Chapter Text
She tried not to listen to him too much, because he rarely said anything of substance. Ill-timed jokes, unhelpful sarcasm, childish ramblings— at some point in their friendship, it became easy to drown out all the white noise. However, she couldn’t do so completely. He’d always find a way to slip through her filter. He knew the crevices and cracks of her mind, what words piqued her interest. So just this once, Monica decided to give in to Chandler. She bought a computer.
“Awesome, right?” Chandler slapped the top of the gray computer, which made home in front of Monica’s balcony window. The gang crowded around the machine—which Phoebe likened to a cinder block—in awe, all with their heads tilted and eyes narrowed. Maybe if they squint, they’ll see whatever it was that Chandler was so fascinated by.
“It’s so…” Ross searched for a word, “big.”
The others nodded in agreement. Chandler was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of deja-vu, for every time he attended one of Joey’s plays. Tasked with not lying, he always had to come up with a neutral adjective to describe his best friend’s performance. Theatric. Live. Big.
The computer took up half of the space on the desk, with the girls’ items haphazardly shoved aside to make room. The desk lamp was one gust of wind away from falling over and shattering, which was how they knew Chandler was the one who brought it in. If this were Monica’s idea, there would have been a square of tape outlining the machine’s dedicated space. Instead, the gargantuan plain square stood amongst a mess of objects; a scene straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“Yuh-huh!” Chandler said with a childlike enthusiasm. “It’s an all-in-one machine, with 8 megabytes of RAM, a 500-megabyte hard drive, and the brand-new, lightning-quick 603e CPU. This, my friends, is the Performa 5300.”
“Aww, all you need now is a black turtleneck, and you’ll be the next Steve Jobs.” Rachel teased with fake encouragement. Chandler rolled his eyes.
Ever since he got his own laptop months ago, it seemed like all Chandler could ever talk about was technology. He read off these numbers and acronyms from computer magazines that nobody cared about, and suddenly, Ross knew what it felt like to be a paleontologist’s friend. It shouldn’t have been a huge surprise; he worked with computers all day. Still, it was an odd interest for him to pick up, and now he made it everyone else’s problem. Nobody figured that this fever was contagious until he infected Monica.
She stood a foot behind the rest, cautiously rubbing her upper arms, embarrassed whenever one of her friends shot her a confused glance. She gave in, but not proudly.
Phoebe poked her finger all over the computer, much to Chandler’s dismay. “So, what does it even do?” Pressing into the rectangular slit underneath the monitor triggered the CD tray to pop out, which made her and Joey jump. The former with fear, the latter with excitement.
“Cool, pancake maker!”
“Listen, I thought it’d be useful!” Monica pleaded. “Chandler said it was good for organization! You know, if the apartment ever burns down, I can have all my recipes and contacts and other things backed up on here!”
“So this thing’s fireproof?” asked Phoebe.
“Well…no.”
Ross began inspecting it himself, examining all the little ports and buttons, as if he knew what any of them were for. “How much did it even cost?”
Monica said “It really wasn’t much”, but her hesitant voice suggested otherwise.
“What, like three hundred dollars?”
Chandler laughed. “Yeah, in India, maybe.”
Then everyone turned back to Monica with a skeptical brow. Frugal Monica, who constantly scolded Rachel for her impulsive shopping. Well-adjusted Monica, who always urged Joey and Phoebe to be careful with their scarce money. Patiently awaiting her answer.
“Alright. It was somewhere around…a thousand dollars.”
Gasps filled the room in unison.
“But come on! It’s really not that much! I mean, this is the future we’re talking about!” Monica explained, in that urgent pitch that overcame her during every bad financial decision. “So, y’know, this thing could really help me! I can use it to research recipes and cooking techniques, which could further my career, so actually, I’ll be making money! This is free money!”
Recognizing his convincing voice coming from Monica’s mouth, the group’s judgmental attention switched to Chandler. All part of their game of hot potato, which’ll decide who to be more disappointed in. Still, Chandler looked proud as ever, standing next to the big white cube that cost two weeks of work.
“Career? Mon, you don’t even have a job right now. Are you sure this was a good idea?” Rachel asked with genuine concern. She’d yell at Monica about her financial hypocrisy later.
