Control, Alt, Delete

Fifteen years ago, I was—as usual—in between jobs. I’d recently dropped out of graduate school and had been fired from one entry level job or another (either barista or receptionist, possibly both). I spent most of my time not looking for work, exactly, but thinking of looking for work. I also drank a lot. It was on one of these idle afternoons, waiting for the bar to open and casually perusing Craigslist, in, for some reason, Baltimore—a city I’d never been to nor had any intention of visiting—when I came across an ad that would, against the odds, change my life.