Kevin 'special forces' Hardy
worked with my mate's dad. He claimed he was in the territorial army. Nothing unusual about that except that Kevin was an absolute lardarse. He hardly ever left his desk unless he really had to, even to use the printer. He even brought in his own printer to save the effort of walking across the room and his packed lunch was always something spectacularly gut-busting with enough calories to keep Ranulph Fiennes well stoked on an expedition to the south pole.

Kevin then declared to my mate's dad that he had been seconded to the territorial army's equivalent of the SAS.

One day, my mate's dad being head of IT asked my mate to come into the office to coo over the new Xenix mini computer with its staggeringly vast 150Mb hard drive and the 12 Wyse terminals it served and I went along with him. We went into the office and saw a large bloke stuffing his face with a sandwich that was nearly the size of my head.
"I bet that's Kevin" I said. This was confirmed by my mate's dad.
"If he's special forces, then so am I" I added, sitting there being 9 stone wet through and the most danger I'd ever been in was telling a PE teacher to "bloody leave me alone" when I was 12.

Kevin claimed he was going on a mission over the weekend, because that's what special forces do. Declare they're in the special forces and that they are going on a secret mission.

Now, me and my mate worked Saturdays at McDonalds and we noticed Kevin getting served a lot of food and then go sit down. We went out to see him and said hello.
"Hello Kevin, how's the mission going?" we asked
"Eh?" he replied before recognising us. "You bloody idiots, you'll blow my cover" at which he scopped up his 3 Big Macs and 2 large fries, grabbed his large milkshake and dashed out and up the street. Well I say dashed, it was more like staggered and wheezed whilst sweating profusely.

We learned that Kevin didn't turn up for work on the Monday or the Tuesday. On the Wednesday he claimed he'd gone underground to avoid being captured after 'those bloody kids had put me at risk' though we suspect that he was just too ashamed to turn up.
God knows what he's doing nowadays. Probably working in some office as cover for his secret work in Iraq fighting the resistance to KFC opening a restaurant in Baghdad.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 13 Jan 2011, 13:49, 2 replies)

I like
this story, there are so many people in the world like this.
( Trollman, Thu 13 Jan 2011, 15:56, closed)

First love
Ah, Xenix. I remember my first encounter with a Unix-like operating system - an Altos running Xenix on an 8086. Love at first sight, compared to the CP/M and MS-DOS systems I had been using here was a real operating system. Elegant, clever and powerful. And twenty-five years later my mobile phone is running Linux. Joy!
( electric_goat, Fri 14 Jan 2011, 9:42, closed)