Ask Kajsa

Nisse doesn’t understand anything

“No no no, you don’t understand anything!”

Nisse’s¹ girlfriend was at wit’s end. She spent the last half-an-hour trying to explain a simple thing to Nisse, and was now beginning to wonder if it was worth it. Today’s subject consisted of the rather uncomplicated relation between her old classmate Tove and Nisse’s colleague Love. Kajsa thought that Nisse’s misconception of how things were set up might stem from the likeness between the names and decided therefore on a new strategy.

“Let us put it like that,” said Kajsa. “We rename Tove and Love to Things and Stuff.” Kajsa turned a page in the blank paper pad that was placed on top of the kitchen island. She used to sketch stuff on paper ever since she realized how complicated it was to explain simple truths to her doltish boyfriend and kept therefore the paper pad always within reach. Nisse understood namely things better when they were surrounded by round-cornered squares and were connected to stuff using pointed arrows. Kajsa drew a round-cornered square and wrote “Things” with large letters inside it. Beside the square, she added another square and wrote “Kajsa” inside it. In order to simplify the sketch for the feeble-minded, she added “your girlfriend” with small letters below the name, and surrounded the description with parentheses. Finally, she surrounded both of the squares with an ellipse and above it added “Löt high school, 1992–1995”.

“We went to high school together, Things and I. Are you keeping up so far darling?”

Nisse nodded thoughtfully to indicate that this was the case.

Kajsa drew another square, on Things’ right-hand side, and inside it wrote “Things’ mother”. Beside it another, “Things’ mother’s sister”, and yet another one beside it. In this square, Kajsa wrote with small letters “Things’ mother’s niece”. She decided, namely, that names were redundant in this context and risked straining the delicate comprehension that currently seemed to reside inside her boyfriend’s head. Kajsa surrounded those last squares together with Thing’s own square and above it wrote “Things’ family”. To be on the safe side, Kajsa clarified verbally that this group represented certain selected individuals in Things’ family.

She looked once again towards her boyfriend’s direction and saw how he systematically went through the sketch and took in all the facts. After a while, Nisse nodded again, albeit not as confident as after the first time. Kajsa took a deep breath and continued.

Below “Things’ mother’s niece”, Kajsa drew another square with “Stuff” inside it, and surrounded both with an oval, titled “Elie street 10, Sundbyberg”. “They are neighbors”, she explained. “They live under each other in the same house — not only on this paper! — they actually live on different floors!”. In the last square, Kajsa wrote “Nisse”, and below it “you” surrounded with parentheses. The last ellipse enclosed both Stuff and Nisse, and beside it Kajsa wrote “The Apes AB”. “That’s where both you and Stuff are working”, said Kajsa and hoped her voice didn’t fail her despite her sky-high adrenalin level.

In order to conclude the sketch, Kajsa painted a heart in its bottom left corner and wrote “You and me” inside it. From these she drew arrows, pointing to their corresponding squares. “So”, said Kajsa, “Do you understand the relations between Things and Stuff now?” Otherwise, I’m going to jump out the window, thought Kajsa. The sketch looked finally like this:

Nisse shut his eyes for a moment and tried reaching that tranquility he often required when his girlfriend was in that strange state of mind. He then opened them carefully and tried following the complicated diagram which lay in front of him. He was not stupid. He knew it. But he did feel dull sometimes. “He gets it fast once you explain it to him slowly”, he once overheard a colleague joking at work. But he knew he could grasp it this time. Kajsa had been extremely pedagogic and the sketch was very clear. He only had to concentrate a bit and then…Yes! Nisse understood how it hanged together! Things was, simply enough, Stuffs’ neighbor’s cousin. Why didn’t his girlfriend say so earlier?

The neighbor

Nisse’s neighbor was a cute girl about Nisse’s and Kajsa’s age, who constantly lacked eggs, flour, potato peelers or other ingredients or kitchen implements which she more often than not wanted to borrow. Nisse noticed that this frequently happened just when Kajsa was away and wondered if she was afraid of her or whether there was some other reason for her to try avoiding his girlfriend. Finally, his neighbor got tired of waiting for the dense but handsome-looking Nisse, who constantly missed noticing how much effort she put matching her clothes, spraying expensive perfumes, removing stubborn hairs and generally looking quite sexy when she for the zillionth time knocked on his door when he finally was home alone. She decided therefore it was high time to be outmost explicit and asked Nisse straight out if he would consider having sex with her.

Nisse was dumbfounded. He didn’t understand. Did he hear correctly? Or was it a very unfortunate case of Freudian mishearing? He wasn’t totally certain there was such a term either. Wasn’t it the other way around? He decided finally that the little cook once again had asked for something that probably existed inside his fridge and mumbled that sure, he’ll just see if….but before he had enough time to figure out the rest of the sentence, his neighbor put her arms around him and kissed him passionately.

