Global Citizen

Back in the day, a friend and I wrote a series of absurd stories about a family that found themselves in ridiculous situations the world over. We would generally think of a ridiculous premise and give it an equally absurd setting. When we decided that one of the characters was to get gravely injured because he fell asleep in one of the cars that was to be destroyed at a demolition derby, we consulted an atlas to find what we thought was an unlikely place for this event and found a city in Romania named Cluj-Napoca. We had a good laugh and I never gave Cluj-Napoca a second thought, until today. I was doing some work and uncovered what appeared to be a bug in an open source library that I was using. I posted a description of the issue to the discussion forum for said piece of software and I soon received confirmation from one of the developers. When I saw in his profile that he was based in Cluj-Napoca, it jogged my memory and brought me back to the story I wrote a good 15 years ago. That's the great thing about the Internet - it gives you a chance to interact with people from the places around the world that you made fun of when you were a kid because you thought they had funny sounding names.