» Why I was late

Oktoberfest
From: $Manager
Sent: Donnerstag, 28. September 2006 12:29
To: REC
Subject: Re: Where are you?!

REC, its already noon and you have not called the office to say your whereabouts. Are you working in home office?

# # #

From: REC
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 14:14
To: $Manager
Subject: Re: Where are you?!

I'm in Prague. I'm not on holiday but I'm unable to work. I hope to be in the office tomorrow.

# # #

From: $Manager
Sent: Donnerstag, 28. September 2006 14:21
To: REC
Subject: AW: Re: Where are you?!

What does it mean you are in Prague?? You know that you can not take vacaction without first getting approval. I will have to talk about this to $ÜberManager and you may get the writte up for this. It is unacceptable and we will need to have a meeting when you return.

# # #

From: REC
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 15:17
To: $Manager
Subject: Re: AW: Re: Where are you?!

There will be no meeting. This is NOT vacation. I'm here in Prague because I followed your directions to keep $Customer entertained. I escorted him to the Oktoberfest where, due to my connections I was able to get us into the otherwise closed Hobräu tent. $Customer was having a very good time. Too good a time, in fact. Suffice to say he's somewhat socially inept, even in the context of the Wiesen.

After having drunk four Maß glasses of beer he decided that he'd seen enough of the "cold-ass bitches" who shunned his attempts to become more sociable because "they must hate foreigners" and figured that what he really wanted to see was Czech capitalism in action, something he'd heard can be considerably cheaper than that business which is conducted in Germany. Due to my own consumption of seven beers, this didn't seem as bad an idea as it perhaps should have.

$Customer told the limo driver where to take us. The limo driver balked so $Customer handed him what appeared to be a couple hundred euros. After approximately three hours of driving, during which we discussed $Customer's plans as best as we could, we arrived on the strip as the A6 becomes the D5 at which point, $Customer found an object of interest but required some 11 minutes for the transaction. His business completed, he agreed that it was time to return to Munich.

The border guards were not of the same opinion. While we were waved through by the Czech guards on our arrival, the Germans decided to go by the book. Despite giving them my full information and it checking out, they refused to let me back in the country without ID, something I tend not to carry when dressed in traditional Bavarian lederhosen to participate in the Oktoberfest traditions. We drove to Prague and found a hotel.

I'm currently sitting in an Internet cafe near the Schoenborn Palace. The embassy says they hope to have temporary papers for me by tomorrow but will make no promises. $Customer has disappeared, presumably to the British embassy but for all I know, back to the strip along the D5 to further his understanding of Czech business.

Hotel, transportation and all other costs will appear on my October expense report.
(Thu 28th Jun 2007, 12:17, More)

» Vandalism

It's murder.
It's amazing what you can do when you have too much time on your hands, a twisted sense of humour, some beer and a little Crime Scene tape. You know, that yellow and black plastic band the cops tie between trees or doorways to block them off? My best friend had a roll of the stuff. We'll call him Legba, despite his American birth and Welsh background.

He worked in the Uni game room and that's where we met. We became friends quickly and had a mutual love of beer and pinball, both -- coincidentally -- available in the game room. I was the (AP-affiliate) newspaper's copy editor at the time and we were one floor up in the Student Union. Once the paper was ready for the printer, off I'd go to the game room where Legba was usually busy closing up and kicking people out, leaving us to play the Addams Family pinball machine and drink beer in peace.

Legba and I are big on obscure and oddball references. He'd come over to my flat a lot and we'd drink beer and watch the Rockford files or Rocky and Bullwinkle... maybe a film. And talk. Imagine two drunk, well-read, quasi-intellectuals giving the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment to a 1970's cop show and you've pretty much got the picture. "Oh captain, my captain!" indeed.

Anyway, during my ball, he started talking about his crime scene tape. We'd been throwing Repo Man quotes at each other that night. I sent the ball into the unlit electric chair, the machine said, "It's not plugged in yet," and Legba said, "Let's do some crimes!" I just spit out, "Yeah, let's do a murder and not pay!"

It had been a pretty boring summer and we were going to spice it up. He had the tape with him. All we needed was chalk and blood. There was chalk aplenty at the dart boards, leaving us needing only blood. I had a lot of paint and dyes at home and ran to pick some up (it was a three-minute walk to my place). We came up with a mixture of rose madder paint dye, beer and some other stuff. Actually, I came up with the blood, Legba having supplied the beer and tape. I made it the brownish colour of dried blood, not the bright red of the fresh stuff.

