The Girl of Taco Gringo

Optimus Prime is really one for stories, and he ran down another one for me recently that I thought was both amusing and fascinating in how our interactions in other peoples' lives serves to change them. This one boils down to an essential if-then statement when it comes to Prime's life choices, since in the case of this particular girl, his failure to keep track of time and desire for some Mexican fast food changed someone's life, and perhaps not for the better.

His story began with Everquest, a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), which has since been supplanted, I believe, by Everquest 2. These are affectionately referred to by players as EQ1 and EQ2. Well, people who play these types of games tend to revolve their lives around them, and as such, he tended to miss dinner time at the college cafeteria. Some colleges have some very specific times that the cafeteria is "open" for meals, and in the case of his college, this open time was 5 to 6 pm. After that, you're on your own. 

Well, his choice of fare when he missed the college meal time was a place called Taco Gringo, and he said after the first twenty or thirty times he went in there, they got to know him, and he tended to get more to eat after that. One person who got to know him was this girl who was a waitress in there, and him being a geek and all, he talked to her about computers. She wasn't even a user at the time they met, but knew "about" them, probably like your average 80 year old knows "about" them.  She had been thinking about getting one, and so she talked to him about how to use it, etc.

He, in turn, not only gave her the whole skinny on computers, but told her all about EQ1 and his affinity for it. I have little doubt that he went into lots and lots of detail about who he was and what he did and the little clubs or whatever he was in within the game world. This lead her to go out and buy a computer, and subsequently, get into Everquest as well. While I've never played an MMORPG (never wanted to make the time to do so), I understand that losing yourself in that virtual world is very easy to do if you're not careful, and this is what she ended up doing. She went from waitress to EQ junkie in short order.

So one day, when Prime had missed the meal times at the cafeteria again, he's gone into Taco Gringo only to find that the girl had failed to show up for work again, and had been fired as a result. This, however, was not the end of the story because he'd apparently learned more of what happened to her after she'd left Taco Gringo and how her life in the EQ world went from there. This is all given "as the story goes," and may or may not be 100% of what happened, but it's an interesting story all the same.

She had met a wizard in EQ, and he didn't live too far from her -- just over the state line. She began to take time to go see him, and like the game junkie she had become, she took her computer with her when she went. It started out with weekends, but after one weekend when she'd taken her computer over the state line to see her wizard, she didn't come back. Turns out they had gotten married, but then reality set in.

Apparently (and this may come as a surprise), being a level 80 wizard in the Everquest virtual world is just that: a level 80 wizard online. This equates to being absolutely nothing in the real world. Like his new wife, his EQ obsession took its toll on him, and he was expelled from college for his overkill obsession. This guy was beyond your typical gamer. As the story goes, he had an actual Legend of Zelda Master Sword in his dorm room at one time. By actual, I mean it was an actual, functional sword made to look just like the one in the video game.

I asked him what ever became of them, and his first response was pregnant with 12 kids, but then he laughed it off. Turns out the relationship was not meant to be. He left her when she discovered World of Warcraft.