But before I start slamming on the societal leach that is organized sports, let me first state that in certain circumstances, sports are fun and appropriate.  In fact my wife recently asked me about activities in which our daughter should be participating.  I brought up sports almost immediately.  Being aware of my stance on sports, she looked at me for a moment and then decided I was being snide and facetious.  “No,” I explained, “Our daughter is five years old.  Sports are great for little kids.  In the end, that’s what sports are: children’s games.  Kids need exercise and they need to learn about team work, rules, and cooperative play.  They need to learn how to strive to win and lose gracefully.  All of those lessons are wonderful for a five-year-old.  If a fully grown man spends 20-30 hours each week trying to be better at running back and forth on a hard wood floor to put a ball in a basket he needs to have his fucking head examined.  If Zoe wants to spend a couple of evenings a week playing t-ball or soccer, that’s fine.”

And I wasn’t lying.  Sports have a place in elementary, middle, and high school.  I even understand adults wanting to play sports to a certain degree.  I played intramural sports in college.  I played volleyball and ultima frisbee against the other dorms.  I met some friends this way, and met a couple of girlfriends too.  I got some exercise and had something to talk smack about with my friends.  In order to facilitate intramural sports such as this, the university maintained a couple of sand volleyball courts and bought a few balls and frisbees every year.  The dormitory staff organized and scheduled the games.  The budget for this was probably a couple of grand a year, if that.  Hundreds of people enjoyed it and got some exercise.  That seems like a good thing too.

And I am sure that as the years go by I will enjoy watching my daughter play sports.  I will sit in the stands eating snow cones and cheering.  I will enjoy talking about team politics with the other parents and watching the team progress through the ranks.

But after a while, its time to get serious.  When people are deciding careers and thousands upon thousands of dollars are being spent (and borrowed) for tuition, do organized sports really have a place?

As you can probably guess, I think the answer is a resounding, “no.”  There are many people who are complicit in this complete waste of time.  The players, the administration, and the fans themselves all come together and pay fantastic sums of tuition and tax dollars to watch grown adults play children’s games.  And I will rag on all of them one by one.

But before I do that I would like to address an argument that for years I entertained.  My friends used to tell me, “Buck, you need to lighten up on sports, man.  What’s the old saying? Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong?  You are probably the only person in the universe that doesn’t like sports.  And what do you do with your free time that is so much better than being a sport’s fan?  You play video games, right?  Yeah.  That’s a much better use of your free time.  We piss away our time being sports fans.  You piss away your time trying to get to level 20 on Galaga.  And this is better…how?”

And for years that really made sense to me.  Everybody wastes time right?  But then I wrote my epic post about my first introduction to computer games.  If you have the stamina to read it you will find out that before long I was learning to program two different computer systems to make my own text adventure.  This made me think about all the other experiences I have had with gaming.  When I got older I started playing multi user dungeons or MUDS.  This led to me trying to make my own which included learning yet another programming language and learning about networking.  Back during the Amiga and the early PC years you had to be a freaking computer scientist just to get a game to work.  I learned how to allocate memory, write my own batch files, and design special boot disks.  When Doom came out I learned that there was a level editor.  I spent hours learning about the first kinds of 3D modeling.  I worked for a while with a group that designed a Star Wars themed port for the game.  When Half-Life came out, I again found the ‘World Editor’ included with the package.  Now I was learning about modern 3D design and compiling my own deathmatch levels.  Currently I am really into emulation.  I am currently learning to emulate several older systems on modern machines to play classic games.  This has led me to learn about using emulation as the perfect defense against viruses and worms.  I am currently discussing the installation of an email server on an emulated copy of XP at work that would allow me to back up not just the contents of the hard drive, but the entire virtual computer so that the system will be absolutely foolproof against crashes and viruses.

In other words, I am not a casual gamer, so this argument just doesn’t hold water.  I guess someone who does not have any interest in computers could argue that I am still wasting my time, but my current employers sure don’t think so.  Games have evolved over the years.  There is always something interesting, new, and different to play.  When you take into account the added layer of experimentation and learning about computers, there is really no comparison between what I do and being obsessed with the local sports team.

So with that in mind, let the rant begin.  First up…

The Fans

Louisville doesn’t have any professional sports teams. This is still the case despite the city government constantly wooing teams in other cities to move here.  They have outright offered up my tax dollars to make this happen in the form of promises for a subsidized arena and tax breaks to any franchise that wishes to move here.  But alas, no fish has been hooked. All sports in this town are college based.  So all those people who are itching for a sports fix become college fans whether or not they attended that college or any college.  Living in Dallas was not like this.  I hate to talk about sports, and when you mention that in open conversation everyone looks at you like a freak.  So one of the tricks I used to use in Texas was to guide a conversation about sports back to the university.  When I lived in Texas this was fairly easy.  Example:

“Buckman!  Did you see the UT game last night?”

“No I didn’t, but hey, I didn’t know you were a UT fan.  What did you major in while you were there?”

Almost without exception, a fan of the team had at least attended the university, if not graduated.  Asking their major was pretty safe.  The conversation would move to what they did at the university, and I didn’t have to explain that I didn’t have any interest in the biggest game in the universe that everyone was talking about.