Twenty minutes later, Nisse remained laying on the couch while his neighbor put on her clothes, kissed him on his cheek and went home without borrowing any kitchen appliances. Nisse did not know what to think. In his mind he saw an imaginary boxing match between his libido and his conscience. The latter had just received a massive right hook and lay on the floor, bleeding, but now seemed to recover its wits and rose up in order to give its adversary a retribution it would seldom forget. Nisse could almost hear Rocky III’s theme, Eye of The Tiger, in the background.

What had he done? How could he cheat on Kajsa, his beloved, who was always so good and loyal to him? He thought he must try to gather his thoughts, and dragged himself therefore to the bathroom. Under the shower, he always felt more perceptive and it was there that he always came up with the best ideas.

The shower

Well under the shower, Nisse felt his mind changing gears. The warm water that met the back of his head at a forty-five degrees angle yanked at his gray brain cells and made them cooperate merely. He thus forgot at once that he should establish some kind of a strategy to contain the neighborgate disaster, or rather disclose everything to Kajsa and beg for mercy. Instead, Nisse came to think about his girlfriend’s sketch.

Kajsa had, as much as Nisse could understand, an enormous database in her head, in which she collected facts from everything she saw, read, heard or deemed. She never forgot a single detail and could, without straining herself a single bit, and in the tiniest detail, account for situations she encountered years ago. For example, she could look at Nisse’s worn shirts and tell him that he bought this particular old rag 7.5 years ago at H&M for 59 and 90. Furthermore, she remembered which other garments Nisse rejected at the same occasion, exactly how they looked like and what they costed, which other shops they visited, which other alternatives they found there, as well as how petulant Nisse was during the whole process. Her database made it possible for the genius to describe the relation between Tove and Love without any problem, which Nisse couldn’t possibly understand. How smart was she actually? And how could he possibly manage his life without her? A spark of bad conscience lit for a moment inside him, but extinguished abruptly when other thoughts rose up. He now thought whether there were other people on earth with the same talent as Kajsa’s, and whether they also had boyfriends who couldn’t survive without them.

What if Kajsa could offer her memory as a service to customers around the country — people who needed to remember where they bought their clothes or wondered if they were related to each other. Then they could simply pick up their phones and call the service, which might be called “Ask Kajsa”, and ask away. Kajsa could perhaps take a hundred crowns for each answer she gave, and become a millionaire in no-time.

Nisse fantasized a bit about Kajsa bathing in Scrooge McDuck’s money-filled bathtub when the idea suddenly struck him. He was working, for Pete’s sake, as an app developer! He could design the “Ask Kajsa” app himself! Now the world would see who would take a dip inside the money! Should he immediately change his first name to Scrooge?

The app could simply collect all available data about different persons, and given two names could indicate if they were relatives, neighbors or acquainted with each other, or perhaps a combination of all of the above, in the same way that Tove and Love were.

Nisse pondered a while on where all of the information could be found: friends were on Facebook, that was easy. Job information could be fetched from LinkedIn. Residence from Eniro or Hitta¹. Relatives? There were a lot of pedigree sites on the internet. All were simply available and waiting to be used. All that remained were some small details.

Nisse lay in the bathtub and handed himself a microphone in form of a shower nozzle, not unlike Jimmy Rabbitte in The Commitments. He interviewed himself in English with a distinct Irish accent and said: “Tell me about the early years Scrooge…”

Champagne

When Kajsa came home that evening, she was invited for champagne and chocolate truffles that Nisse had bought to celebrate their new life as Croesus Voles³. He told her all about the idea and described how simple and carefree the whole thing was and how thankful he was for her inspiration without which the idea could not have been contrived.

“Have you been messing around with the neighbor?”, asked Kajsa. Nisse had apparently underestimated her observation skills. “You treacherous trout⁴. I’m going to mom’s place”, she continued and started packing a bag with clothes and bathroom accessories.

Nisse was speechless, and the questions raced around in his head like crabs on a hot sand beach. How could she know that? What would he say? Had she left him for good? Could he still call the app “Ask Kajsa”, in that case? And why just a trout? Were no other fish suited for the job? Was trout the worse possible fish?

