When smart people do dumb things

I had a random memory pop up this week.

When I was a kid I loved video games. I played them ALL THE TIME. Nintendo, Sega, even computer games (I was a Monkey Island master). But do you remember text games on the computer? I mean the ones that said "You're in a room with 2 doors. What do you do?" and then you type things like "go south." or "Pick up the gun". Sometimes there were animations to help and sometimes just long text descriptions. They were a lot of fun.

Well, I have a friend. I'll call him Luke Perry. He was a smart guy. I mean, I think I'm a smart guy too... but Luke was also focused. He was the kind of guy that actually went home from school and did his homework. Weird, right? Anyway, I was at Luke's house one day and he was playing one of these games. It may have been Hugo's House of Horrors. He was stuck in this one spot of the game and couldn't move forward. He didn't know what to do. He looked at all the objects and walked in all the rooms. I think he was looking for a key to open a door and just couldn't find it. So he's standing in a kitchen (in the game) and getting very frustrated.

Me: Have you checked the cabinet for the key?

Luke: The stupid game doesn't know what a cabinet is... it must not open.

Me: ...What?

Luke: It doesn't open. Watch.

[Luke types "open cabnet" and the game responds with some answer that it doesn't understand]

Luke: See? The stupid game doesn't know what it is.

Me: Maybe it would know what it is if you spelled it correctly. c-a-b-i-n-e-t.

Luke: ....oh

Ok so it's not that funny of a story. But it made me laugh for 2 reasons. One, This guy was always doing well in school and so it was nice to have something to hold over his head. Two, it just made me think of how primitive games were back then.

Boy, this blog post wasn't very good. I'll do better next week.