Don’t try this in Kentucky though.  I think about thirteen or fourteen people in Kentucky have ever attended a university.  The University of Louisville looks like a big impressive campus with a lot of brick buildings and some maintenance crews that mow the lawns and such.  But I think everyone you see walking around during the week are just support staff for the stadium.  If you ask the average U of L fan what their major was, they will tell you they dropped out of high school.

But regardless of school affiliation, why in the hell does anyone want to see people run back and forth with a ball?  Really.  My complaint is as simple as that.  Video games at least provide variety.  You may be a space ship pilot, or a spy, or you may be doing the fantasy RPG thing.  Maybe you’re playing an adventure game or waging a war for world domination.  Forget all the added stuff I have done over the years with emulation, 3d design, and programming.  I don’t even need it for the argument.  Nope, the sports fan some how gets pleasure from seeing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again.  A bunch of people running back and forth trying to put a ball somewhere. Who gives a fuck?

At least with video games I get to participate and be part of the action.  When I was playing Counter Strike I got to mow down the enemy and get the bragging rights.  Here in Kentucky I see droves of people who never attended U of L, never played basketball, and are morbidly obese and out of shape, but are obsessed with the U of L athletics program.  They will yell things at the TV like, “Wow!  Did you see that guy jump?  He must have been in the air forever!”  So a person who has never played the sport, and never intends to get any exercise himself is jumping for joy because a man he has never met that goes to a university he has never attended can jump high.  Am I the only one who thinks this is retarded?

The Players

Being an athlete is cool.  There is a lot of personal satisfaction that can be gained from such things.  Being in top physical shape has its benefits too.  There are plenty of people who do this, and I totally get it.  There are people who run almost every day, and sign up for marathons.  That’s a great hobby.  There are people who spend a lot of money playing golf on the weekends.  Walking around in a pretty park playing a game against your friends is fun too.  You are outdoors enjoying yourself.  You get to talk some smack with them.  Afterwards (or even during the game) you can knock back a couple of beers.  Tennis and racquetball make sense too.  Good exercise.  It’s fun to compete with friends at the local YMCA or the club. Yep. I get it.

But what about the adult professional athlete?  What about the guy who played basketball since he was a kid?  He played it through middle school.  Through high school.  Through college.  And now he is in the pros!  And man can he jump high and put that ball in a basket!  Congratulations retard, you are an expert with thousands upon thousands of hours of experience in a children’s game.  In your quest to be an expert in your field you have most likely forgotten all of the things my daughter will learn while playing sports.  Remember?  Team work, rules, and cooperative play?  Striving to win and losing gracefully?  Nope.  You have long since forgotten all that stuff.  You don’t need it now.  You have an agent.

Have you ever seen a sports interview?  If you have seen one, there is no need to ever bother seeing one again.  All sports interviews can be boiled down to five questions.  The answers to these questions are identical.  They’re so uniform that you don’t even need to hear the questions.  That would be a complete waste of time.  I’ll just give you all the answers:

1. Well, you know, we are going to go out there and play our best on game day.  That’s all we can do.  And God willing, we will be the victors.
2. The season started out slow, but we have been building our teamwork and learning to play together.  The team is really working as a cohesive unit now.
3. Sure we love to play at home.  We love the fans.  This is all for them.
4. The doctors tell me that my knee will be just fine.  I’m ready to go out there and give it 110% on game day.
5. I think the coaching staff is doing a fine job.  I have a lot of respect for the leadership of this organization, and God willing we will win on *insert day*.

Damn.  I couldn’t even get through those five answers without being redundant.  I have an idea.  This should save a lot of network air time.  I think ESPN should have an interview show where no questions are asked.  They just line up athletes and have them bleat out a one sentence mashup of the five answers above.  They could say something like, “Going to play our best on game day, season started out slow, team playing better now, we love to play at home, this is all for the fans, my knee will be fine, the coach and the owners are great, God willing we will win on game day, peace out.”  I think most athletes could read that off of a cue card in about ten seconds.  What am I thinking?  They’re athletes, so it will take most of them thirty seconds or more.  But it would still save tons of time so that the networks could shoe horn even more ads into their programming which is already interrupted once every 4 minutes.  But in case there is some pesky FCC regulation about having more ads than content, the network might be able to show more sports.  So you can watch more people running back and forth with a ball on a field or court.  The redundant interviews would be replaced with more redundant footage of the games.

Finally I would like to give a nod to the commitment and perseverance of the Olympic athlete.  Some athletes spend every waking moment of their lives trying to master sports like curling, or synchronized swimming.  I can’t really bring myself to watch the Olympics anymore, but I used to love the interviews and montages of an athlete’s life that would be shown just before an event.

“This is the story about Ally-Mae, born in Podunk Wisconsin.  Her parents were share croppers and from the age of three little Ally-Mae knew that she wanted to be an Olympic badminton champion.  She pursued this goal with a tenacity that bordered on obsession.  Her parents paid for lessons as early as the age of four.  By the time she was in first grade she was considered to be an Olympic hopeful and woke up every morning at 3:30am to train before school. Fifteen years and eight surgeries later, it’s little Ally-Mae’s time to shine!”

Look.  I know that in a previous post I made a big deal about supporting your kids in whatever it is that they would want to do.  But if my daughter wants me to get up every morning at 4am to take her to synchronized swimming practice I am going to have to have a long talk with her.  I also suspect that many Olympic athletes are pushed into this by the same kind of psycho parents that push there kids into child acting and beauty contests.  The best policy in this, as in everything, is moderation.  It’s great if little Johnny wants to join a sports team.  If he spends more time at that sport than he does in school, then everybody involved needs to take a deep breath and a reality check.