Janne

The ongoing lack of Kajsa lead Nisse to try to find someone else to share his brilliant idea with. The lottery ticket fell on his colleague Janne, who was actually called Jafar, but due to the fact that many of Nisse’s colleagues had a difficult time pronouncing that name correctly, he abidingly had to accept the slightly boring name. Janne was, according to Nisse, a technical genius who could fix bugs that Nisse could not even grasp and program in languages that Nisse hadn’t even heard of. When it came to social competence, Janne was slightly less capable, which made him fit into the nerd-are-introvert-loners cliché even better, if that was even possible. While Nisse disclosed all the details around “Ask Kajsa” for Janne, he began feeling that they two could be working tightly together, like Jobs and Wozniak. He, Nisse, could be the idea guy who knew what people needed better than they knew themselves, and Janne could fulfill the technical expertise role and solve all the complex problems that might be hiding in the bushes. The next step in order would probably be to find some kind of a garage where they could develop apps that would change the world and turn it upside down.

The only problem was that Janne wasn’t the least interested. “Such ideas have I heard before”, yawned Janne. “They are too complex, have multiple legal issues and finally no one wants to know if ones neighbor is someone's cousin. No one cares, simply said. By the way, didn’t you start a different project a few weeks back Nisse? Get a grip and stop dreaming away now. And take care of your relation with Kajsa, she is a real catch, you know.”

Nisse was speechless. First Kajsa and now Janne. What was wrong with this world? He needed to take one more shower and think things over.

One more shower

The shower works in mysterious ways. This time Nisse did not have any brilliant ideas, and instead felt guilty about Kajsa, frustrated about Janne and felt a stomach ache when he thought about his app idea. He decided to put the plans on a mental shelf somewhere in his frontal lobe and instead spend his time and strength trying to fix the relationship with Kajsa. When he stepped out of the shower he was ready for battle and picked up his mobile phone in order to call the ex, ready to beg for forgiveness and mercy. Unfortunately, it was not Kajsa who answered, but her mom. Hell, thought Nisse. If there was a place like that, it was probably filled with ex-mother-in-laws.

“Kajsa does not want to talk to you Nils”, she said in a sluggish tone. “You have hurt her in an irrevocable way. Show some compassion and refrain from contacting her again.” Nisse didn’t want to hang up but realized that the ex-mother-in-law was not willing to deliberate. Thus, Nisse decided he will not call again. Not in the next five minutes in any case. After that he could not hold himself and dialed Kajsa’s number again and received a round of concentrated bad conscience, served cold by her mother. Nisse thought that perhaps this could do for now. Instead, he could try reaching Kajsa in some alternative ways. Ever since all of the social medias pop up, life for a stalker was much more diverse and the possibilities unlimited. He tried therefore sending messages to Kajsa using all possible ways he knew: using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even via e-mail, SMS and some other obscure forms. Finally, Nisse fell asleep on his keyboard after have sent a hundred forty-seven different messages to Kajsa.

In his dream, he was chased by a mob of mobile phones, which in some strange way resembled Kajsa’s mother. They all screamed at him that he should be ashamed and that he should get a real job. Nisse tried running away from the mobile monsters but they kept turning up everywhere and yelled at him accusingly with shining, angry diode eyes: “Nils! You have hurt her! Get a real job!” etcetera. Nils woke up covered with sweat.

In the morning, Nisse went through all of the different services he used the evening before, to see if Kajsa had answered him. Unfortunately, none of the messages were acknowledged. Nisse felt woozy and depressed. He e-mailed his boss and took a sick leave.

After a few days of self-loathing, Nisse went back to work. His worst fear, to once again meet Janne’s accusing gaze, solved itself miraculously since the troublesome truth-teller was gone. His colleagues explanations diverged. Some said he took leave of absence, others that he went on parental leave (which was strange since Nisse knew Janne was not in any relationship). Further accounts said that Janne was sick due to a sudden stroke of the flu, rubella or bad knees. Yet others declared that Janne simply, in the middle of the working day, said goodbye and disappeared without any explanation. Nisse liked this version best: presumably, Janne had bad conscience because of what he told him, and went and sat in some corner, ashamed for what he did. It was, perhaps, for the best.

One more trout

The days felt very long and empty for Nisse, who sat mostly at home and played online games during the night and half-slept at work during the days. Nisse felt that he, for some reason, suddenly had a lot of time on his hands, as if all the time he missed earlier in his life in some magical way found its way into the present time, where it could lay on the sofa and slouch. What had he done before he met Kajsa? Nisse couldn’t really remember. Most of his friends from before had disappeared during the last years and got replaced by colleagues and friends of the ex. Nisse’s relations to his own family members were neither at their prime. Affiliation was limited to one reunion during Christmas every second year. He needed, he understood finally, to get himself a life.

Nisse turned on the radio. There was a manly, squeaky nasal voice who sang a sorrowful old song:

I walk around in my Pompeii, among the ruins And I’m stomping around in the remains of our lives⁵

He shut it down immediately. That was more misery than he could take in right now.