“Listen, guys, this is an investment.” Chandler jumped to her defence, but really, everyone knew he was just defending himself and his own indoctrinating sales pitch. “Besides, we got it at a discount.” He knew a guy who knew a guy who worked at a small electronics store on the verge of closure. “Market price, this is, like, seventeen-hundred. Monica already made a profit!”
“Seventeen-hundred dollars?” Ross repeated, dragging out each syllable. “Seventeen-hundred American dollars to write some things down?”
“That’s not all it can do!” exclaimed Chandler. “It can connect to the internet! You can access all sorts of online forums and websites. This is a machine of worldwide communication! This is the revolution! One day, in the far future, when aliens rule the world in their flying cars and control humankind, historians will trace it all back to this very moment! This is history in the making!”
Even with his colourful storytelling and his exaggerated voice and dramatic pointed finger, his friends remained unimpressed.
“Worldwide communication. Wow, neat!” Ross sneered. “We’ve had that covered since about 1876.”
Joey nodded. “That’s right. Antonio Meucci.”
Silence. Since when was Joey capable of trivia?
“What?”
“Y’know, the guy who made the phone.”
“Joey, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.”
“That’s what they’re teachin’ you at college?” Joey chided. “What, no one cares about Italian history anymore?”
“Alright, enough.” Monica skipped over to her brand-new computer, standing in front of it, shielding it from the group’s ridicule. “I already bought it, okay? It can do a lot of things and I’m excited to use it.”
Chandler stood tall next to her, hands on his hips. “Yeah. Exactly!”
“Can I play games on it?” asked Joey with round, shiny eyes.
“No, you can not play games on it!” She reprimanded. Then, she slowly dragged her hand across the surface of the computer, wiping off any dust that had collected during this exhausting conversation. “It’s a home computer, okay? It’ll only be used for important matters, and only Rachel and I get to use it. End of story.”
Rachel squealed in excitement. Including her name meant she no longer cared about the rationality of Monica’s decision. Material possession always trumped reason. Chandler, however, grew offended.
“Excuse me? What about the guy who helped get you the computer? The guy who gave you the idea in the first place? The guy who helped set it up?”
“Ah, right. What would I have done without you yelling the instruction manual out loud to me?”
So now, after all of Chandler’s ramblings about the future and the importance of technology, after his constant pestering that she join his club and get a computer of her own, Monica had a Performa 5300.
And flies coming out of her wallet.
“Hey, so you can message Monica’s computer from your computer, right?”
The two guys sat idly in their own apartment. Chandler, sitting at the kitchen counter with his laptop, playing around with the format options on the built-in word processor. Joey, spinning around in his barcalounger, elbow deep in a bag of Doritos, asking his roommate questions.
“Yeah, with an Ethernet cable.”
Joey chuckled smugly. “Don’t you mean internet?”
“...no. Ethernet, Joe. With an E. E for Elephant.”
Joey’s lips parted in that empty, brain-switched-off way it did anytime he couldn’t understand something, but he quickly shook that confusion off his face. “Hey, you know what’d be really funny?”
“If the chicken crossed the road?”
He jumped out of his seat and into another, landing on the stool across from Chandler’s. “You should send her a message and pretend to be a guy.”
Chandler stared at him blankly. “Wow. I’ve always dreamt of being a guy.”
“No, no! I mean some other guy. Y’know? Like, a guy looking for a hook-up, or something. She’ll have no idea!”
He chewed on the idea for a little bit. “I don’t know…isn’t that a little mean?”
“We prank call the girls all the time. Is this really any different?”
Joey raised a fair point. It’s not like Chandler had anything better to do.
“Just one message.” Joey held up a single, enticing finger.
“Just one.”
With big smiles, the boys got to work. Always ready for mischief. Chandler cracked his knuckles far out in front of him, preparing for his symphony; he was Mozart if pianos had letters on their keys. He dubbed his new, secondary email address BenchDarling467, an anagram of his name, granting him the clever thrill usually reserved for serial killers. The two boys huddled together in front of the empty textbox. Chandler’s fingers wiggled in the air as they brainstormed. Joey continued crunching on his chips.
“We’ll pretend that he accidentally emailed the wrong address,” Chandler said, already typing away, his hands too quick for Joey to follow.
Monica wasn’t cryptic like Chandler’s new character. Straightforward, she insisted her address should simply be her first and last name for easy discoverability. Little did she know where easy discoverability would get her.
