Dave's Place / Metamusing

I always set my parking brake, something I am occasionally teased about. This weekend I got an almost painful reminder of why I do. It was snowing hard when I left work on Friday. I stopped at Atkins Farms for a few things on the way home, and forgot to set the parking brake. By the time I got back to the car it was completely shrouded in a light coating of snow. I could not see once I got in. I had Soolin with me and had picked up a small treat for her while in the store, and I started unwrapping it as I started the car. I turned to give it to her and while she was enjoying it I got a funny sensation and suddenly realized I was moving. I slammed on the brake, sending Soolin tumbling, and flicked on the rear windshield wiper. I was maybe half a car length from a small embankment that sits above Atkins, and the car had scooted most of the way through the parking lot, only 5-6 car lengths in total but my path crossed over 3 lanes of parking spaces and an area where there’s normally a lot of foot traffic. I was super lucky no one was walking through the lot when this happened, and that instincts kicked in and I slammed on the brakes before I went over the embankment. It’s only a couple of feet high but nothing good could have come of it. Three cheers for a little Friday luck!

Susan and I had a great Saturday. We started the day by heading north to Brattleboro, VT, where we stopped for coffee and lunch fixings at the local coop. Then we headed East on route 9 to the Pisgah State Forest in NH, where we went on a ~7 mile hike along the Pisgah Mountain ridgeline. It was a beautiful day and the views from the ridgeline were great. By the time we hiked out we were exhausted. We headed further east to Keane, NH, where we stopped for coffee and watched the ‘Freedom Party’ crazies chatter a bit incoherently about their dissatisfaction at a small rally in the heart of Keane. After that we headed south to Greenfield, MA, and visited Greenfield Games. Last stop before home was dinner and drinks at The People’s Pint. I love that place!

All in all we had a fantastic day. The only downers were Soolin, who had to hike with her lead on because of her still-healing hotspot from last weekend, and my sore body which apparently wasn’t quite recovered from last week’s adventure. By the time we got to the car my ankle was super sore.

trail map and links to a gallery of pictures below. One note on the trail map – it’s slightly inaccurate because I had to manually edit the trailmap. If anything, the hike was a bit longer on the southern end of the trail than is represented below because the gps lost signal for a bit while we were in the deep forest towards the SW end of the trail.

Trail Map

Image gallery

You can checkout the image gallery here. Below is a sample image to give you a sense of it:

Andrew JT and I summited two of the Adirondack 46ers this weekend, Wright and Algonquin. We had a pretty great time despite it being socked in at the higher elevations.What we lacked in dramatic vistas from the summits we made up for with drama on the hike. Andrew managed to forget his boots and hiked ~9 miles and ~3-4k in elevation change in his slippers, then had his newly installed crown crack out of his tooth while eating lunch. JT broke his arm the week before the hike but stuck with it anyway despite the risk. I hiked in with two dogs to save Nori from having to spend the day alone at home and ended up having to haul both their canine arses up and over some pretty rough terrain. Soolin put a period on the expedition by developing a nasty hotspot on the ride back from the hike, caused (apparently) by her pack abrading her forearm. Still in all it was a fantastic experience. I’ve knocked off 4 of the 46ers now and Soolin’s done 3. We’re already talking about our next trip. Below you can find the map of our hike and a link to a picture gallery with tons of photos.

The image gallery is here.

Another memory of Scott, this one poking a little fun at him. It’s possible no one outside his family remembers this one.

When I was in high school a proliferation of 1-900 for-pay calling services emerged. They covered every genre under the sun, including porn. Some of them were even free. Scott was still a little kid back then, and somehow he figured out about a 1-900 fantasy role playing game you could play over the phone. I think it played along the lines of those old fighting fantasy books – they’d read you a paragraph of text like ‘you enter a dark room. You can hear scritching noises. Press 1 to cast a light spell. Press 2 to draw your sword. Press 3 turn back,’ etc etc. I suspect F.I.S.T. was the game, though it could also have been Phonequest - I’m not sure. Anyway I remember him telling us about it at the time, and how he was trying to make his way to the end -  if you managed to get to the ending you’d win a prize. You can probably tell where this is going – Scott managed to rack up hundreds of dollars in fees before his parents figured out what he was up to.

We teased him about it at the time, one of those awkward juvenile moments for him where his older brother and friends gave him shit for not having much common sense, but I remember him standing up for himself, trying to explain how his plan was to win the prize – it wasn’t that he didn’t realize he was racking up a bill, he just figured he could make it pay off in the end.

This sort of captures another fundamental piece of who Scott was for me. He was by no means a conventional thinker, and he knew it. He wasn’t embarrased by this, or mostly not, and he wasn’t afraid to defend his ideas even in the face of withering criticism or the good natured ribbing of his friends. The truth is I really admired him for this. I often thought he was a crackpot, but he was a crackpot with a plan and the willpower to carry it out no matter what anyone else thought.

There’s a gallery of all of my pictures of Scott here. I’ve also written a few other remembrances of him, which you can read here.