The Administration

Rick Pitino is the coach of the University of Louisville basketball team.  He is currently paid $2.5 million per year.  There are approximately 21,000 students attending the university.  Doing a bit of simple math, every student in the school is responsible for roughly $119 of his salary every year.  This year he is due for a ‘Loyalty Bonus’ for staying with the program so long.  This $3.6 million bonus will represent an extra $171 coming from each student.  That’s $290 per student so far just this year.  But let’s not forget that the new waterfront arena is scheduled to open this year for a reported $252 million.  The total debt in bonds for this project will be $573 million over 30 years.  $206 million of this will be paid by the city of Louisville.  $265 million is to come from increased tax revenue generated by business that the new complex will bring.

Oh yeah…this is just one of U of L’s sports teams.  This year they will also expand their football stadium to add 14,000 seats (originally they wanted to add 21,000 seats which is about one seat for each student currently enrolled in the school) at a cost of $72 million.  Roughly half of that will be paid by issuing bonds.  Oddly enough, since they announced the expansion in 2006, attendance has gone down every year and currently seats are only selling at about 77% capacity.  So they can’t even fill the seats they have.

This all comes at a time when students across the country are protesting budget cuts and tuition hikes.  The biggest argument I keep hearing for all of these expenditures is that the athletics programs are self sustaining and they actually make the university money.  I dug around for some statistics on this and found the Accountants’ Report and Financial Statements for the Athletic Association for 2008 and 2007.  In 2008 $1.9 million collected in student fees went to the athletic teams, and the university transferred $2.1 million to the program.  $4 million from university funds is not self sustaining.  When the plans for the waterfront park arena were originally drawn up, it was estimated that the complex would lose $123,000 each year.  But hey, what’s that when compared to Pitino’s salary, right?  But it made people angry so they shuffled some things around, got rid of the attached hotel idea and lo and behold it should generate an annual profit of $196,000 each year.  I’m sorry to point this out, but that university is only a hiccup and one shitty season away from losing millions a year.  Looking at the recent decline in football attendance I wouldn’t bet money on any of this.  It’s sheer folly.

And yet I still hear all of these arguments about it being a wonderful thing and that it will bring business and stimulus to the region along with added tax revenue.  Pundits argue that revenue is revenue and that what’s good for the university is good for everyone.  Meanwhile EMS workers and other city employees are put on furlough due to shortfalls on budgets.  The whole sports arena looks like a house of cards built on the assumption that they are going to have winning seasons and sold out stadiums for the next 30 years.  Let’s put this in perspective.  A city that is sinking financially just like the rest of the country is shoveling millions of dollars towards an institution of higher learning whose department with the largest budget is a bunch of people who want to play children’s games in front of capacity crowds made up of people who don’t even attend the school.  What the fuck?  What should I expect though?  I live in Kentucky where everyone has twelve toes and carnal knowledge of their cousin.  Every year we duke it out with West Virginia for the bragging rights of being the most toothless state in the union, and as of 2009 we are the leaders in child abuse and neglect.  So this stupidity seems perfectly fine in this bizzarro-state.  Sure…why the fuck not?

Two of the universities I have attended previously all but shut down their athletics programs.  For a while I went to Richland College in Dallas.  They started a sports program and wanted a mascot so the student body saw the ducks in one of the ponds and decided we were the Thunder Ducks.  After a few years most of the athletic programs were shut down due to lack of interest.  I also attended the University of Texas at Arlington.  The student body there decided to just shut down the football program all together and use the stadium for band practice and parking.  Now that’s my kind of school.

Interestingly, France has free health insurance for all its citizens, tuition at all universities is free, and the schools do not waste time with organized sports.  Most of them retain their own teeth and are not obese.  Perhaps I was born in the wrong place.  Who knows?

Meanwhile, when co-workers and other people I know ask me if I saw the game last night I will just smile and try to change the subject.  I have no reason to argue, do I?  Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong, can they?  Oh wait, the French don’t do this stupid crap.

Case in point: A couple of years ago one of my neighbors came to my house in a panic. When I opened the door she frantically asked, “You’re a paramedic aren’t you? Come quick! I think the man across the street is having a stroke!”

I followed her to an older couple that lives across the street. They were both sitting on the porch. She was smoking a cigarette and rocking back and forth in her rocker just like she has done for years. The husband wasn’t looking well though. He was slumped over to one side with an obvious facial droop. He was breathing adequately, but was unable to speak or move. Upon first glance it was obvious that he was having a stroke. If he wasn’t then something else horrible was happening to him and he needed immediate medical attention.

“Oh my,” I said, “yes he is definitely having a stroke. We need to get him to the hospital quickly.” I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and started calling 911.

“Well how do you know he is having a stroke?” his wife asked suspiciously.

“Ma’am, look at him. You know this isn’t normal. That’s why you sent your neighbor to come get me. The same thing that scared her into getting me is the same reason why he needs to go to the hospital.”

“I understand that, but how do you KNOW he is having a stroke? He might not be.” She continued to rock and smoke like nothing had happened. “Maybe we should wait awhile and see if he gets better.”

