From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour, I'm Jennifer Hickson. Today we're going to hear

some stories that pivot on something noticed. Millions of details cross our path each day.

Most are in consequential, but sometimes our eyes grow wide and we zero in on a detail

that changes everything. That's what happened to our first storyteller, our Eric Thomas,

when he pulled focus on a small sign in a library. Eric originally told this story for us

in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. Here he is alive at the Moth.

The first time I went viral was in 2002. Do you know what that means going viral? Yeah,

it's that thing where everyone's passing around the same meme or the same article. We're

all talking to each other on the internet at the same time. That happened to me in 2002.

Now 2002, as you remember, was the Wild West days of the internet. There was no Twitter,

there was no YouTube. Very few people were on Facebook. So it was really, really hard

to go viral back then. I say that, so you'll be impressed. So in 2002, I was a college

student at the University of Maryland. It was a really hard time in my life. I was sad

all the time. I was tired all the time. I didn't really make any friends on campus. I just

went to class and I didn't join any activities. I just occasionally would write movie reviews

for the college newspaper. I did that mostly because I really like free things. I would

go home and I would go to my parents' basement. For work, I worked at the Baltimore

Sun, the local paper, in their subscription complaints department. It's a living.

And so he would call me if they didn't get their paper delivered in the morning. And

sometimes he would call me if they had complaints about an editorial. I couldn't really do much

about that. And sometimes he would just call me because they were lonely. And so I would

go in at five and talk on the phone until noon and then I would go to campus and then

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