TellTales #100 - 25 years of Dapper

Column.

So. A historical moment. TellTales #100, my little contribution to Dapper, an APA. (The APA 😇)

For 25 years I've been unloading my rambling on the other innocent members, and they haven't booted me out. Let's look some of the statistics and facts...

Why

I wrote this a few months ago, when I reached (sort of) my 100th contribution to Dapper, and everything was all sunshine and optimism.

In these days of Corona I just needed something positive, so here it goes...


The Facts

• In August 1994 I wrote my first contribution in Word Perfect 5.1. That’s 25 years ago...

• Since then, excluding this contrib, I wrote about 744 pages, of which perhaps one or two may have been of remote interest to someone else :-)…

• The numbering of TellTales (the name of my contribution) has been… irregular. I think I wrote about a 100+ real contributions, but… well… I did mess up now and again. There was, for example, Telltales #8 which was a postcard so does that count? #22, #24 and #25 went through a blender. I’m not sure what happened to #36, #37 got split into two parts, almost a year apart. #86 was never finished and still sits on my hard-drive. There were also extras such as #24a, #24b, #24c, #24d, #24e, #24f, #24g, #24h, #24i, and #24j. I think we’ll just call at a hundred then :-)

• Jan granted me about 22 front pages (I got 24 files on this PC, but I know I haven’t submitted all of them, and Jan didn’t use one or two).

• 2 (3?) contributions were completely handwritten, 1 was written on a BlackBerry (though I admit I assembled it on a PC before sending it to Jan).

• I skipped Dapper 60 times (sorry) and have been 27 times on grace. The worst was in 2007/2008 , where I effectively dropped out of Dapper for 18 months due to private circumstances…

• 4 of my contributions were Teletubbies inspired (actually, my old printer started misbehaving, but by creatively refilling and sometimes incorrectly (re)placing the ink cartridges I squeezed another 8 contributions out of the thing), 3 dealt with nuclear explosions and the end of the world, and one contribution prominently featured Sylvester Stallone’s underpants (I mean boxer shorts).

• My worst… I mean most substantial ;-) contribution was 32 pages (which was the one with the boxer shorts, actually).

• I managed to write mailcomms for 81% of all Dappers I participated in... (But did read them all, believe me!)

• Since I joined Dapper I’ve spend a year in China, got married, had two kids, lost my hair (not necessarily in that order :-)), moved 4x, rebuild 3 kitchens, visited Japan and the US (thrice), got divorced, changed jobs about ten times, and never won the lottery.

• Also, five minutes ago I found out Desperados is fine but their Mojito Mint & Lime flavour is absolutely horrible!

25 years...

Life sometimes throws a curve-ball, and looking back I admit not everything has been fun. Still I can only conclude these last 25 years have been worth it, and I hope I’ll be able to add a couple more. Read more books, watch more TV shows, enjoy more movies, as well as find victims for my ramblings inspiration in Dapper :-)

So, yeah, I plan for another 25 years!

See ya’!