“No offense ma’am, but I have been a paramedic for 15 years. That’s why your other neighbor came to get me. You all have asked for my opinion, and here it is: he is having a stroke and this could kill him. The answer is ‘no I do not KNOW he is having a stroke.’ But I do know that there is a high probability that he is having a stroke and if you don’t act quickly he will most likely suffer irreversible brain damage or death. So to cover our bases, let’s just go to the hospital and have a CT scan.”

“Yes…but you don’t KNOW he is having a stroke. I think we should wait to see if he gets better.”

This kind of idiocy gets my blood boiling. As I said, if anything drives me from this industry, it will be this. This and the fact that this behavior is tolerated and even to some extent encouraged. I’ll explain that a bit later in this post, but for now let’s go back to the story. I decided to drop the big one.

“Ma’am, no offense, but what you are saying makes no sense at all. He is over 65 years old, and he is insured by Medicare. So being worried about a bill would be one thing, but you really don’t have that excuse. Medicare will pay for his treatment, the CT scan, and the ambulance that will take him there. There is a hospital less than a mile away that is capable of reversing this condition and saving his brain. You are suspecting he is having a stroke just as much as I am or you wouldn’t have sent your neighbor to come get me. The problem is that I did not give you the answer you wanted to hear. You wanted to hear that he will be alright and this will all go away. That is not the case. He is sick, and his life is in danger. If you don’t act quickly he will either die or be permanently disabled. There are about 100 reasons to take him to the hospital, and absolutely no reason not to. Other than the fact that you are scared and acting irrationally. Your inability to act is hurting your husband, and it may kill him. I have already called EMS, and they will take him to the hospital.”

“Well you SAY that…but how do you really KNOW?” She was now rocking back and forth in her chair at a faster pace with a creepy smile on her face like she knew something I did not. She also continued to smoke like a freight train. For a moment I thought maybe there was something really wrong with her and she perhaps wanted her husband dead. But then I remembered what I do for a living and how many people I have seen act in exactly the same way. Nope, she’s just bone stupid. And slow. And selfish. And creepy.

“Ma’am, you asked me for my help, and I called 911. If you care about him at all you will stop acting like a fool and let EMS take him to the hospital. You are being ridiculous. I’ll be across the street if you need me.”

And I walked away. Just like that. When I am being paid to work on an ambulance I am made to deal with idiots like this, but I was going to be damned if I was going to engage in another circular argument with a creepy selfish idiot in my off time. A few minutes later EMS arrived. She must have given them the business too because they were on scene for almost an hour. The hospital is literally thirty seconds away, and it took the crew an hour and a supervisor coming on scene to get the poor guy off the porch. Upon arrival he was diagnosed with a stroke and treated. He survived that incident, but had a long stay in the ICU. Soon after coming home he had another vascular event and died from it. To this day my neighbor won’t talk to me. Why? Because all of this was somehow my fault, of course.

But this isn’t limited to the patients and the families of patients. This kind of stupidity has crept into the minds of providers as well. If you haven’t noticed, I feel very strongly about this subject and want to rant like a sun gone supernova. Consequently I would like to stay away from real work cases so that there isn’t a record of me talking about a patient or a family member like a knuckle dragging idiot. The neighbors are okay. None of them have a computer or even know what a blog is. I could give them my laptop, the url, and an hour and they would still never read this. (But if they did, their lips would be moving.) So let’s describe another situation I had with my vet almost 20 years ago.

When I was in my early 20’s the family cat had what appeared to be a seizure and a stroke. (Notice a theme yet?) I talked to my parents about what to do, and as usual, yours truly was ‘volunteered’ to take the animal to the vet. My parents are the kings of denial, by the way. Just the other day, someone from Webster’s came by my parents’ house to take a picture of my dad for the ‘denial’ entry in their dictionary. I asked what they wanted done about the cat. They had no answer. They just shoved a credit card in my hand and pointed me towards the door. Even before I was medically trained, I was always the cool rational one of the family.

So I took our sputtering, drooling, sad little 18 year old house cat to the vet. He asked me what had happened, and I said that I witnessed something that looked like a seizure and since then the cat has been very disoriented, unable to walk, and appears to be favoring one side. She growled, hissed, and carried on as if she was in pain and at times she would labor to breathe. He examined her, and stood her up trying to get her to walk. She just crumbled to the table in a pile. For a moment she looked like she stopped breathing. Then she sputtered, coughed, barfed all over the table and began to carry on as she had been for the last few hours.

“So, is it a stroke?” I asked.

“Most likely, yes,” he said looking concerned.

“That’s pretty bad isn’t it? I mean, there’s no hope for a cure, isn’t that correct?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, that is the case.”

“Okay, well I suppose it would be best to put her to sleep. How much will that cost?”

“Well, hang on a second,” his words hung in the air while his eyes looked upwards. He spent some time searching for the right words. When he found them his voice was soft and overly soothing. “These matters are very complicated. Many of our owners wish to take their pets home with them.”

The cat started howling again. She flailed sideways, unable to gain traction on the formica counter and slipped striking her head against the table. I cupped a hand around her head and tried to steady her. “I’m not really sure what you are getting at,” I said, “are you saying there is a chance she might get better?”

“Unfortunately no, but still, there are other factors to consider when making this decision.” He spoke cryptically and in circles.

“Look, I don’t want you to think I am a cold pet owner or something, but this animal is having seizures, laboring to breathe, peeing and defecating on her self, and howling as if in pain. If there is no hope of improving her condition, then why on earth would I want to take her home?”