We went out to the front entrance of the Student Union building which faced a pedestrian bridge. It was on this bridge at dusk that we set up the scene. The building's main entrance columns would've made a great location, but we didn't want to risk it all being torn down before anyone could see it so we went for the wide bridge, choosing a sort of corner that was both out of the way and yet highly visible.

Legba lay down and I outlined him, not with curves following the body but with very basic, simple, straight lines. That's how it was really done then though I don't remember how I know that. Then we drew a couple of lines with arrowheads converging toward a point on the stairs about 10 meters away. Using a syringe, I set some "blood" at the chest with a little spatter on the wall, some coming from the mouth outside the chalk line, and a little smear "under" one of the hands. Next to the shoulder I drew a box and added a few cryptic letters and numbers, something like "H234/3 C37 AB3L". Or something like that.

Then I went to the merge point on the stairs and dropped a few coins on the ground. While Legba was doing his best to tie off the scene with the tape (strategically moving a rubbish bin to get a tie point) I drew circles around three of the coins, numbered them and then picked up my change. This showed where the casings had fallen. It was dark, we had our full scene completed and we headed to the watering hole laughing our asses off. It had taken us only five minutes to set up.

I was at the school around 7:45 the next morning and as I got to the bridge, I saw a couple maintenance guys jabbering into their radios and finally beginning to remove our scene. While I was a bit sad that it was disappearing so quickly, it had been seen. Rumours were flying around and the 37000-student campus was abuzz by mid-day. People at the paper were asking each other if anyone knew anything. Campus Security was refusing to comment. I spent the day trying not to laugh and was only mildly successful at it.

Legba and I were hysterical that night as we drank Rolling Rock and watched Rockford Files. Working in the game room where a couple of the kampus kops hung out, he'd heard them talking to each other. It turned out that the the cryptic stuff I wrote just happened to match the standard homicide notation! The first line was "Homicide, day 234 / shift 3". The C37 also matched "jurisdiction, ordinal number". Oops.

The campus police were mad because they figured the city cops had stepped on their jurisdiction yet again without telling them. The city cops kept saying there was no incident and were annoyed by the stupid questions. The morgue said no bodies came in. But the funniest bit of all were the people who talked about how some friend of a friend was a witness on the same day!

It's hard to drink when you're laughing so hard, even out of a longneck bottle.

Did I mention it was Freshmen Orientation that week? Yep, bunches of high school kiddies and their parents were touring the campus. Heh heh heh...

It took a few weeks for all the talk of the "murder" to die down, but the "blood" stains were there on the bridge for a year. Some two years later Legba was in ourn local and some chick who had been Student Government president at the time was telling her friends all about the murder scene she'd seen on her way home after working late at the uni. She saw it and legged it, screaming at the top of her lungs and running as fast as possible back to the sorority house. Legba overheard, broke out in laughter and 'fessed up. She damned near handed his head to him.

My memory's a bit shaky; maybe we did it on a Tuesday night.
(Tue 12th Oct 2010, 13:41, More)

» Insults

Top Gear
While driving to see her family in Belgium, my girlfriend offered various comments on my m4d motoring sk1llZ. At one point she said she'd start calling me Hammond. I looked at her for a second, not quite sure what she'd said. "Hammond! Hammond! The guy from Top Gear!"

She's not a big fan of the show but she likes some of the funny bits, like the Bizarre vehicles, Clarkson pouring a concrete floor in a Merc S-class, and... Hammond crashing.

I was still looking at her when she then asked "Wasn't he the one who crashed the fast car and almost died?" I saw my moment. "No," I began...

When driving ever comes up in a conversation now she insists on telling everyone that I drive like the Stig.
(Mon 8th Oct 2007, 11:44, More)

» Little Moments of Joy

Nestlé's supermarket ice cream may be shit, but it was the best fucking scoop I ever had.
Finally able to visit me after weeks in hospital, my 4½-year-old daughter insisted on emptying her penny purse to buy an ice cream to share with Papa. I wasn't even supposed to be eating yet. I had chocolate chocolate chip, she had strawberry. We shared (she insisted on that, too).
(Mon 27th Jan 2014, 13:51, More)