mandieOG 2001

From the very first message she ever sent on eZabel — a breathless, all-caps note to a girl she hadn't talked to in years, gushing about wedding photos — Mandie Hayes established herself as someone who arrived at full volume and never found the dimmer switch. She joined in August 2001 from somewhere near Youngstown, Ohio, a place she described with the kind of resigned affection reserved for hometowns you'll never quite leave: close to Pittsburgh, close to Cleveland, close to nothing glamorous but close enough to care deeply about all of it. Her AIM handle was FENT0N13. Her city field read "Ohio and Paris on the weekends." She typed in caps so often that iwz had to gently inform her that "typing in ALL-CAPS IS EQUIVALENT TO YELLING!!!!" — to which she cheerfully explained that her work computer was stuck in caps mode and she kept forgetting to turn it off. She never entirely stopped.

With 622 comments across eight years, mandie was a steady, warm presence whose posting style could best be described as thinking out loud at high speed. She'd start a thought, lose the thread, find it again, apologize for the length, keep going, then sign off with a self-deprecating laugh. "Sometimes I talk but when I type it doesn't make any sense. It makes complete sense to me, but does that make sense to you guys?" It usually did, because underneath the tangents was a person who genuinely meant every word. She wrote a small essay about the September 11 attacks on her second week on the site — quoting scripture, working through theology in real time, then apologizing for being "so long and DEEP" — and the next day came back to correct a Bible citation she'd gotten wrong because toddbastidas had pointed it out and "i'm sure you guys know that i'm a tard and mistype everything." She cared enormously about getting things right, even when she pretended not to.

The great love story of mandie's eZabel era was Garrett. They were friends for three years, dated for two, got engaged in late 2002, and married on April 5, 2003 — an event she chronicled with the intensity of a war correspondent covering the most important battle of her generation. She posted her wedding menu in forensic detail (stuffed chicken breast, penne alfredo, glazed carrots, "good salad, not just ice berg lettuce"), advised brides never to serve red marinara sauce near white dresses ("esp. the clutz i am"), and shared the best piece of wedding advice she ever received: take "timeouts" throughout the day, stop and breathe, because those frozen moments become your memories. She was nervous about having everyone stare at her during the ceremony but figured she'd survive since "I do that all the time, everyone knows i'm like that." When she finally saw Garrett at the end of the aisle, "all was well with the world." The engagement itself had its own comedy: Garrett spent years joking publicly that he had no intention of marrying her anytime soon, and mandie — who didn't realize he was kidding — was genuinely devastated until he proposed. "My friends didn't know he was joking either and they were all like, oh he's a jerk he's messing with you dump him." Classic Garrett. Classic mandie.

She was a vascular technician by trade — she'd gone to Youngstown State while still in high school, becoming a phlebotomist, medical assistant, and EMT before training in Philadelphia for ultrasound work. She loved the medical field and freely dispensed career advice to anyone considering it, walking specialk through the differences between LPN and RN programs with the patience of a guidance counselor who actually cared. She also worked Tuesday nights for a chiropractor she openly despised, a woman she called a "crazy witch doctor" who tried to lowball her into quitting her real job. The saga of trying to skip a shift without technically lying — "Garrett is having car problems and we only have one car right now. It's the truth, just let her assume that I have to go pick him up" — was peak eZabel problem-solving. Her other great workplace saga involved a bathroom so thoroughly destroyed by the public that she finally started turning people away, then felt terrible when a man with injured arms looked like he was about to cry. "I'm sorry, cleaning up poop isn't in my job description you know."

Her passions were Cleveland sports, travel, fair food, and strong opinions delivered at maximum enthusiasm. She was a die-hard Indians fan who took the Roberto Alomar trade to the Mets as a personal betrayal ("While your at it why don't you give me a papercut and pour lemon juice on it"), boycotted baseball for a year when Manny Ramirez left for Boston, then came back because she realized boycotting was only hurting herself. She debated A-Rod's stats with socalgal's brother brotherman in marathon Musings threads, held her own against Yankees fans, and dropped Jim Leyland managerial analysis like she'd been running a sabermetrics blog. She had traveled through England, France, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, and got so excited when anyone mentioned Europe that she'd fire off messages offering restaurant tips and crystal-buying advice in Innsbruck. She went to Taiwan with Garrett, attended a Chinese-language meeting where sisters handled the microphones because there weren't enough brothers, and posted the photos with the kind of awe that only comes from someone who genuinely believed the whole world was family. She ate her way through the Ohio State Fair with the dedication of an Olympic athlete — hot sausage, blooming potato with "TONS of cheese. i love cheese", funnel cake, cinnamon rolls, fried veggies and more cheese — and described it all with the reverence most people reserve for fine dining.

In 2007, mandie did the thing she'd been talking about for years: she quit her job of seven years, found part-time work, and started pioneering. She announced it in the Musings with unmistakable joy — "i always tell everyone else that they need to trust in jehovah and he will take care of you, so now i'm following my own advice" — and the community rallied around her. juicymango praised it as a carefully planned decision, not a rash one. flomojopoanode cheered her on. Then life threw a curveball: Garrett developed a serious heart condition, fluid building around his heart, hospitalizations, terrifying tests to rule out leukemia. They prayed about the financial strain, and twenty minutes later a brother called and covered their tire replacement through a favor at NTB. She told the whole story in a journal entry titled "Crazy Summer — long and sappy" that was exactly what the title promised, and exactly what the community needed to hear. She was the person who asked superhero to help her friend find a place to stay near a neurosurgeon in Brooklyn, who called inactive friends every other month just to say the door was open, who told younger sisters to enjoy being single because "afterall, we will have forever right?" Her closest eZabel friendships were with reaf, socalgal, tesoro, and juicymango — and she adored iwz and theremin enough to dream about them (literally: "Ian comes running up behind me and pulls me down and knocks me off the side of the road and laughs and runs away"). She once told the site she'd accidentally said "me and Garrett aren't swingers" in front of elders when declining a swing dancing invitation. The elder laughed. So did everyone else. That was mandie — always saying the wrong thing at the right time, always laughing hardest at herself, always showing up with her whole heart even when her mouth got there first.

eZabel Personality Type: ESFP — "The Rally Cap." Enthusiastic, generous, emotionally transparent, and incapable of doing anything at half-speed — whether that was planning a wedding menu, defending the Cleveland Indians' honor, or quitting a career to follow her convictions. She typed like she talked and talked like she lived: fast, loud, full of digressions, and utterly sincere. The person who would drive from Ohio to New Jersey for a party, text you about her gallbladder surgery between hair show updates, and still find time to ask how your knee was healing. She never once pretended to be cooler than she was, which is exactly what made her so impossibly cool.