“Some pet owners wish to spend some more time with their pets before making this decision,” he paused cryptically again, “as I said these things are complicated.”

“So are you suggesting that I take the animal home?”

“If you wish.”

“Okay, forgive me but I am getting a bit frustrated here. The animal has no hope of recovery, correct?”

“That’s correct, yes,” he said slowly.

“And it is obvious that the animal is suffering, correct?”

“Well, suffering is a relative thing,” he said thoughtfully, “we can’t really know what the animal is feeling. We also have to take your feelings into account as well.”

“Alright. Look, I am specifically asking for your medical opinion. When you answer this question, I would like you not to take my feelings into account at all. The only factor you should take into account when answering this question is the well being of the animal. Because she is the one who is sick and suffering. Not me. So, in your medical opinion, should this animal be put down?”

“Well, it’s not as easy as all that. You see…”

“Oh Christ, put this cat down before I walk out of here and find another vet who CAN answer a simple question.”

A few minutes later, the best possible outcome for the cat was reached. He gave me a box to take home, and I had to deal with more oddness and double speak from my parents. I wound up burying the thing by myself in the side yard. My mother was very disappointed in the outcome of my trip to the vet. I explained to her that it was really the best thing for the cat. She started crying and accused me of being cold.

“No,” I said looking at my mother, “cold is keeping a suffering animal alive because you don’t have the emotional strength to do what you know you have to do. What I did was understanding and compassionate. Of all people, I would think that someone who grew up on a farm would understand that.”

Yep. That went over well. Notice that my parents do not speak to me anymore. This is because I confronted my father about his denying that his behaviors are going to lead to the amputation of his legs. I was being concerned. I was speaking the truth. And so now they don’t talk to me. And my father’s legs look like doughy, scaly tree trucks weeping yellow fluid. Natural selection taking place before my very eyes.

So what do we do about this? If you have been in EMS for any length of time, you must have run a call like this. Oddly enough, they seem to occur with the most clear cut calls which are heart attacks and strokes. If someone has the sniffles they won’t think twice about calling a quarter million dollars worth of government owned equipment to their house at three in the morning so their family can drive to the hospital right behind you in their perfectly functional car. But when they have chest pain radiating down the left arm with nausea, diaphoresis, and palpitations they will wait for hours to call 911, refuse treatment when you arrive, and try to sue you for abandonment afterwards.

But wait…I have the solution. No one wants to hear it. But I have the answer. In order for this master plan to take effect, we would have to make me the new Emperor of the Known Universe. With that as my title, blood would run in the streets for weeks, but I assure you, after the carnage the trains would run on time and natural selection would be allowed to take place. So now, hear ye, hear ye…Buck the Emperor of the Known Universe shall make his first decrees.

 1. No religion shall be recognized by the state. Sorry…ahem…the Empire. So all you Christian Scientists out there who won’t take your kids to the ER when they break something…sorry, a charge of neglect for you.

2. The only person allowed to refuse care is the patient. No exceptions. So, if you would like to take part in the natural selection process, then go ahead. Other family members and care givers will not be allowed to refuse care for a person that cannot give consent themselves. Period. The end. Emperor Buckman has spoken.

3. Emperor Buckman will also decree that all nursing home patients who are a ward of the state shall be evaluated for orientation and quality of life and we shall come up with a criteria to make those patient’s DNR’s when appropriate. Call it a Death Panel if you wish. It has a nice ring to it.

4. Also, all nursing home patients who are wards of the state shall be registered organ donors by default. Human recycling is a good thing.

5. All unconscious or incapacitated people shall be treated for their illnesses and injuries under implied consent. All family members who try to interfere with this care for any reason (except legal DNR’s which are encouraged) will be detained by the police and charged with endangerment and obstruction of an emergency crew. They shall be beaten in front of the EMS crew for their amusement before they leave seen. Then the offender will be sentenced to community service taking care of nursing home patients with the same diagnosis that they were refusing to have us treat. So my neighbor would be sentenced to 500 hours of ass wiping and drool cup changing in the stroke ward of the local nursing home.

6. All EMS crews shall wear microphones and recording devices (like many police departments currently do) and all patient refusals shall be recorded. If the EMS crew says, “The symptoms that you are exhibiting may be a deadly disease which may lead to permanent disability or even death. It is my recommendation that you come with us to the hospital,” and the patient still refuses, the patient will be held accountable for his or her actions. If they later try to sue the EMS crew for abandonment they shall be beaten in front of that EMS crew for their amusement and mine.

And that’s how we will roll in ‘Buckman’s Totalitarian Regime O’ Common Fucking Sense.’ Denial shall not be tolerated.

 However, after I wake up from that dream, I am left with the ridiculous world that we live in. A world where the most irrational person on scene with the least amount of medical knowledge is allowed to make ill-informed and even harmful medical decisions about people who cannot speak for themselves. And yes, we have the right to transport people under implied consent. And that stupid family member may actually be charged with something in the future…but you know as well as I do that this never happens. Meanwhile, someone who is having a stroke or a heart attack and is loosing brain cells or muscle by the second languish while we entertain the ignorant ramblings of the one person on scene who is too mentally close to the event to make a rational decision.

