boredatworkOG 2002

Somewhere between a trauma center, a law office, and an extremely strong opinion about grammar, Ilaine Jimenez carved out one of the more distinctive voices on eZabel. She arrived in September 2002 under the username boredatwork -- a name that was probably literal, given that she later confessed to spending entire workdays listening to Abba, Buena Vista Social Club, and The Best of the Wilsons -- and immediately started writing journal entries that toggled between deeply thoughtful and wonderfully absurd. One post would be a surprisingly rigorous biblical cross-reference about the chupacabra (complete with measurements of the nightjar's wingspan), and the next would be a passionate manifesto about the Powerpuff Girls, insisting that Cartoon Network was superior to PBS and that anyone who called the show "Powder Puff" deserved whatever correction was coming. She was the kind of person who could lecture you about the difference between "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" with the zeal of a tenured linguistics professor, then turn around and share her recipe for canned ham baked in Coca-Cola, cherries, and pineapple juice for five hours.

Ilaine grew up in a Spanish-speaking congregation in New Jersey, Puerto Rican by heritage, and that background colored everything from her food recommendations -- she was fiercely loyal to Golden Skillet, a fried chicken chain from Puerto Rico that delliott101 delightedly confirmed also existed in Hackettstown -- to her multilingual adventures, having spent time with an Italian group and nearly transferred to a French congregation. She worked as a legal secretary for almost four years before becoming an X-ray tech, a career pivot she recommended to anyone who would listen, citing the pay, the flexible schedule, and the medical benefits. She worked in a trauma center, which gave her vivid nightmares about patients she knew but also grounded her humor in a kind of dark practicality: asked about snowboarding versus surfing, she noted that she preferred "smashing into a tree and going quickly" over drowning. Her pop culture tastes were eclectic and firmly planted in nostalgia -- original Nintendo with Mario Bros. was the only acceptable gaming, The Goonies was memorized word for word ("boobbie traps!"), and she once went to a Thursday concert where her sister got crushed by a crowd, she took a sneaker to the eye, and two guys made out in front of her, which she reported with the exhausted resignation of someone who had seen it all.

Her closest bonds on the site formed fast and ran deep. skaorsk8 was the kind of friend who would invite her rollerblading through the parks of Ridgewood and Paramus and advise her to get her car shampooed after the sunroof incident (her mother left it open during a storm, two inches of water, never the same). sux2beme validated her hard-won wisdom about relationships with an "EXCELLANT comment!" that felt genuine. thatdarngirl and reaf were constant presences in her threads, and punkprincess -- Tina -- was her road trip partner, dance class co-conspirator, and the person she thought of whenever The Princess Bride came on TV. They planned a trip to Maine together to see real snow ("sorry, the fake stuff in Mt Creek doesn't count"), and Ilaine got a speeding ticket in an Audi on that drive that she remained "very proud" of, even after being banned from driving in the state. At the center of it all was deanh77 -- Dean -- her boyfriend and soon-to-be roommate, the one she called "the ROOT" in a bilingual pun that only she found as hilarious as she did, the one she dragged to private dance lessons (hip hop and Latin, because "I knew you were going to say that"), and the one she took to see The Barber of Seville at Lincoln Center while marveling at the absurdity of an Italian opera set in Spain with an English title.

eZabel Personality Type: ENTP -- "The Debater." Ilaine posted almost exclusively in 2002, burned bright through 2003, and then surfaced only twice more -- once in 2005 to talk about Audis and silky terriers, and once in 2006 to ask whatever happened to Tina. But in that concentrated burst, she left behind a body of work that was funny, opinionated, and startlingly specific: a woman who kept olives with cheddar cheese as a desk snack, who dipped soda crackers with butter and gouda into hot chocolate, who wore boots with hollow heels for three years of field service and picked rocks out of them every time, and who once nearly made a huge mistake in a relationship but stopped long enough to listen to the people who saw what she could not. She was analytical without being cold, spiritual without being preachy, and always, always willing to argue -- about grammar, about hair, about whether women chop it all off the moment they get married just to torment men. She suspected they did, and she had a theory about it, and she was going to tell you whether you asked or not.