My friends and I have this annual group camping trip that’s been going on for 25 years now. As a coincidence Scott and I both attended the first time in 1995, and since roughly 1998 it’s taken place on Lake George in the Adirondacks in upstate New York. If you’ve never been, Lake George is absolutely gorgeous. It has a reputation as a sort of mini-coney island tourist trap, but that’s just the southwest corner of the lake – the northern 4/5ths of the lake are mostly state lands and undeveloped, and there are a few dozen campsites that are accessible only by water. For 10 or so years out of the 25 year history of this camping trip we’ve rented a boat and camped on the water-accessible only sites, floating in all our supplies and spending the weekend tubing, cruising the lake on the boat, etc.

The area is known for its powerful thunderstorms in the summer. You can be out on the lake on a completely beautiful sunny day one second and the next find yourself in the heart of the maelstrom, thunder crashing, the wind roaring and the rain coming down so hard and fast you can’t keep your eyes open to see. Usually the dramatic storms are short lived – they blow through, relieve some humidity, and then you’re back to your beautiful sunny day.

Dave, Scott and me set out to refill the boat one year the day after we arrived. It was a beautiful sunny day and we were tubing on the way back after picking up gas when we noticed thunderheads moving in, so we pulled in the tube. Almost before we had finished that it started coming down hard, the wind picked up, and things got rough. While we didn’t exactly panic, Dave and I both got concerned. Dave had been driving and he had slowed the boat to a crawl, but the winds were high and were forcing us towards shore. Scott and I both started exhorting him to keep the boat moving. Dave complained that he couldn’t see a damn thing with the rain blowing in our faces. Scott took control of the situation, taking the helm of the boat. I asked Scott how he could possibly see – I had sunglasses on which was keeping the rain out of my eyes, mostly, but I still felt blinded. Dave meanwhile had pulled the tube up as a shield and he was kneeling behind it. I joined him and the two of us knelt there on the deck, cowering behind it.

Scott meanwhile had started to accelerate. At first he was just trying to get the boat’s nose headed into the wind so we would stop drifting towards shore, but soon he was laughing, nudging the speed higher and then higher again. Now the wind was just whipping through the boat and the raindrops stung when they hit you, and Dave and I were clucking like nervous hens behind our tube, occasionally poking our heads up to try and see what was happening and then quickly ducking back down.  At some point during this Scott asked for my sunglasses, and that’s my image of him in this scene – my sunglasses on, laughing, laughing, laughing – laughing at Dave and I, who definitely looked pathetic, laughing in the face of the storm as he pushed the boat ever faster into it, laughing at life and the chaotic fun it could throw at you.

It was over in 5 or 10 minutes, and soon we were all laughing at what we had just been through, Scott poking fun at Dave and I, observing that we felt like we were starring in our own Yes album cover, and chugging back to camp in what was now a gentle rain.

There’s a gallery of all of my pictures of Scott here. I’ve also written a few other remembrances of him, which you can read here.

This is my favorite story about Scott because it really captures an essential piece of who he was for me.

Some years ago Scott and his wife were trying to have a baby. There were some issues and they were tracking her cycles. There were certain moments in time when Scott needed to be there to do his part. Scott had driven up to my place in Saratoga Springs to pick me up, and we drove up to Bolton Landing to wait for our ride.

On the way we talked about what he and his wife were going through and how he might have to take off early to go be with her, which was understandable but a bummer. Sure enough we got there, Scott got a call from home, and the next day off he went to be with his wife. What’s surprising is less than 24 hours later he was back, spending at least 15 hours on the road (some of it in the worst traffic the tri-state area has to offer) in less than 2 days. And more surprising than that was that he got another call from home and took off, a day early, to again do his bit.

I’m not sure if Scott’s son Logan came out of this experience but I’d like to think so. I also think it says a lot about who Scott was, selfless in his devotion to those he cared about. No one else that regularly comes on our trip would have done this, but for Scott it was a no brainer, even in the face of all of us ragging him about it.

There’s a gallery of all of my pictures of Scott here. I’ve also written a few other remembrances of him, which you can read here.

My friend Scott Leighton died from cancer on August 4th after a roughly yearlong battle with the disease. I went to his funeral last weekend. The funeral had the unfortunate but necessary effect of making Scott’s death real for me – up until I walked into the church on Sunday and heard his wife’s incredibly poignant eulogy for him his death had been an abstraction, something not real that was gnawing away at me quietly in the background. Sunday I had to confront it and it was sad and hard to bear. One of Scott’s wishes was that we all celebrate his life with a pseudo Irish Wake at one of his favorite bars, Napper Tandy’s in Northport. It was brilliant – simultaneously sad and invigorating, the rush of many drinks combining with the raw emotional state of the folks crammed into the bar in a potent mix of sadness, laughter, and ultimately reconciliation with what had happened in the company of good friends. I hope it worked as well for Scott’s family as it did for me.

As in the past when those dear to me have died I’m going to post some of my favorite memories of Scott. I’ll start here with when I first met him and an overview of my relationship with him over the years.

My family moved to Northport in 1979 and I soon met Scott’s brother Patrick, whose family lived around the corner from me. Scott was a little (6?7?) tyke at that point and my earliest memories of him are of this little kid brother Pat had, shy and usually quiet, with a squeaky little voice. The Leightons had an Intellivision and I remember we used to tease him because when he played hockey or the car racing game he would lean his whole body in the direction he was trying to will his on-screen character to go, including usually his arms which he’d sometimes whack you with. He was good at it though, especially Hockey – the Leighton brothers got to the point where they could pretty much always whip me in Hockey.