Meanwhile we allow stupid family members to scream and physically threaten us because their 96 year old great grandmother riddled with Alzheimer’s and cancer is not doing so well with this fifteenth bout of pneumonia and we offered to discuss withdrawing care. Have you ever had that pleasure? Have you ever called security to deal with a cro-magnon retard family member like this? They just sit and watch them go off. Occasionally they will say, “Sir, would you please calm down?” They don’t ever beat them with maglights and thrown them down the back stairwell like I so nicely suggested.

Yep. Denial. That’s what will make me quit. That is the straw that will break the camel’s back. It’s just a matter of time.

It wasn’t intentional. But that didn’t matter. The result had nearly killed someone. The way it was explained to me was that the gunpowder had been placed inside an air tight mason jar. The chances of it exploding were a thousand to one. But it happened anyway. When the jar hit the ground it broke with the contents under pressure. Perhaps the metal clasp sparked as it struck the pavement igniting the entire jar as it broke. Metal and broken glass shot across the court injuring four children. One child in particular had tried to catch the jar as it fell. He was the one that spent weeks in the hospital trying to recover from his burns.

I asked if his clothes caught fire, but they said “no.” In fact, his shirt was almost completely shredded off in the blast. The expanding heat vapors scorched him in an instant. After the initial shock he ran around screaming with bits of skin and hair peeling from his body. No one who was a witness to the event was older than ten. They really didn’t know what to do. They just watched as he ran around the school yard.

It’s odd how someone’s life can be changed like that in an instant. Or perhaps it wasn’t that instant. So many things led up to that event. And it wasn’t just the boy who was injured whose life had changed. The boy that gave him the jar full of gunpowder…his life changed forever too. They said he was a latch key kid. They said his parents didn’t raise him right. They said there was something wrong with him, and that something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. And I felt in some way responsible for this.

He was my best friend.

*          *          *

It’s hard to explain to someone one just how hot it was in Dallas, TX in the Summer of 1980. Whole weeks would go by without the temperature ever dropping below 110 degrees. In looking back at the weather records, there were two days in June when the temperature reached 113. I remember playing in a little league baseball game on one of those days. It was miserable. The coach put a cooler full of ice water in the dugout and we would periodically dunk our heads in it to try and cool off. After pulling our heads out of the ice bath, we just felt sick and disoriented. It didn’t help at all. After a while one of the outfielders passed out and they finally called the game and sent everyone home.

There was a kid who lived across the street from me who had become by default my new best friend. The pickings were slim in my neighborhood. Raquel lived directly across from me and next door to my new best friend. But she wouldn’t even acknowledge my presence. She was popular and I was not. To say that I was not popular was actually a bit of an understatement.

I had just moved from another part of Dallas during the previous year. I had a stuttering problem, so I had to go to speech therapy every week. I hated to talk in class because it took me about three minutes to say “hello.” It was also determined that I had trouble reading so I was taken out of regular class everyday to go to a special ed session with three other kids who were behind. The teacher of that class sat down with me and put me through a bunch of aptitude tests which placed my vocabulary at the same level of someone attending college. She had a few conferences with my parents and it was determined that I was actually very accelerated in aptitude, but my speech impediment and shyness kept me from wanting to participate in class. So for about a year and a half I had to endure a lot of special sessions, appointments, and classes. Meanwhile, all my classmates would point at me and yell “Retard!” while I walked down the hall. By the summer of 1980 my stutter was almost gone. The only time it was noticeable was when I became nervous or excited. This meant that my speech impediment was still well known to my classmates, and it cropped up at the most inopportune times.

There were other kids in my neighborhood. Mike lived just a couple of streets over, but we fought all the time. He was one of the ones that would point and yell “Retard!” We got into a couple of fist fights over the years and I was always the one who got into trouble over it. Once we were playing touch football during recess which quickly turned to tackle whenever the teachers turned their backs. I had made a few yards during a run and was tackled a few feet from the end zone. Mike ran up, jumped in the air as high as he could, and landed in the middle of my back with both knees after the play was well over. “Yucky Bucky!” he shouted. “Yucky fucky Bucky!…Retard!” So I didn’t go out of my way to play with him.

Jeffrey lived a couple of streets over as well. But he was one year younger than me, and even less popular. If that was possible. I liked him and was always nice to him, but he was the whiny asthma inhaler kid. It seemed like everything we did was too rough. Or it was always too hot. Or too cold. Or he was allergic to it. He was constantly sniffling. His sleeves were crusty with snot. I don’t want to even tell you what happened when he wore short sleeves.

Near Jeff were a set of twins who were actually distantly related to me. But we were never close and actually fought a lot. One of them was the first kid on our block to get a pocket knife from his dad. So what did he do? He slashed my bike tire with it.

My only hope was the kid across the street. He liked me. He was nice. But he had a lot of baggage. He was two years older than me, but only ahead by one grade. He had been made to repeat the fourth grade and that’s where he was in 1980. It was hot. Dreadfully hot. I was the stuttering retard. He was the latch key kid who was repeating a grade who didn’t suck as much as the other kids on my block. We were friends by default. We were friends out of self defense.

*          *          *

“Hey, dad!” I exclaimed at the dinner table one night, “Guess what my new best friend told me!”

“What?” inquired my father looking like he was wary of what I was about to tell him.

“He told me that his Dad was a flying ace in the Korean War, and shot down 12 planes!”

“Son, the Korean War was 30 years ago. His dad was probably about three years old. He didn’t shoot down any planes. Your friend is lying to you.”

“Are you sure?” I asked dejected.

