blankly into space for an hour or so, the little spawn of demon juice wanted to learn all about the internet. Or at least that’s what I first thought. I had heard stories from the senior librarian that “there is this one girl that comes in now and again… ahh, you’ll find out what I mean when you meet her”. The world according to Ace of Base. That was the one and only thing she ever wanted to know about or to view on the internet. Bearing in mind that I was actually there in a capacity of a teacher, after her third of fourth visit of say… fifty, I felt quite bewildered every time I’d see her walking in.

It was impossible to teach this girl. “You just have to click here and…” is what I’d find myself repeating ad nauseam. “Ace of Base” is practically the only thing I’d ever get in response. Every time we’d sit at the already aging PC I’d try to instill yet another tiny nugget of knowledge into what I could easily see was an already overcrowded brain. “This is Yahoo!”. “Ace of Base”. And so on, and so on. “Click this link and the page will load”. “Ace of Base”. I must have seen so many Ace of Base fan sites over that summer that I could have either sung their songs in my sleep or picked them all out from a police line up composed primarily of Ace of Base impersonators. She didn’t want a teacher nor to be taught how to use a computer. She wanted a butler. Someone to tackle the dangerous task of clicking a mouse button and typing the eleven characters needed to fill the hour long session with Swedish export. Ahh shit, it’s all flooding back now. The inane lyrics, the trivial details on every single aspect of each band member’s pseudo-existence. Just when I thought I had wiped the memory clear, 96FM brings it back to haunt me until I can manage to send it back where it came from. There’s going to have to be some pretty heavy drinking over the weekend to sort this one out. Damn you Ace of Base and damn you crazy Pakistani girl, wherever you are!

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