We were geeks back then – videogame nerds, comic book nerds, computer nerds, dungeon and dragons nerds – you name it, if it was nerdy we were into it. We could sometimes convince one of our parents to take us to comic book shows back then and now and then Scott would tag along when one of the Leightons was driving us. I can’t remember what comics Scott was into back then, but unlike most of us he stuck with it over the years and as recently as last summer I was shooting the breeze with him about old Marvel characters.

I also recall Scott being big into Soccer when he was young. Both the Leightons were growing up, but by the time Pat and I had become friends Pat was no longer playing. Meanwhile though the Leightons were frequently off to games and practice with Scott, and I remember him practicing/playing in the yard on the side of the Leighton house.

My earliest vivid memory of Scott is one I share with several of my friends. We were sitting around the Leighton pool and Scott’s Dad had just taken him to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. Scott was usually shy around us, watching more than talking, but we asked him how the movie was and he became animated and enthusiastic, running us through the movie plot from the perspective of an 8 or 9 year old, with run on sentences, gaps in the story, and a fair amount of gibberish, along the lines of ‘and THEN he fell in a room full of snakes but they burned them, and THEN he knocked over a giant statue and ran away, and then the box moved, and THEN their faces MELTED!’ It cracked us all up.

As we all graduated from high school and moved on to college I lost touch with Scott, running into him now and then through my college years but never spending any significant time in his company. Scott’s a year older than my younger brother though, and I heard tales of him now and then. What I most remember is that he was renowned for the parties he’d throw during his high school years.

After I got out of school I reconnected with all my old Northport friends. For a couple of years I lived in my Mom’s house and Scott played in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign we got rolling. His character had a secret and central role in this epic, hackneyed plot I had cooked up (I was the dungeon master) which sadly he never got to act on because I took a job in Maine and moved away, but of all the players in that campaign Scott was the most engaged – willing to read through the extensive background material and understanding and attempting to role play his character.

After I moved to Maine I again lost touch with Scott for a couple of years, but both of us started going to an annual camping trip some of my high school friends had started in 1985. Scott and I attended (I think for the first time) in 1995, and for most of the years after that I’d see Scott once a year for most of  a week in the woods/on a lake/etc on the camping trip. We also played online games together – a short run in Everquest II, a longer one in World of Warcraft, with dabbling in other things, I guess most notably Neverwinter Nights. As in the pen and paper campaigns, Scott was a solid, reliable player. He was usually pretty quiet when we played, but you could count on him to understand his character and what role it played in the party dynamics. Usually you listened when he spoke, too, because it took something important for him to speak…unless it was because he was mocking you for doing something dumb

You wouldn’t say Scott and I were close over the years – while we’d trade the occasional emails, and I’d see him some years at parties or during the holidays, he wasn’t someone I was in constant touch with. Yet at the same time he was someone I’ve known most of my life, someone who I admired and liked. There were similarities between us too – we’re both observers in a room full of people, watching rather than sitting at the center of attention, making quiet comments at the periphery, better in one on one conversations than in a group dynamic. We’re both also hopeless videogame addicts. One year for the annual camping trip Scott and Pat came up a day early and we bounced around Saratoga Springs. That night Scott found the game I of the Dragon on my computer and he played it for hours. After the camping trip he extended his stay at my place first for one additional night, then for another, because he got so hooked on it. Out of our circle of friends only Scott and I would do something like that and it makes me smile to think of it.

I’ll pass on talking about the details of Scott’s death aside from saying how tragic it felt to miss him by only a few days this year. We moved our annual camping trip to a beach house on Fire Island in NY this year in the hope that Scott could make it for a day or two, but by the time we got to the house Scott was seriously ill and he never made it, dying only a few days after our trip ended.

I feel guilty that I never got to speak to Scott about his illness before he died, and I’m angry with myself for not reaching out to him. At first I figured if he needed a shoulder to lean on he’d reach out to those he felt could help him, and I wasn’t a likely candidate for that – best to let him spend as much time as he could with his intimates rather than inserting myself into things. Then I figured better to see him in person than to email, which felt so impersonal and inappropriate to the circumstances. In the end that inaction on my part cost me and I’m the worse for it. A real lesson learned there for me, though it’s one I hope I never have to use.

There’s a gallery of all of my pictures of Scott here. I’ve also written a few other remembrances of him, which you can read here.

Midweek last week, Susan heard the dogs scuffling on the side of the house and tried to call them in. She saw a flash of white and thought maybe they were after a cat, but she caught a whiff of skunk and quickly closed the door then called for me in a minor panic. I was in the midst of a Team Fortress 2 match and couldn’t really hear her – all I heard was urgency in her voice. I knew she was downstairs making pickles and was thinking…who has a pickle emergency?!? But after the second time she called for me I came downstairs and could immediately smell the skunk. Still – what could we do? I opened the door and Nori, our black lab, was up on the porch waiting to come in. Soolin was out of sight. I could smell skunk in the air but when I sniffed Nori I couldn’t really smell it, so after running my hands over her I let her in then started calling for Soolin. She came up onto the porch tossing her head about, a thick white froth covering her mouth and chin and a long dribble of drool spraying about. Susan and I were a bit freaked by her appearance and behavior – she kept tossing her head violently, smacking her lips, and drooling profusely. I sniffed her and while the smell of skunk was very strong in the air, she smelled more of chemicals, like windex or something. We brought her inside, confused, as I kept sniffing at her mouth and wiping away all her drool. We started to panic a bit, fearing that she had ingested chemicals or something toxic, based on her behavior, the lack of a skunk smell on her, and the drool. Susan called the vet and pretty quickly we headed off to the animal hospital, expecting that Soolin was going to have her stomache pumped.