“Of course. Look, I actually went to ROTC in college because I thought I might be drafted into Korea. The war ended right when I finished college and I went into the Army after the war. I am a good bit older than your friend’s dad. He must have just been a kid. Besides, planes really didn’t dogfight much in Korea. We were flying Saber jets, and the enemy stayed on the ground.

A few days later…

“Hey dad! My new best friend told me something really cool!”

“Oh yeah? What’s the boy genius done now?”

“He said that his dad wrote this song when he was in the Army, and people still sing it to this day!”

“Really? How does it go?”

I started singing a silly little song about biscuits and rolls that I had heard from my friend It was a song about army food.

“Buck, that song was on M*A*S*H last week. Your friend is pulling your leg again.”

After getting me twice I pretty much gave up listening to my new friend’s story telling. We had a good time together, but he often felt the need to tell me these wild stories about his father. I remember a bit later him telling me that his dad was a champion skeet shooter, and was so good at the sport that he had a setup to reload his own shells. I dismissed it as more lies. Little did I know that this story was true and that there was a large amount of gunpowder in his house.

*          *          *

So why were we friends? We had one thing in common. There was this one thing with which we were both fascinated. It consumed us, and to some extent it does to this very day.

Computers.

We had met in 1977 when my family moved onto that street. After a few interactions like the ones above, I was wary of him. But we kept coming back to each other because of this common bond. Home computers weren’t standard equipment back then. We were the only people we knew who had this hobby. And we were quite young, and most of what we were dabbling with was beyond us.

His dad worked for the Teledyne Corporation. I think he helped design some sort of chip or microprocessor. Whatever he did, he was fairly important and had to work from home quite a bit. Because of this he had a Digital Equipment Corporation VT52 terminal at home. For readers who are not so familiar with primitive computers, it is important to note that there was no internet, and home computers like the Apple II had just been invented and were not common. Most computers were quite large, taking up most of a room. Digital Equipment Corporation produced two lines of computers back then, the PDP series and later the VAX series. Simply ‘sitting down at the computer’ didn’t make any sense. The computer was incredibly huge and expensive. A company the size of Teledyne would only own a few of these systems and employees would access them through these VT52 terminals. It was a fantastic way to give several people access to the same computer that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Although the terminals had microprocessors in them, they were not fully fledged computers in and of themselves. They would allow you to connect to the larger computer through a modem to feed it instructions and run programs.

My friend’s dad told us that everyone at Teledyne went home at about 5pm. If we waited until about 5:15, we could attempt to logon with the VT52, and if it was not busy we could play. What were we playing on such an expensive machine? The Colossal Cave Adventure of course. I had no idea of the significance of it then, but I now know that this was the first widely distributed computer game ever written. It was a wildly popular text-only game that took the user through several locations in a system of caves designed to be similar to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky which the programmer had visited. It had a Dungeons and Dragons feel and involved solving logic puzzles to gather treasure and points. We were most likely playing it in its original FORTRAN on a PDP 10 (or possibly an early VAX machine) located across town. I can still remember sitting at the terminal with my friend watching the seconds tick by on the clock. At exactly 5:15 we would furiously dial the rotary phone and jam it in the cuffs of the modem to logon and start playing.

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

Later on we were able to play the more well known Zork through the same system. A couple of years later my friend’s dad also got a home computer that looked similar to the VT52, but it had its own disk drive and was a complete system. (I am fuzzy on the details of this, but this machine may have been a VT100 with an add-on card which allowed it to emulate a PDP 8. I truly can’t remember any details other than we could finally program on a machine at my friend’s house without worrying about taking up time on the mainframe at the office.)

In contrast, my dad worked for Texas Instruments and was in charge of advertising for the TI99/4 and later the TI99/4a. While the original system was being developed, my dad’s bosses wanted him to be familiar with competing machines. Around 1977 or 1978 he was given an Apple II to take home. He loaded it up with software and watched my friend and I play. Our favorite game was a version of Star Trek. There were no graphics, just text arranged in such a way as to represent a ‘sector’ in space. The letter ‘E’ represented the Enterprise, while ‘K’ stood for Klingon and ‘B’ stood for base. I played it for hours while my disgusted father looked on.

It is important to point out that even though both our fathers worked in the golden era of the personal computer, both men absolutely hated their jobs. My father was clinically interested in my fascination with these machines from an advertising standpoint. But he was also a never ending fountain of lectures telling me what a waste of my time it was. In 1979 he brought home a TI99/4 home computer with every peripheral and piece of software the company made. Despite the fact that our house was dripping with computer equipment, I was lectured every time I spent more than fifteen minutes playing with it. My friend got similar lectures from his dad and so we often bounced back and forth between houses trying to use the VT52 or TI99/4 as long as our fathers would tolerate it, and then run across the street to the other house.

This is why the Summer of 1980 is so important. It was hot. So hot that none of our parents dared make us play outside. Finally we were given unlimited access to thousands and thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment. We decided to make our own adventure game. 1980 was the Summer of programming.

*          *          *

You are in a small room. The walls are composed of a dark, almost black form of smoky quartz; they glisten like teeth in the lamp-light. The only exit is the passage to the south through which you entered.

