My name is MC Speller and I came here to spell

For years, C worked offshore. He went to college on a ship, he’s worked for shipping companies, and he even grew up in the water, on a sailboat his parents navigated from Florida to the Bahamas.

In all those years, in all that dangerous work, my boyfriend, Mr. Safety, never sustained a work-related injury.

A few years ago, he took a promotion that moved him to a cushy office with privacy and a chair and a computer.

At construction sites and car shops, you always see those signs that say, “It has been ___ days since our last on-site injury.”

Now, after several years of freedom from bone-crushing, eye-gouging or flesh-ripping on-site injuries, now, he has RSI.

From sitting. In a chair. At a desk. All day.

The kicker is that a team of expert doctors can’t even tell him what caused it, or how to make it stop. Because of the pain he has a hard time playing the guitar and ukulele, and sometimes it even hurts his wrists to drive his car.

The good thing, I guess, is that his work has provided him with all kinds of fancy technology to help ease the pain.

Last night, he was installing this seeing eye device on his laptop which basically acts as a mouse, using a laser beam to read a sensor stuck to his face. When he moves his face, and therefore the sensor, it moves the cursor just like a mouse would.

But my favorite thing is his voice recognition software.

At least once a week we go jogging with this crazy group of runners that go by nicknames unfit to print in this venue. A few days ago, C was writing an e-mail to some of these friends of ours. It entertains me to no end to hear him dictate to his computer.

“Eargasm jumped right into the bayou, and found himself standing in mud up to his knees,” he says.

“Select ‘orgasm.’ Spell that. E-A-R-G-A-S-M.”

“Select ‘by you.’ Change that to ‘bayou.’”

“Select ‘sneeze.’ Change that to ‘his knees.’”

It takes him about five minutes to dictate a single sentence. In the meantime, I’m cackling like a mad woman, enjoying both the goofiness of a grown man saying such obscenities to an inanimate object and the utter frustration I feel emanating from his general person.

“You’d be surprised at the words I’ve taught this thing,” he says.