The Big Word Project

Greetings Internet!

I have finally found an internet cafe that allows you to plug in a camera. So here is interview with Wordee number 1!

Details

• Wordee - Koen Van der Auwera
• Word - Nifty
• Website - atog.be

Underwear

Koen (later discovered to be pronounced ‘koon’) was a fantastic wordee! We met in a big square called the Groenplaats in Antwerp, Belgium in the pouring rain, thunder and lightning. Myself, my trusty cameraman Marty and translator Jo were waiting for our first encounter and didn’t really know what to expect. We were looking around deciding ‘could it be him?’….or ‘is it that guy?’. There was a guy running around the square in the rain….in his underwear. We all hoped this wasn’t our first wordee … well maybe a little.

Smiling Man

Then a smiling young man in a Wikipedia tshirt came towards us. It was a huge square and while we knew it was him and he knew it was us, it took a long time for him to reach us. Kind of like that scene in Austin Powers where the guy gets run over by the steamroller.

Koen was great! We went to a small cafe/pub on the Groenplaats and had some Karmeliet, the best belgian beer according to Koen. We talked for ages about various things, Belgium, beer, Koen being his own boss, the concept of word ownership and more beer.

We had some great chats about geeky internet stuff. Who knew that wordees would be geeky? Koen was wearing a great tshirt, reading ‘Wikipedia is accurate’ and below that ‘citation needed’. Brilliant.

Goodbyes

We had a great time with Koen and after taking the picture below, trying to fit in the stunning background, we said our goodbyes and wished him a happy day at work.

Although we did catch Koen riding on his bike later with a McDonalds under his arm. He obviously didn’t feel like heading back to work yet. Ah the joys of being your own boss!

Blogged back

Koen has written a blog post about our encounter. It’s always nice to get the wordee’s opinion on the meeting too. I’ve linked to a translated version of the post but here’s the original post in Dutch.

I’ll be uploaded videos of my other interviews soon

Word of the day

Nifty - very good; fine; excellent: a nifty idea.