Flying Toasters

Love one another and you will be happy. It’s as simple and as difficult as that. ~Michael Leunig

Dude and I met each other in 1995 when we started working for the same company. He had been working there for 20 years, since the age of 18 and was in the IT department. I was only 27 and in customer service.

I hated him instantly…

Every time we had our quarterly meeting Dude won the top employee award for his outstanding performance. Blech, gag, cough. It infuriated me because he was always giving me a hard time about my computer. If I installed something that I wanted then he’d inevitably come to uninstall it. I also hated how much everyone loved him.

One morning I came into work at 6:30 am to get some extra work done. Dude showed up at my desk and told me he needed to install something new on my computer. When he told me it would take 30 minutes I became indignant and gave him a hard time. You would have thought that would have been a warning signal for him of what the future would hold…

Then there were the Flying Toasters. I decided it would be so much fun to install the Flying Toasters screen saver on my computer. When my co-workers saw my new screen saver they wanted a piece of the “Toaster” action too…so I installed it on everyone’s computer.

About six hours later Dude came to my desk and said, “Your screen saver has to go.”

He tried to tell me that it was bogging down the entire network and we argued about it for 10 minutes before I let him uninstall my coveted Flying Toasters. Everyone else lost their Toasters too. That’s when I knew without any doubt that I hated Dude.

Something changed after I was out of work for a few weeks during the summer of 1996. When I came back I ran into Dude and saw him in a whole different light…

See, one of my managers had asked me where I went to high school. When I told him the name town where the school was located he said, “Dude lives there.”

I instantly had Dude pegged for marriage with three kids and a pickup truck. So, I asked a co-worker if my instincts were correct and watched her laugh hysterically. At the time Dude was extremely single and drove a sports car.

Later I ran into to Dude and struck up a conversation about living in the same town I went to high school in and I think he was shocked I was nice to him. A week later there was a post-it note on my calendar, which had cows on it. The cow had a bubble saying, “Moooo….Hi Lisa, see you in XXXXtown”

My co-workers and I decided to plan a Happy Hour and invite Dude so that it would put us in a social setting without any pressure. Plus, we loved any excuse for Happy Hour. So, every Friday we planned Happy Hour and invited Dude. Dude would accept our invitation and at the last minute back out. We thought it was hopeless.

When our co-worker Paris received a promotion we planned a real Happy Hour and invited Dude once again. I didn’t think he was going to show up so when I got to the bar I was hanging out with the boys and showing off my beer chugging abilities. I can chug a bottle of beer less than 15 seconds.

Dude walked in to find the guys circled around me cheering, “Lisa! Lisa! Lisa!” Great first impression, except it really did impress him. He still tells me today it’s one of the things he was most impressed with.

We finally had the chance to talk and get to know each other at Paris’ Happy Hour. I told Dude that my mom lived in the same town as he did and that I’d be visiting her that weekend so he invited me to his house.

Later that weekend I stopped by Dude’s house, watched an Eagle’s game and he grilled some burgers.

We started dating and about three months later I got pregnant with our first daughter. At the time I found out I was pregnant I was actually thinking about breaking up with Dude. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him but I was actually afraid of how I felt about him. Finding out that I was pregnant complicated every thing.

Dude and I decided to take a leap of faith just four months after we started dating. We were married on December 28, 1996…my 30th birthday. Three months later our first daughter was born four months prematurely. That was the beginning of crisis after crisis to hit our marriage but 11 years later here we are still together. We’ve had our share of problems but we are probably one of the strongest couples I know.

We still joke that “we’ll always have Paris” but that’s the story of how Dude and I came to be…

Thanks for asking Kate!

By the way, After Dark made the screen saver Flying Toasters which you can download for free here.