Pet Names

My bother and my husband both work for Redbox. It creates kindof an interesting dynamic for me. They both know I work in an office. They both know my boss is pretty flexible. They both know I sit at a computer all day. And neither of them use a computer with internet during the day. When Josh got his computer from Redbox, the number of calls I got in any given day significantly decreased. Until Nate started up.

I get requests from either one of them for things you wouldn’t even believe. Most of the calls are for machines, food, or cars “can you check my e-mail and tell me the address for machine 6547 and how to get there from machine 5530?” “I’m in Park City and I’m starving, where’s the nearest Arby’s?” “I have some spare time and I need some new shoes, where should I go?” “Closest bank?” “Closest Walmart?” “Closest cell phone store?” “I blew a tire, where is a Big O in Payson?” “I just looked at my gas tank, and I’m about empty, between Lehi and Saratoga Springs. help!” (that one used to be a much more significant problem that usually lead to the response “turn around now!”) I even got a call one day from one of them (I won’t say which to protect his pride) because they needed to buy a new pair of pants due to a puking incident. I have to say, there are not enough ______marts in Sandy. They’re all clustered together, and none of them go up the mountain, which sucks for he-who-shall-not-be-named because he had to drive in puked on pants clear down the mountain. Needless to say with so many various calls, google has become my best friend.

This weekend after shopping at the Close To My Heart warehouse sale (TOTALLY worth an hour’s drive and fighting off hundreds of women and strollers) Sarah, the boys and I were going to go on a picnic. I decided we’d have Subway since I have about 10 gajillion points and I figured it’d be easy to know what we wanted there. Only problem was, I didn’t know where one was. Who did I call? Nate. And he told me right off the top of his head, which worked out perfectly. He also informed me that:
“you know you can text google right?”
“text google?”
“yes. Text google. Tell them what you want and they will text you back with where it is.”
“Google is not a person, you know that right?”
“Yes they are. They answer the phone when you call them too.”
“You can call google?”
“Yes. You say, ‘hello google? I am hungry and would like to find the nearest Arby’s I’m in Orem’ and they say ‘OK, would you like us to text you the addresses or just tell them to you?’”
Seriously! They do that! For free! Granted, when you call google you can’t say “I’m hungry, what sounds good?” which means they aren’t as cool as I am. Well, maybe you could, they might have a food-mood-reader on site. Given the cool-level of google (currently 10,153,649 and rising) I wouldn’t put it past them.

Anyway, today on the 3rd time Josh called me at work to ask where something was (we googled Panda Express, and I looked up a bunch of stuff from work for him) I kindly informed him that he could call Google.
“You know you can call Google and they’ll do this crap for you.” I snapped at him – in my defense, it’s been a very busy day at work.
“But they won’t say they love me” he reminded me
“I love you. Neither will I.” I retorted
Laughter ensued.
“I’ll be your google.” My heart was now softened and I could look up the nearest branch of America First Credit Union.
“I’ll be your huckleberry.” He responded.

And that’s how the latest pet name of “google” was born for the Egbert household.