Just Try to Find Me!

One evening, as I was mopping the floor, I noticed the salad bar girl taking a break, canister of broccoli still in hand, watching the end of the Braves game on the big screen. I mopped my way over there, probably to make some sarcastic comment about getting back to work.

I then proceeded to start a conversation which would come back to bite me in the ass a million times. It went a little something like this...

Me: "You like baseball?"
Her: "Yea!"
Me: "You like the Indians?"
Her: "No, they suck."
Me: "They suck? I bet you 100 dollars that they go to the world series in ten years."
Her: "Okay, 100 bucks."
Me: "Just try to find me in ten years..."

There is two things about that conversation that really backfired for me. First of all, what I meant when I said, "in ten years", was that they would simply go to the world series within ten years, not in exactly ten years. That little syntactical error might have very well cost me 100 dollars, because in 2004, the Indians didn't even come close to making it.

The second issue is when I incorrectly guessed that finding me in ten years would be a particularly difficult thing to do. Turns out, that was a bad calculation on my part. She found me. In fact, she didn’t have to look very hard at all, since we live in the same house.

Yes, that's right, I owe my wife 100 bucks!

Snowballs

Two words all school goers love are "Snow" and "Day" used sequentially. Usually, these words are proceeded directly by hours of crappy TV shows, like "The Price is Right" and reruns of "The Andy Griffith Show". Sometimes, all it takes is for a naive young exuberant weather man to proclaim "flurries" and the whole township freaks out like the apocalypse is coming. They rush to the grocery stores and complain about the long lines of people stocking up on water at and canned goods.

One night, a few inches of snow fell, but school had already been called because of the mass hysteria caused by the innocent sounding news reports the night before. My friend Aaron and I were looking for something extremely exciting to do, so we headed off to work, not to work, but to hang out. We found our friend Nathan working there that day, called in cause someone else was "sick". He needed a break so one of us suggested...

"Let's climb up on the roof and throw snowballs at people."

In retrospect, I should have stayed home and read the labels on all our mattresses or something, but the snowball thing just seemed right.

We sprightly climbed up the cold metal ladder bolted to the back of the shopping center. It practically had a sign hanging on it that read, "Teenage punks, please climb me and do bad things."

We found ourselves staring out over a vast expanse of untouched, white, virgin snow! Perfect raw material for snowball manufacture. Some of our friends were working for the attached grocery store and busily pushed carts through the dirty slush that carpeted the parking lot. Wet shoes, wet socks, and tips if your lucky... Sounds like a great job. The only thing that could make it worse is a nice hard ice packed snowball splattering onto your already soaked noggin and raising a nasty frostbit welt!

We managers to raise more than a few frostbit welts that day. There wasn't enough hot chocolate in the world to fix those! We had a great time, reigning havoc down upon the masses below, until it was so rudely interrupted by a noise behind us. We turned around. Two people stood there looking slightly aggravated.

"Come with us." One of the men said.

Now, on further consideration, we should have just started running. It would have been very easy for us to outrun the fat guy who was scowling at us. Instead, we did as he said (as if controlled by some government mind control device), and followed him, down a ladder and through a tiny tunnel that led to the back room of the grocery store.

We climbed down into the part of the grocery store you never see, where stacks and stacks of dog food await consumption. It looked a lot like Sam's Club, concrete everywhere. The smokers seemed to have set up a little country there, they gathered around a fold out table as if they were doing something important other than puffing addictive smoke into their lungs and exhaling whatever is worse than the smoke that went in. They looked at us like we had just spit upon them and doused their cigarettes. Clearly, we were cretins compared to them.

The man led us out into the grocery store, Aaron, Me, and Nathan (still proudly wore his pizza eatery shirt). He covertly ripped off his name tag and sent it flying over the twizzlers into the next aisle over. Something was going on in that head of his. He was developing a plan and I had an inkling that it had a lot to do with false identities.

The man lead us into his tiny office. Coffee rings decorated the papers scattered out over his desk. He told us to sit, and wait for the security guard.