By the time we got halfway to the animal hospital we had concluded it really was a skunk we were dealing with, not chemicals. We couldn’t explain the different smells, but the way my car reeked made it clear that it was skunk on them.

It cost me $100 for the vet to confirm this, and I ended up feeling pretty foolish. Susan and I had a really long night – we had to put the dogs in a tub and scrub them with a solution made up of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, dish soap and water. The good news is aside from their faces, which we couldn’t scrub so assidiously, the dogs smell ok. The bad news is the odor lingers around our house and most especially in my car, which absolutely reeks. Based on a conversation with a co-worker who also ended up with a skunked car, I’m going to pay someone to detail it and ask them to focus on steam cleaning the upholstery, we’ll see if that clears it up.

[update] I forgot to mention the reason Soolin was drooling and frothing at the mouth. She took the skunkblast straight to the face and mouth, which is why she was so agitated and drooley. The vet told us it was harmless, but you can imagine how disgusting this must have been, even for a creature acustomed to the occasional snack on some other dog’s poop.

Andrew pointed me over to an entertaining thread about Action Park, the long closed and fabulously dangerous first person amusement park* that I used to go to a couple of times a year back in the mid 80’s through the early 90’s, and I couldn’t help contributing my favorite little vignette from my times in the park to the thread. The thread starts here on metafilter, and my contribution is here. As a teaser to incent the clickage, the story involves an unwelcome enema. How can you resist clicking through to discover how that could happen at an amusement park!

* first person because most of the rides featured you putting your body in some form of harm’s way, be it on a waterslide, alpine slide, running down rapids in a tube, or jumping off a platform on a bungie cord.

Spoiler below! Don’t read till you’ve read the metafilter story!

I should add that I didn’t tell the whole story over on metafilter because I figured no one would believe me, but the coda was, after Brian and I waddled over to the first men’s room we could find, we opened the door to discover a little kid who had absolutely exploded with diarrhea and was standing in the middle of the bathroom in obvious distress. We couldn’t figure out what to do about the kid, and after a brief mexican standoff we both retreated and waddled off in search of another bathroom, both of us unwilling to use the completely soiled one.

So, I’m back. I’ll write up how the trip went with some pictures over the next week or so, but I had to tell the unfortunate tale of airplane hell I went through yesterday. My original itinerary was: Seattle depart, 11:22 PM. Arrive Chicago at 5:40AM’ish. Wait for next plane which departed at 6:25, arrive Hartford before noon. Instead what happened was:

1) Seattle plane delayed by 20 minutes, which was then delayed another 40 minutes because they sent a guy onto the plane with a cat carrier which wouldn’t fit under the seat, only the baggage folks didn’t agree, bickered, sent people onto the plane to play tetris with the cat carrier (trying to stuff it under various seats), until they finally made the guy check the cat in as baggage. During the flight, I get 3′ish hours of fitful sleep.

2) Arrive Chicago at 6:30. Rush frantically to gate on the other side of the airport to witness my plane rolling away from the gate. Talk to customer service – get waitlisted on an 11:45AM flight. Get coffee, wander terminal, curse my fate for 5′ish hours. Try to get on flight, fail.

3) Fallback plane, I have a guaranteed seat on a 1:12 PM flight. Wander terminal. More cursing of fate. Watch as plane gets delayed in 20 minute increments, for 3 hours, moving from gate to gate as it gets reshuffled to other gates as part of this process. Watch in bemusement as the terminal starts to get overstuffed with people on delayed flights due to thunderstorms on the east coast.

4) Finally start boarding at 4:15, we are warned as we board that we may have problems due to the thunderstorms.

5) Arrive Hartford and are told we can’t land. Spend ~45 minutes circling at 32k feet in a tight spiral, until we have to bail due to low fuel. Diverted to Syracuse where we have a rough landing due to storms. Spend more than 2 hours stuffed in a hot, muggy, stinky, not air conditioned plane waiting for the storms to pass so they can refuel us. They run out of drinks before the drink tray makes it to us.

6) finally take off and have a rough flight to Hartford, where we land around 11PM, ending with me almost to the point of kissing the pavement I am so pleased to have escaped from airline hell. I speed off at 80MPH with a trail of mist behind me in the rain, grateful to finally be in control of my own fate again.

Thankfully the trip was really excellent which offsets the horrible flight experience. I’ll write more about that later.

Here’s another in the amusing ‘Dave is occasionally an idiot’ series of posts.

