Incompatible

You know we spend every moment together. Kane and I have pretty much spent 24 hours per day, 7 days a week for the last 5 ½ years at a distance of no more than 20 feet from each other. We live together, we work together, we have breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. We go to the gym, volunteer with the cats, and wash our cars together. Obviously, we're pretty damn compatible. Either that or we're using up all the time we're supposed to spend together for the rest of our lives before we even turn 30, and will be breaking up in the next couple of years. But since that explanation doesn't really make any sense, I'll stick with the compatible thing.

The other day, however, we discovered something. We were on a four hour train ride from France to Germany with nothing to do and motion sickness a constant threat. Neither of us wanted to read and it's a bit crap when one of us bogarts the computer. The only two-person card game we know besides Go Fish (Speed) has gotten tiresome.

Were there any little games on the computer that we could play together? Indeed there was: pinball. I took the left Shift button and he took the right; we each had a flipper. We took turns launching the ball into play. And here is where the differences between us shine like a hundred-watt eco-friendly light bulb.

Kane is patient, calculating. He likes to hold the flipper up when the ball comes down the side chute so that he can stop the ball and put it back into play at his leisure. He will let the ball bounce off his flipper, thinking it is going to bounce over onto mine where I would have a better shot, and let it accidentally fall down the middle. He pushes the flipper one single time just as the ball lands where he wants it, always aiming each shot toward whatever area of the board is lit up for bonus points.

I mash the shift key like it's got a cockroach under it. If the ball is somewhere in the vicinity of my flipper, including heading for or currently touching Kane's flipper, my flipper is flapping wildly. I smack the ball away the second it touches my flipper, regardless of which direction the ball might fly.

I'm a spaz. Kane is a damn guru.

When Kane does the thing where the ball bounces off his flipper and down the gutter (he stopped doing this after a while when he got the hang of how the physics of the game worked – thank goodness) rage rises in me as though he's just slapped my mother across the face*. How could a person possibly be so patient?! We played probably 20 games before tiring. Our scores increased steadily during our practice and we actually seemed to be working well together despite our radically different techniques.

I like to hit the ball as hard as I can** all the way up to the top of the board where it pings around for a while, giving us extra time on a play. Kane likes to follow the lit up arrows on the board to activate extra points. We ended up with a high score on one round of about 1,600,000. This is a good score, trust me. Kane played alone for long after I was sick of the game and in about an hour of solo play, he never broke a score of a million.

And so, I conclude, the sum of our talents is better than one of us alone even when we seem completely incompatible. Isn't that cute?

*He would never do that.

**I could not get away from the idea of this being an actual pinball machine that responds to how hard you engage the flipper, when, in fact, I'm fairly certain that the Shift key only flips the flipper at a set speed when you hit it.