While in the midst of chewing, Joey fed him his suggestions. “Make this guy super romantic. Like, right out of a movie!” Little wet specks of orange splashed against the small monitor as he spoke.
“Hey! Sit on the other side if you’re gonna spit everywhere!”
“You’d rather I spit on your face?”
Chandler winced. “Why do you have to spit at all?”
Joey sighed and shoved his half-eaten bag into the drawer closest to them, a battle Chandler would fight some other time.
“Alright, how’s this?”
I’m still thinking about you after our time together. When your fingers traced my veins, I couldn’t help but feel excited, knowing how close together our blood circulated. And when your shoulder brushed against my lips, I inhaled as hard as I could because I couldn’t stand the thought of you leaving me. I wanted the memory of your scent as a keepsake. Even the taste of your soft kiss lingers on my tongue. I’ll never be able to have candy again because nothing is as sweet as you. Do you think our hearts beat at the same time? Can we meet again and find out?
The actor did not approve. “Dude. What the hell is this? Don’t tell me this is how you talk to girls.”
“You said to be romantic!”
“Yeah, romantic! Not scary!”
Chandler muttered a “fine, fine” under his breath as he angrily spammed the backspace button. On second thought, sending this to Monica would go a little beyond simply messing with her, somewhere in cardiac arrest territory. When Joey said “right out of a movie”, he probably didn’t mean Fatal Attraction. Suddenly, Joey yanked the laptop closer to himself.
“Let me try something.”
Hey gorgeous. Hope your legs aren’t hurting too much after lastt time. Bet you’ve never had anything like that before huh? Im only in NYC for a little longer but i cant leave yet without one more night with you. I know you want it baby. Come on, give me a call, lets have one last ron day voo.
Chandler squinted. “Ron day voo?”
“Yeah. It’s French.”
“Excuse me, what about this is romantic?”
“Hey, sorry I didn’t talk about our blood gushing or lungs breathing or whatever.”
Chandler sighed, grabbing the laptop back and warning his roommate to keep his hands to himself from now on. He had one final idea, and thus came the third draft.
I had a really fun time the other day. Honestly, I was worried you wouldn’t like me. I know I blew up on you a little when you put your feet up on my table, but it wasn’t anything personal, I swear! I just don’t believe that anything that has touched the ground should be in the same place as my coffee or snacks or whatever. Anyway, I hope I didn’t scare you away. Truth is, it’s been a long time since I truly connected with someone as we did. It might be a bit early to say this, but I think you understand me better than a lot of the women I’ve known before. I have all these sensitive feelings that I just can’t share with the people in my life, but you accepted me completely. Really, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. Whenever I brush my teeth, cross the street, or clean my coffee table, you’re all that’s on my mind. Hopefully you think of me as much as I think of you. Just thought I should let you know.
With his arms folded, he felt confident in his product. He turned to Joey to say “Admit it, this is—” only to find his roommate halfway out the door, throwing on his leather jacket. “Where the hell are you off to?”
“Grabbing a sandwich. Want one?”
An incoherent sound of disbelief forced its way out of Chandler. “Hello? What about our email?”
Joey grimaced. “Yeaah, I don’t know. It wasn’t as funny as I thought it’d be.”
“Joe, this was your idea! At least read what I’ve got!”
“I’m good. Besides, she’ll probably know it’s us.” Those were Joey’s casual parting words before the door closed behind him, leaving Chandler and his email alone in the beige apartment.
He was right. Monica announces her new computer to her friends, then out of nowhere receives a strange email? It had apartment 19 written all over it. Chandler always felt a shiver down his spine whenever Joey made sense.
His cursor hovered over the close button. It was the world’s most inconsequential prank. Weird email, big deal. That wouldn’t shake her at all. But that felt like all the more reason to send it. Weird email? Big deal! That wouldn’t shake her at all! So what did it matter? Besides, it granted her the opportunity to learn how the email process worked on her computer. Chandler was simply teaching her about the wonders of her device, fulfilling his duty as the group's technology maestro. It was a net-positive.
He wouldn’t think about it any longer. With no name attached, who would Monica get mad at? She’d forget all about it in a week.
The laptop made a little beep-boop sound once he hit send. He didn’t quite know in that moment where that beep-boop would take him.