I got a new color laser printer, the Samsung 300P, and spent last weekend printing a bunch of stuff to test it. To my surprise, after less than 60 pages the red toner cartridge claimed to be out of ink. This pissed me right off since one of the prime motivating factors in my buying this printer was to escape the ‘inkjet ink is more expensive than human blood’ syndrome. I was convinced there was still plenty of toner left in the cartridge but no amount of shaking, cursing and configuring could force the printer to recognize that. Angry yet at the same time curious as to what was going on, I proceeded to try and break open the toner cartridge.

This printer uses cartridges that look like oversized film cannisters, and I knew there was some risk of a mess so I took it out into the yard. Various efforts to pry it open all failed so finally in a fit of who gives a shit I started bashing it with a hammer, which caused it to pop like a balloon, showering me in violent pink powder.

So, I was right. There WAS plenty of toner left in the thing, but now it was all over me. I cleaned off in the hose, laughing at myself but still irked that I had to drop ~$40-50 on a new cartridge when there was nothing wrong with the old one besides being clogged or something. From now on I’m going to periodically pull the cartridges out and shake them about to try and prevent this from happening again.

There’s a coda to this story too – my yard got a dusting with this stuff. I wandered around with the hose trying to wash it away, and we had rain as well, but still, while playing with the dog yesterday I noticed Soolin’s water had taken on a distinct pinkish hue – the toner was getting into her drinking water, probably via the ball as it picked it up from the grass. There’s also a pink stream tracing the flow of the rainwater that follows the contours of my driveway.

Aside from the annoyance with the red toner cartridge, the printer’s decent. I now have a monochrome samsung ML 17something looking for a home, if anyone’s in the market for a laser printer on the cheap.

For about two years in college I lived with my friend Will. His Dad had purchased a house adjacent to campus as an investment and many of us rented rooms in it over my years at Wooster. It was a great investment for him I guess, and it’s actually now a part of the college campus. During the summer between the first and second years in the house, Will rented it out to some folks, a couple of whom were friends of ours. These friends agreed to take care of the cats of other folks who had headed home for the summer, so the house ended up with a large cat population. In the latter half of the summer the folks living in the house decided to make a road trip to the west coast. They couldn’t figure out what to do about the cats, so the geniuses bought several huge bags of cat litter and dumped them into what had been the coal room in the basement of the house. They then bought the largest sack of dry catfood they could find and slit it open and left it laying in the middle of the kitchen. Then they split for the west coast.

Will and I knew none of this when we showed up a couple of days before classes were to start to settle into the house. We opened the house and gods, the stench! Dust bunnies, dry cat food, and hairballs were all over the kitchen, and aside from the cat food, scattered through the rest of the house. The worst though was the basement, which was so rank it was hard to go into it without gagging on the smell. Meanwhile there were no cats to be seen.

Needless to say, we were pissed. We spent hours shoveling the ugly mess in the basement into bags, vacuuming, wiping up dried cat yuck, and mopping out the kitchen. During this we both noticed there were fleas around but it was all part of the broader mess and we didn’t think much of it. After a couple of hours we finished a first pass on the house and went out to pickup a pizza. When we got back we settled into the living room with some beer and the pie.

What happened next was mind blowing. Within 5-10 minutes of settling into the couch we were both attacked by hordes of ravenous fleas. I’m not talking dozens or hundreds, I’m talking hundreds of thousands of the little bastards. We both were starting to frantically scratch ourselves and while so doing I pulled down my sock and my ankle was literally black with fleas, it was astounding. We ended up running from the house in a frenzy to escape, out in the backyard scratching and spraying ourselves down with a hose. We both feared to reenter the house. I ended up staying with my Aunt and Uncle. I can’t remember where Will headed off to.

It took us weeks to completely purge that house of fleas. We had to go through several rounds of bug bombing which required us to abandon the house for a day then return to vacuum and scrub.

As to why they all suddenly attacked, all I can do is speculate. We had been in motion for the rest of the time in the house, so maybe the fact that we were finally still for a while gave them the chance to all beat a leaping path to us. Or maybe the couch was the locus of the infestation. I don’t really know. As to our friends and the state of the house, basically no one would fess up. When they got back and discovered how pissed off we were it turned into a finger pointing game with no one willing to admit they were responsible.

Meanwhile, not that I was ever a fan, but MAN do I loathe fleas after that experience.

While I don’t comment on it much here, I was in a very raucous co-ed fraternity in college. We threw the best parties by far, for at least a couple of years we had the largest membership of any of the social groups on campus, and for 2 of the years my house was ground zero for party central. My friend’s Dad bought a house that was adjacent to campus as an investment property and we lived there, host to more keg parties than I can possibly recall. We were the generation who grew up thinking Animal House defined what college life was like, cartoonish as it was, and on several levels we strove to live up to the standards set in the movie.

We had our fraternity pledge party at the house for several years, and one of those years it was an absolutely brutally cold night, as in you could spit and it would freeze almost immediately. We had the kegs out on the back porch, and there was a balcony up above it that connected to my bedroom. At one point several of us were standing out on the porch braving the cold, smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze. A friend of our, so drunk he could barely walk, came out of the house and made his way down the steps. There was a sheet of plywood at the foot of the stairs that we had put there because in the preceding week it had become so muddy that it sucked trying to get into the house. None of us knew it, but a thin veneer of ice had formed on the plywood, and when his foot hit that his legs went out from under him. He ened up sprawled on his back at the foot of the stairs, all of us including him laughing.

