First of all, I'm so grateful to my SF for recollecting this evergreen memory .
The Great Internet Cafe Incident: GTA, Akka, and the "Anatomy" Lesson
It was Christmas vacation, and I was around 14 years old, dreaming of becoming a GTA San Andreas legend. My best friend and I had one mission to get that game onto our PC. So, what did we do? We decided to hit up the local internet cafe. No, not the fancy ones with comfy chairs and snacks, this was the old-school kind. You know, the ones with the bossy owner.
That day, the cafe owner had decided to take a break, leaving the place in the hands of one akka who didn’t exactly know her way around a computer. We walked in, ready for action, armed with a shiny pendrive and a plan to download GTA and conquer the virtual world.
We were shown to our cubicle. These weren’t the open tables you see today. These were small, cozy booths, just big enough for you, your computer, and your secret internet life. With the curtains drawn, you felt like you were in some super-secret spy mission, with the only thing separating you from the outside world being a thin sliding curtain.
We sat down and got to work, typing “GTA San Andreas download” into the search bar. Every link looked sketchy, but we were too eager to care. Suddenly, the internet being the grinch, it is decided to stop working. My frustration was building up faster than my GTA skills would, so I called out, “Akka! The internet’s broken!”
Akka, looking more like a deer caught in headlights, came over. She peered at the screen, scratched her head, and muttered, “Hmm... I’ll check.” And then... she just stood there, unsure of what to do next.
Now, I wasn’t the kind of person to just sit and wait. So, I decided to fix it myself. I slid out of our cubicle, thinking I could ask the guy next door. I pulled back the curtain, and what I saw nearly made me fall over from laughter.
There was a guy, sitting there like he was in the middle of a serious work meeting. No, he was watching, um, a very educational video about the human body. Let’s also say it involved two people, zero clothes, and very little actual biology. His face was so serious, you’d think he was getting a PhD in biology. He didn’t even notice me, so I stood there frozen, staring at the screen, then slowly turned to my friend. We both started giggling like there was no tomorrow.
That akka, having seen what I saw, was now in full laughter mode. Her laugh was so loud, it bounced off the walls of the cafe. The poor guy turned around just as we were all howling. His face turned as red as Rudolph’s nose, and he scrambled to close the window, hoping we hadn’t noticed.
But that akka wasn’t done with him yet. With a straight face, she said, “Your time is still left 30 more minutes!” The guy didn’t even try to open that window again. He just nodded, pretending nothing happened, while we shuffled back to our cubicle, barely able to breathe from laughing.
In the end, we didn’t just download GTA San Andreas that day. Oh no, we downloaded a memory so funny, it still cracks us up.