I’m like many of my peers in having a “wide net” that sweeps in all manner of trivia, facts, obscure details, and what-have-you and stores it away against a time when said knowledge will randomly come in handy. If you’re reading this and you know me, you probably have a pretty wide net as well. The people I know well all tend to have this in common.
I sometimes wonder, however, if mine is atypically wide — I have a bizarre set of interests that you don’t always find in the same brain. In the last 24 hours, I’ve been able to supply the names of two of the major players in the unification of Italy in the 1800s (Garibaldi and Cavour) and I’ve found myself using “DUUUVAL” as the meeting password to an online meeting with a customer located in Jacksonville, Florida. Sports geekihood and regular geekihood don’t always coincide.
Having such a wide net can be kind of a curse. Carole, who graduated from Harvard and who competed on Jeopardy nonetheless assumes that she can ask me virtually anything and I’ll know the answer. I’m her human Wikipedia. On those (admittedly rare) occasions when I don’t know the answer, she’s dumbfounded… and just asks again, much as one would rephrase a Google search that failed to find what you were looking for the first time. It couldn’t be that I actually don’t know … it’s just a matter of rephrasing the question so my brain will cough up what she’s looking for. When I tell her that I actually don’t know the answer, she gets vexed with me. “I don’t always know the answer, Carole” I say, and she says “Once in a blue moon, sure. But you usually DO.”
No, this isn’t a humblebrag. As I said, I know a lot of people with the same blessing/curse, the curse of knowing everything. It’s just kind of weird, is all. A lot of times I have literally no idea why I know something. Just that I do.