As he collapsed, what appeared to be snow started to fall over the plywood. Our friend stuck out his tongue and started to try and catch flakes with his mouth, rolling on the plywood, a huge grin on, giggling like a little kid. ‘It’s snowing, it’s snowing!’ he was saying.

I noticed the snow mysteriously seemed to be falling in a very localized area around the plywood, so I poked my head over the edge of the porch to figure out what was happening. I looked up and saw another friend on the balcony above relieving himself over the railing. Barely able to stop laughing I turned to the guy on the plywood and said ‘umm, that’s not snow dude…’

Fortunately for him he was too drunk to realize, and as the snowfall ceased he gathered himself up and wandered off into the night. I’ll never forget the look of childlike delight on his face as the ’snow’ came down though and I still laugh to think of it.

My favorite pranks: Dave as network tormentor

In the mid-late 90’s I worked for the nascent internet division of a communications company that owned small market television stations and newspapers. I actually helped found that division. This was in the dark days of the Macintosh, before Jobs came back, when their product was really starting to fall behind windows, when their product line ballooned to the point where I think they had a different model number for every potential customer, and (for a while), when they were still trying to charge $99 for the tcp/ip stack you needed to connect macs to the internet over a network (!!! – I can admit this now, I never paid, I considered it a ripoff and pirated it for everyone. Within a couple years they did the right thing and provided it as part of the OS). Anyway despite all these troubles we were a mac-only shop largely due to my efforts, and I sat in the middle of a networked web of 20-30 macs. This was also back when networks in an office were novel, and the PC guys from the parent company still didn’t have any of the PC’s networked.

One downside to being at the center of this hub of macs was that I was tech support for everyone. Macs used to crash at the drop of a hat or if you, say, sneezed while clicking the mouse, or most famously to me at the time, if you connected to the internet using pop3, disconnected, then reconnected. But I digress. The long and short of it was this was a huge pain in the ass, and I was supporting a lot of non-computer savvy folks. Mac’s ease of use actually worked against me in this circumstance, because any of the fool salespeople could download stuff like, say, a doohickey which would put candy canes all around the edges of their screens, but then their machines would crash, I would show up like the grinch and remove all their third party addon crap, reboot the machine, and viola, problem solved. Usually.

The problem was this lead to a sort of adversarial relationship with the staff – everyone loved their third party crap, macs crashed no matter what you did, and though my methods had the best of intentions and were generally effective at reducing the frequency of crashes, folks began to resent it.

Factor in my sense of humor and a little known and poorly documented feature of Appletalk (mac’s built in networking) back in the day and you get a long running series of my some of my favorite pranks. See, there was a method you could use to send a message directly to the screen of any of the macs on the network, which would pop up on the target mac in a box that looked very much like the standard mac crash/error dialog box. So, say you’re sitting there typing one day and suddenly this error pops up:

Keystroke Frequency error: 1094
Keyboard input exceeding buffer tolerance. Reduce keystroke frequency.

or:

Mouse accelerometer malfunction: 0xAE EEE3
Mouse controller maximum input velocity exceeded. Reduce excessive speed of mouse movement.

or:

CDROM tray lubrication deficiency: EEE3
Lubrication sensors indicate primary cdrom bay controller issue. To confirm this error please execute an open/close cycle on the primary CDROM drive 10 times. If error message persists, see technical support.

Revenge for dumb tech support help requests is a dish best served cold but with an opportunity for laughter was my theory. Call me into your office for the 3rd time because the solitaire game you were playing instead of working crashed your laptop again? OK, I’m going to the well for the third time with some ridiculous error message sent your way that’ll have you in my office trying to explain why you think your keyboard (on a laptop) needs replacing, or asking me for CDROM grease, or whatever. I had dozens of these.

So yeah, I was pretty much the BOFH in some ways but there was an undercurrent of humor to it and I still laugh to think of these to this day.

So I lost touch with my main girlfriend from my college years (we’ll call her Kathy so that google doesn’t connect her with this story) back in ‘91 or ‘92 after a sour breakup. For a while after that I would hear tales of her from mutual friends. She moved to San Fran, was hanging out with folks we went to school with, had delayed moving on to grad school, things like that. Every so often I’ve googled her to see what she’s up to but she never was much into computers and seems to be almost invisible online. Then a few years ago I noted someone with the same name had accepted a position at a notable educational software publisher. She’s got a fairly uncommon name but there were no pictures so I wasn’t really sure whether it was her or not, but the location and name matched so the chances were fair or better.

A week or so ago I’m driving home and there’s a bit on NPR about research into the use of software in education and who do they interview but…Kathy. Only a sentence or two but it made me laugh to hear it. Funny thing too, it’s been 15 years or more since we’ve spoken  and I couldn’t be sure it was her voice. But it led me to more googling when I got home and I’m pretty sure at this point it was her – the biography matches in terms of post-college stuff. Kudos to her on her 15 minutes of fame. Meanwhile, what are the chances? I listen to NPR for 15 minutes or so each day to and fro work these days, and I just happen to catch a news bit with an ex girlfriend who was dear to my heart.

…I was a fax machine killer.

