Swap Craze
A Short Story
Somewhat Inspired by Sort of True Events
By: Payman Akhlaghi
"Status: Bored With My Glasses! Fancy Yours! Care to Swap?!" -- I typed and clicked Enter. Two hours later, his reply came up with a bleep: "Likewise! Affirmative! Opt for Overnight Delivery!" The next morning, I appeared before my class in a pair of golden retro pince-nez. My students ogled. One finally broke the silence, "Professor, are those Jimmy's, too?" I smiled.
As everyone knew, Jimmy had been my number one eSwap pal for the past six months. I knew very little about Jimmy, except that he lived somewhere far in northern Canada, and that we both had an apparently insatiable craving for anything that belonged to the other one. Since we had discovered each other on eSwap, we had exchanged many things via this online bartering service, from books to pants, to furniture, or to whatever else which we'd suddenly found boring. Swap-wise speaking, Jimmy was my soul-mate, and eSwap, with its revolutionary regression to the early days of bartered goods, was the Heaven, where we had luckily found each other.