An old man eventually showed up. Detective Sipowitz he was not. Detective Fife plus 100 pounds or so was more like it, but what do you expect from a private security company no one had ever heard of. He sat us down and gave us his "throwing snowballs off the roof is bad" speech. Then he shoved a piece of notebook paper at us and told us to write our names and numbers down.

We did.

He picked up the phone and called Nathan's parents.

"Hello?" He said into the receiver, "I have your son Nathan here and I-. Excuse me? Oh right, I'm sorry I must have dialed it wrong."

Nathan hadn't expected him to call while we were still standing there! HAHA, I nestled into my chair for a show. The guy ogled the notebook paper, trying to pinpoint his error. Nathan leaned over and pulled off perhaps the most amazing lie I've ever heard.

"Oh, that's a ZERO, not a ONE" He said pointing to the last number in his phone number, clearly a ONE.

Now, to me, it seems like a 1 and a 0 are different looking enough, but the guy said, "Oh, I see." Then proceeded to call the proper number and relate the situation to his parents.

Nathan got in trouble. His mom came and took him home.

My parents weren't home, so he resolved to call them later, but didn't. Aaron's mom came and took us home and gave us another, entirely different but similarly satisfying, "Throwing snowballs is bad" speech.

Then the problem was: we were all at home while my car and Nathan's car were both still at work. So Aaron arrived, picked us up in his car, and we went back! After all, Nathan was still on his break.

A little weed, so much trouble!

I worked with a guy Nathan. He's a good guy, working in Reno last I heard. His dad is my dentist, and I'm currently AWOL so I'll find out more once I go see the good doctor. Nathan was also a major player in the great snowball debacle, which I haven't had the time to blog about yet.

Once, his church decided to take him along on a mission trip to Mexico. I was talking to him before he left, and we had this conversation.

"I'm going to buy some weed!" He said, as if such a thing were impossible in the states, or even in our restaurant, depending on the delinquents we employed at the time. I've seen a few "good buds" while working there, although I can't tell you what makes any particular bud better than any other.

I thought he was joking, so I said, "Yea, you should."

"I will." He said.

A week later, he showed up again and said, "I did it!"

"Did what?" I asked, completely forgetting about his nefarious plan to purchase weed in Mexico.

He showed me the baggie, a tiny Ziploc baggie with some green stuff at the bottom that looked like parsley. In case your wondering, I don't remember if it contained good buds or bad buds.

He told me the story. It was pure Nathan. Moments after arriving in Mexico, they bought a beat up VW bug for two hundred dollars from some Mexican guy in the street. It ran well enough, until the crashed it, to get them to some other Mexican in the street who sold him the tiny baggie of weed and suggested storing it in a tin can of Folders coffee in order to trick the border guards on his way back to the USA.

NOTE: Good advertising campaign for Folders: "Folgers, stick your weed in it."

They left the VW bug in the street and went home. Apparently there was some missionary type work in there somewhere, but I suppose it wasn’t interesting enough to relate to me.

The dog at the border took particular interest in his bag. There was a lot of sniffing, but no alert. He got through and ended up standing back in front of me holding a tiny baggie of weed.

"What are you going to do with it?" I asked.

"I don’t know." He admitted.

The baggie haunted him, "Either smoke me man, or give me to someone who will!" It begged. He decided he'd get caught with it if he didn’t get rid of it, but he'd spent good money on it and it seemed a waste to just throw it away, or give it to someone. So he took it to school and sold it. Yep, my friend Nathan became a drug dealer.

The kid he sold it to actually did get caught. He admitted to his mom that Nathan had sold it to him and Nathan's mom was the proud recipient of a phone call informing her that her son was a drug dealer.

The gig was up, he told his parents.

Word got back to the church and he had to stand up on Sunday and explain to the church why he smuggled illegal drugs into the country and sold them at school instead of performing his churchly duties. He wrote a speech, and it started like this:

"Who would have thought that a little weed could cause so much trouble?"