CHICAGO — Friends of local man Jesse Miller were disconcerted by the ease with which he spelled the sexually transmitted disease, chlamydia, without even looking it up or anything.
“That motherfucker did not hesitate for even a moment. We were fucking off at work, just playing Words with Friends,” explained Nell Fowles, Miller’s coworker of two years. “He was going slow, then came across a clue for ‘9-letter word for an embarrassing medical condition,’ and it was like he had spelled it a thousand times. God, I hope not. He didn’t have most of it spelled, all he had was C, from ‘variety of miniature wild fruit.’”
Friends close to Miller recall similar instances in which the man spelled the non-phonetic word, with unnerving ease.
“We were at a bar once when Jesse grabs a newspaper and starts doing the crossword puzzle. It’s just kind of weird to see someone be that confident in spelling such a…specific…word,” said Miller’s roommate of 13 months, Luis Flores. “Like, there’s probably any number of things that it could have been. Like, cataracts? Uh, not celiac. But there’s probably a lot of other things. And he wasn’t even using a pencil. He straight up wrote it in pen. It’s like highly contagious venereal diseases were right up front in his mind. It was very uncomfortable.”
“No shade, by the way,” Flores added. “Hopefully, Miller just knows how to wrap it up.”
Dr. Martha Carter, a behavioral therapist specializing in friendship stress, was not surprised by the unease that Miller caused.
“Very often a discovery like this will really underline how little we actually know about the people we choose to spend time around,” Carter explained. “We like to imagine that we know our friends, their personal lives, whether or not they’ve Googled ‘chlamydia treatment how fast works.’ But the truth is, we often only discover these surprising and kind of weird things about a close friend by seeing it in action.”
When asked about this surprising skill, Miller asked what the big deal was, stating that “I read that like one in three people have chlamydia.”