Instead, Nisse could perhaps surf the internet. Computer Sweden’s⁶ site was known to be full of technical babble, drivel and very limited misery. He read a little about the latest large banks projects which had crashed dramatically and about some other uninteresting nonsense, but after a while found his way to the technical section. There he discovered an article that drew all of Nisse’s attention. After reading some lines, Nisse felt that it also drew all of the air in his lungs. The article spoke, namely, of a sensational new Swedish startup, where one developed an app that combined data from different internet sources and could map relationships between users and other people using their jobs, acquaintances and family relations. The one-man-company who designed this miracle app consisted of a developer with many years of industry experience, who owned the slightly hard-to-pronounce name Jafar. When asked how he came by the idea, he answered that it simply came to him one day when he took his morning shower. The app was simply named “Ask Kajsa”.

“YOU TREACHEROUS TROUT”! screamed Nisse.

Return of the ex

After about a month, the app became a success, not only among the nerds but also amid many other more or less techie people around the country. Nisse was still sour and told everybody who cared to listen that it was actually his idea and that Janne was a treacherous trout who was going to end up in hell together with all of the ex-mother-in-laws.

In the evening his mobile rang. “Now you know, in any case, how it feels like to be betrayed”, said Kajsa. Nisse felt a wave of feelings well up inside him and couldn’t therefore pronounce other than some random consonants. Kajsa laughed. “Yes Nisse, I could meet you tomorrow evening if that’s what you were trying to say. Try finding some vowels until then! Goodbye!”

Nisse experienced euphoria. The transition between the worst depression and total elation felt like coming into a warm sauna after spending a month, naked bathing in an ice hole. Kajsa wanted to meet him! Had she forgiven him? What should he say to her? He must ask a hundred times for forgiveness. No, a thousand maybe. He could do anything to win her back. Suddenly Nisse was panic stroke. He must clean his apartment before she arrives. He didn’t do that since…well not since she left. And the flowers! Ouch. They were probably not green anymore. Nisse scampered around and cleaned the flat while at the same time singing a song that suddenly found itself inside his head and was trying to find the way out through his mouth:

I will be buying some new fish, for the others have run out, and I am just as withered, as the cissus sadly seems to be⁷

Milk in hell

Nisse tested the “Ask Kajsa” app, mostly out of curiosity, but also to cast some oil on the fury’s embers, which with time were dying out. Janne had indeed made a good job, he thought. After registering yourself with your name and e-mail address, one had to decide which networks to allow the app to snoop in. For example one could, if they had a Facebook or a LinkedIn account, tell the app that, yes, please dig away, my private life belongs to you. And please share all your findings with my friends, relatives, neighbors and FRA⁸. If enough people in ones vicinity did the same, which also was the case, one could easily search for a person they might have met in a party and got their phone number, and find out that they were a cousin to the neighbor’s fiancé’s boss’s daughter or something like that. “My God that was fun”, said Nisse sarcastically to Kajsa, who was now back home. “Why didn’t I come up with that idea myself!”

But before the app made international success, the subpoenas started flooding in. Apparently, Facebook and LinkedIn and the others did not approve that their data could be used that way, which could clearly be found in their user agreements. The fact that one did not know about those rules simply wasn’t a good enough argument. After some more weeks, “Ask Kajsa” went to its grave and Janne’s one-man-company declared bankruptcy. Nisse was happy for the little things in life.

A few days later someone knocked on the door. It was the neighbor, who again wondered if she could borrow some milk.

“In hell you will”, answered Nisse and shut the door.

[1] Nisse is easier to pronounce that Nils, and many people called Nils are therefore called Nisse. Swedish name transformation works as following:

• Nils -> Nisse
• Lars -> Lasse
• Karl -> Kalle
• Bo -> Bosse

etcetera.

[2] Eniro and Hitta are both Swedish phone and address registries.

[3] Croesus Vole is an extremely rich capitalist villain in the Swedish comic series called Bamse.

[4] Trout. Originally, in Swedish, it was called mört, that is, a common roach (the fish, not the insect), which is the most common freshwater fish in Sweden, and for some reason, also an oath. However, calling someone a treacherous roach would not give the desired effect, so I had to settle on a different fish.

[5] Trouble (in Swedish: Trubbel), a song by Olle Adolphson. The translation was found at https://lyricstranslate.com/en/trubbel-trouble.html

[6] Computer Sweden is, obviously, a Swedish site about computers and technique

[7] The Grass Widower Blues (in Swedish: The Gräsänkling Blues), a song by Povel Ramel. The translation was found at https://lyricstranslate.com/en/gr%C3%A4s%C3%A4nkling-blues-grass-widower-blues.html. Some modification were added.

[8] FRA is the Swedish national authority for Signals Intelligence.