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I was getting ready to go home and our historian comes back to my desk and tells me some lady wants to ask me about brick factories in Columbus. Since brick production is something I have studied, I said I'd take the call.
I was unprepared for what happened next.
The lady started out somewhat normally. She wanted to know what I knew about brick factories in Columbus. I told her that actually I had studied brick factories in Pittsburgh but I was familiar with the general technology. She wanted to know if there was a way to tell early bricks from modern bricks just by looking at them. I told her that generally there wasn’t a sure fire way and was about to start explaining the difference between hand-made bricks and machine-made bricks, when the woo kicked in.
Her interest in bricks stemmed from her conviction that some of the brick carriage houses behind some of the larger 19th century houses in Columbus were actually very old houses from early Columbus that had been converted into carriage houses by later rich people, and that the alleyways were the original streets. Ok, I thought, that’s amusing but wrong, but before I could tell her this, the woo floodgates opened. Turns out these carriage houses were the original dwellings of indentured servants that came over from England and settled in Ohio in the 1600s, and that the descendants of the indentured servants changed the records so there wouldn’t be any mention of them in the history books because they were ashamed their ancestors were indentured servants. Also, this person apparently was unaware that architects like to mimic earlier styles in their designs, and that every building that featured things like pillars or arches or towers had taken these elements from earlier buildings (again, 1600s) in Ohio, including CASTLES. Then she went into something about the cemeteries being missing, passenger pigeons, humans evolving in North Africa and that the white people liked the high points while the dark people liked the swamps and had a religion about passenger pigeons.
So at this point I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and while it was highly amusing, I could tell this lady was not going to stop talking. I made up an excuse and got off the phone, but not before I was informed that I was ignorant before but now was a little less ignorant. I’m now kind of curious to see if she’s going to try to call me again. I hope not. If she does, I’m going to request she write down all her ideas and send it to me for consideration. You can’t buy this form of entertainment.
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