I was a pretty impatient guy in my 20’s. For several years early in my career I worked for a small market media company which owned several newspapers and television stations in the northeast. For a couple of years I was helping the company develop an online strategy. This was back before the internet really existed in the public consciousness, and we were negotiating with AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve and so on. I ended up having to do a ton of faxing of materials around, including numerous multipage faxes. The problem was the newspaper whose offices I was housed in had standardized on a hunk of junk fax machine brand. This was back when they cost big dollars. The thing was as large as a microwave, it was probably 10 years old by the time I encountered it, and it was utterly incapable of handling multi-sheet faxes. If you tried, it would invariably skip some of the pages and you would get a call from the recipient asking for the missing page/s. This meant you had to hand feed the thing, page by page. I was sometimes faxing 50 page contracts around, and this drove me nuts – it could take me over an hour to get a fax through on occasion. Couple this with the fact that I worked in a busy ad creation department that was constantly faxing comps around to clients, and you had a line of unhappy folks standing around the fax machine every day.

I tried reasoning with the IT department – this is hardly a cost effective use of my time, a couple of faxes taking this long would already cover the cost of a new machine – but to no avail. I pleaded with my boss – to no avail. For a while I was going to the local kinkos to send the long faxes, but my boss stopped appreciating my expense reports for that and put a stop to it.

I remembered when I had worked in NYC and a sales rep from chicago had sent a 40′ long fax to our thermal paper fax machine, and it had killed the machine and gotten her in hot water with our boss, and this set an evil plan in motion.

I waited one night until my coworkers had all gone home, and filled the paper tray in our fax machine. I  then went to the floor below ours and took a piece of black construction paper, cut it to size, and established it in a loop in the fax machine, then  dialed the number of our fax machine on the floor above. Then I went home.

I came in early the next morning and discovered my plan had worked – our fax machine was dead as a doornail – it could no longer print. It didn’t even take very many pure black pages to kill the print heads. I took the black construction paper out of the machine downstairs, discarded the printouts in our own machine, and called IT. Not long after we had a new, non-thermal fax machine which could send multi-page documents.

Yes, I’m an evil bastard, but I do think it was in the company’s interest that I did this.

I’ll also note that years later when I saw the scene in office space where they take the office fax machine out to a field and beat it to death with baseball bats, I laughed so much I couldn’t breathe. Man, could I ever relate to the scene.

Saturday my dog Soolin and I were out hiking on farmland. I was tossing the ball to her. She came back with the ball and I noted it was fairly bloody, so I called her back and to my shock she was covered in blood down her entire front. I grabbed her and started checking her and realized when I got to her mouth that she was bleeding profusely from a deep cut to her tongue – so deep that it was gushing and she ended up covering me in blood. I was 1/3 of a mile from my house, roughly, and I panicked – how does one apply pressure to a dog’s tongue? Meanwhile, she seemed fine with it and just wanted me to throw the ball some more. I started back towards the house at a jog, constantly having to call at her to follow me since she knew we were headed back towards home and did not want to go. I wasn’t sure exactly what I would do once I got back to the house, but I figured I would think of something on the way.

Fortunately by the time we got back to the house the bleeding had slowed and was no longer gushing. I washed her mouth out and cleaned off her coat with the hose and made her lie down and after a half hour or so things seemed to settle. Talk about a scare though, for maybe 10-15 minutes I was under the impression she might be bleeding to death. The wound did re-open several times over the weekend, but only mild bleeding occurred and it has not re-opened since Sunday morning over breakfast so I think she’s in the clear now.

This one’s from my youth. My cousin was a sleepwalker when he was young. When he was about 10, my aunt and uncle were at the neighbors playing cards. They had left the kids home in bed. They were literally about 20 feet away at the next door neighbors house. They had forgotten to put up the sheet of plywood they used to keep my cousin from wandering too far when he sleep walked, however, and when they came home my aunt checked the bedroom and he was not in his bed. Panic ensued and they ran through the house looking for him. They found my cousin in the kitchen, the fruit bin of the fridge pulled out, his rear perched on it, making poopy.

!!!

The doctor had told my aunt not to shock my cousin or violently awaken him if they found him sleepwalking, so they let him conclude his business then shepherded him upstairs and back into his bed. my poor uncle got stuck cleaning up the mess.

This was one of those ‘you can’t let him know you know this story!’ stories when I was a kid, so I never got to tease my poor cousin about the incident, but I laugh every time I think of it.

Another story, this one from early in my career, that was brought to mind by a recent incident at work. I worked for a media company that had founded a division to do web stuff at the dawn of the general publics’ use of the web (circa 1995). We had awful internal morale issues – lots if bickering, infighting, histrionics, thrown chairs, the works. I was not above participating in those days and was in fact known for my volatile temper, though I never threw anything or otherwise physically expressed my frustration.

(as an aside, I’m now convinced my volatile temper in those days was actually a reflection of the undiagnosed diabetes, with high blood pressure and high blood sugars – basically my system was always running at 130%)

Anyway the company decided to take steps to address these issues, and arranged with the director of HR to facilitate a set of off-site intervention meetings where we would participate in a variety of team building exercises as well as take the time to sort of expose and discuss the core issues that were causing so much tension.

