Have you ever heard of Funny Class Notes?

After my late morning foreign language class last week, I settled down for lunch at the campus canteen with a couple of my fellow students. One, Tony, an avid soccer player and regular running partner, was a frequent lunchtime mate. The other, Amanda, the girl who sits behind me and to my right in class and can say twenty words in at least twenty languages, came along for the (English) conversation.

And converse we did. Over tasty pepperoni pizza, a turkey sandwich with all the fixings and a cream cheese filled pretzel (my favorite canteen fare), we battled wits the way only college students can. That is, we used mutters, grunts and urban dictionary slang to express our most aesthetic of emotions.

I am not sure what superfluous topic of conversation we were dealing with when Amanda looked up, a smile in her eyes, and said: “That’s funny. I read something like that a while back; have you ever heard of Funny Class Notes?”

Before going further, it is important for the reader to understand that while I am a highly egotistical person, I don’t go about introducing random classmates to FCN. It would just be too embarrassing to have all my fellow students reading the slanderous things I write about them. They would recognize the nuggets of truth that permeate these episodes and would no doubt take offense at the way their comments and actions are turned into comedy.

I had certainly never told Amanda about FCN.

Even more amazing was that Amanda was able to recognize not only the fact that she was familiar with whatever it was that jogged her FCN memory, but that the content was originally from it. She didn’t think “oh, I read that online somewhere” or "I think some idiot said that on the radio," but instead thought “that’s from FCN.”

Not only had she connected the synapses and deduced the link between her auditory sensory data and FCN, but she felt the need to spread the good FCN word. She had asked me if I had ever heard of it; an obvious attempt to make me into a regular reader. Amanda wasn’t just one of the faithful FCN few, she was a missionary!

Also understand that I pretty much write the way I speak. The kinds of odd, socially unacceptable phrases that you all put up with so routinely tend to bubble out of me in conversation like foam out of beer. FCN posts are a rare glimpse into the chaos of the male mind and I have a penchant for expressing my inner madness with perverse regularity. If I am in my comfort zone, everyone else is in the splash zone. It’s true. Just ask my therapist.

These thoughts, and a few others, crossed my cream cheese inebriated mind in a matter of nanoseconds and I was ready with an answer, albeit an unimaginative one.

“Actually, yes. As a matter of fact, I am one of the writers for FCN. How in blue blazes did you hear about it?”

“My goodness, no!” Amanda looked excited. “I don’t know, a friend of mine told me about it a few months ago. Wow.”

That pretty much proves it. I didn’t know Amanda a few months ago.

At that moment, another realization struck me. I had just encountered our third reader. Our web software was vague as to her identity and up to this point we had been assuming she was an agent of the Russian government who kept tabs on FCN for security reasons. This isn't to say it's impossible for Amanda to be a Russian agent, but it certainly casts a shadow of doubt on our tracking software, which was designed by dear old Uncle Wally.

With all the food gone, our conversation ended quickly thereafter and Tony, Amanda and I headed our separate ways. But the knowledge that an FCN reader, even an FCN missionary, could be just around the next corner will haunt me for a long time.