Shortly before one of the first sessions, a coworker had asked me out, the latest in a series of invitations. She had been pursuing me off and on for a couple of months – mostly, at first, with hints (do you like this new movie that’s coming out? Me too!) and then ultimately with a couple of direct invitations. I had blown her off, politely but firmly, with the ‘I don’t date co-workers’ line. I wasn’t attracted to her.

One of the exercises we had to do on this day was a team building exercise that involved a large sheet of paper hung to the wall for each person, divided in half. Half was the good side, and half was the bad side. Each of us had a post-it notepad, and we had to write one good thing and one bad thing about each person in the room and stick it to the appropriate side of their sheet of paper. Once we had all done this, we had to stand before our piece of paper and pluck off the post-its, read them to the room, then discuss them.

When my turn came around, I plucked a bad post-it off and read it to the room. It said (and I can remember this almost verbatim) “David is poorly socialized, has terrible communications skills, fails to behave appropriately in professional circumstances, and should learn to be more respectful of his coworkers.’

!!!

I had to respond to that in front of ~20 people, back when I was a less confident public speaker. Ye gods! I recognized the handwriting of the culprit (of course it was she of the rejected advances) and my first thought was to simply expose her, as inappropriate as that would be (she thinks I behave inappropriately?! wait till she sees this!). But my common sense won the day. It helped that most of it was absurd. While I was known for my volatility, I’ve also always been known for my verbal communication skills, the ability to condense complex technical issues into summaries that non-technical folk can understand, and my willingness to fold to superior logic. I was also president of my frat in college, for crying out loud, and regularly hung out with a significant portion of the staff in the portland bars.

Anyway, I don’t actually think I did a very good job of responding at that time, I was too flustered, but the incident has stuck with me ever since, and instilled in me a very deep suspicion so-called team building exercises (which, as an aside, were an abject failure in this case. The core of the issues had to do with how sales interacted with the production folks. Sales had no technical acumen and we all knew they were, quite literally, stealing from the company through clever sales incentive scams and we had no respect for them professionally or personally. Most of this, of course, was not exposed in these team building exercises. What was one to do? Write ’steals from the company and gets away with it’ on the post-it and stick it to the bad side?).

I’ll share an amusing story from my youth to make up for the lack of posting here of late.

I worked in a Ground Round restaurant off and on between the ages of 16 and 19 or so, first as a busboy and ultimately as one of the line cooks. Cooking on a line in a busy restaurant can actually be great adrenaline fueled fun fun, especially if you’re young and irresponsible.

One weekend night I was one of the two closing cooks, meaning I had to work until ~1 AM and was responsible for some of the most onerous of the cleaning responsibilities. The worst cleaning job in the kitchen was having to mop behind the line of cooking equipment. You had to pull the equipment away from the wall and sweep then mop up a stretch of tiled floor about 20 feet long and maybe 4 feet deep that was super saturated with kitchen gunk. Sometimes the oil would be a quarter inch thick on that stretch of floor and extremely difficult to sop up. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that since we all hated doing it, we all found schemes to escape having to do it, meaning if you were unlucky you would end up mopping a stretch of floor that hadn’t been cleaned in several days.

On this particular weekend the regional manager had chosen to visit our restaurant. This was a dreaded event as he was wise to our various schemes to avoid cleaning things and he had a volatile temper, often flying off the handle and screaming at us when he caught us not doing our jobs efficiently.

One of the largest pieces of equipment, the broiler where the steaks, burgers, chicken and so on were cooked, had recently been serviced and we had noted that the emergency valve that would cut off the gas supply in the event of a problem had been installed backwards. We were all aware of this and were used to being careful when moving it because of this valve. The gas line it protected was almost wide enough to swallow a baseball.

As soon as the kitchen closed, the district manager came in the back and proceeded to pull the equipment away from the wall to expose our shoddy cleaning, shouting at us as he did so. When he yanked the broiler away from the wall he pulled hard enough that it caused the gas line to disconnect. Normally the safety valve would block the gas from leaking but since it was installed backwards it did not. The district manager was unaware of this fact, while we were.

You never saw two line cooks run so fast. Steve, my partner that night, had the presence of mind to run towards the back door where the emergency gas cutoff valve was – me, being concerned only with self preservation, ran to the bathroom, thinking the thick wooden door would protect me from the inevitable explosion.

Inevitable it was. I heard a muted ‘whooomph!’ and then shouting. When folks started calling my name I poked my head out and there, his bowtie singed, his face lobster red, and his eyebrows and hair singed and smoking, was the district manager, stunned into silence. I lost it, falling into peals of laughter. Steve, who had meanwhile shut the main gas supply off, came to see what had happened and followed my lead, and after a few seconds the two of us ran out the back door of the restaurant, still laughing our heads off.

Amazingly, neither of us lost our jobs. We had filed a repair ticket on the improperly installed safety valve several weeks prior and this plus the fact that Steve’s quick thinking protected against a worse disaster probably saved our jobs. The district manager was taken to the hospital and ended up being only minorly injured, with some serious but not permanently damaging burns on his face and hands. To my surprise this didn’t really alter his behavior towards us or the line – the next time he came in he went through his same procedure, yanking out the equipment and berating us for our inadequate cleaning skills.

I still chuckle every time I remember this incident.