“No, no, no. You can’t just start out programming a person and a room. Here’s what we do,” It was my turn to sit on the floor between the two Galaxy box fans we had carried from across the street. It was my friend’s turn to type. My nine year old mind had an epiphany and I was pontificating. “You have to think of the player himself as a location. The player is location zero. Every room has a variable of one, two, three and so forth. So if the lamp has a location value of zero, it’s in your inventory. If it has a value of one it’s in the first room, a value of two puts it in the hall.”

“Oh I get it,” he started typing furiously, “We can have a subroutine that checks the location of each object. If your command is ‘Inventory’ then you goto the location subroutine and it prints everything with a value of zero!”

“Exactly!”

“What the hell are you doing with all this paper!?” My friend’s dad had barged in unexpectedly. He was angry and he wasn’t hiding it. To be honest he scared me a little. I had my problems with my dad. That was pretty evident. But at least he was nice to company and was genuinely glad to see me every once in a while. From what I could gather, my friend’s dad was never happy to see him, or anyone else. I tried to steer clear of him. “I have to account for all of this! Teledyne gave me this paper to work with! This isn’t for play time!”

We both looked down. There were piles of dot matrix paper everywhere. One of the problems with teaching yourself to program a computer when you’re nine is that you never really get good at it. We got lost a lot. So we took to printing out subroutines and placing them on the floor trying to figure out why the axe disappeared after the dwarf threw it. It was supposed to stick in the wall. But, you see, that was a problem. An axe being stuck in the wall and merely being in the room are two different states for the same object. Under our current system an object either had a value of 4 and was in the antechamber, or it wasn’t. There was no being in the antechamber and being stuck in the wall at the same time. My friend was of the mind that one object should be switched out for another depending on its level of wall stuckness but that was complicated and I was looking for a better solution.

“And what the hell is this?” Now he was pointing at our ASCII animation of Star Wars. Now that was cool. Someone had made this giant text document, and every page was a frame of the Star Wars movie, only done in ASCII text. You were supposed to print it out, stack it up backwards, and flip through it to see the movie. The resulting stack of paper was massive. Much too much to staple through. That’s where the hole punch and his mother’s yarn came in handy. Then my friend had this awesome idea. Since we had a whole box full of accordion paper, why don’t we just print the document backwards on every other page? Then we didn’t have to spend hours with the hole punch and the yarn. It took twice as much paper, but it worked better.

I looked up. He was angry. Both he and his son were built the same way, short and wiry. They were so thin and ropy that it gave the appearance of them being tall. But when you got next to them, you found out they were just short. And angry. And he had tinted glasses. I have always hated that. They are never really clear, and never really dark. They are always just a shade of grayish red. Always hiding your eyes from others, never letting you see fully, always making the wearer look like an angry dork.

“I’m sorry, dad. You’ve got boxes of this stuff that you never use, and we were just having fun. It’s like watching Star Wars. Look.” My friend held up the stack of paper and started flipping the edges.

“I don’t want to look at this, I’m tired of it. I want this cleaned up. I know it’s hot outside, but you two need to go somewhere else. I don’t want to see you on this computer for a few days. I need to work, and I can’t do it with you ruining everything all the time. Both of you get out!”

*          *          *

There is a small wicker cage discarded nearby. A cheerful little bird is sitting here singing. A three foot black rod with a rusty star on an end lies nearby.

“Alright, let’s see if this works.” I was now staring at the blue background on the TI99/4. Why they chose light blue at a background to their BASIC work screen is beyond me. It was hard to look at. I typed ‘run.’

We had been working on the dwarf for days. At first we could only have him in one room. He was an object just like anything else. Consequently he had a location variable just like all the other objects.

Take dwarf.

You take the dwarf.

“You can’t pick up a dwarf! We need to fix that!”

So we set about it a completely different way. Before long the dwarf had his own subroutine and was part of every turn. At the beginning of every turn a random number was chosen between zero and three. If the number wound up being zero, then the dwarf would move. If the dwarf was going to move, the program executed another subroutine that calculated what room he was in and which rooms were adjacent. The adjacent rooms were assigned variables, and then the dwarf’s location variable would be switched to the next location. At the end of this subroutine, if you were in the same place the computer would print, “An angry dwarf walks into the room.” However, if upon the initial location check it was found that the player location and the dwarf’s location were equal the computer would print, “There is an angry dwarf here, staring at you.” We had also written another piece of code that gave the dwarf a one in four chance of leaving the room as well. We had been working on this for three days. Now it was show time.

We started off in the main room as always. I walked into the antechamber and the computer printed, “There is an angry dwarf here, staring at you.”

“Okay. So far, so good. Jack around for a minute. Look at your inventory. Look at the sign again. Use up some turns!”
I did, and after two turns…

“The dwarf leaves the room.”

“Okay, looking good. Keep your fingers crossed. There are only two rooms he could be in, and only a one in four chance that he will move from there immediately. Hopefully we can find him.” We walked out into the hallway.

“There is an angry dwarf here, staring at you.”

“Yes! Yes! The dwarf moves! The dwarf moves!” We were both dancing up and down. We had done it. The dwarf actually walked around in adjacent rooms. We wasted a couple of turns to see if he would move again, and lo and behold he did. We were able to follow him. “Yes! Yes! Awesome!”

“What’s going on in here?” My dad came into the room looking annoyed.

To date this was the most impressive programming feat my nine-year-old mind had conceived. We had a dwarf walking around just like in the real game. And we had plans. Oh yes, we had plans. The dwarf could be a location just like the room or the player. And if the dwarf was in the same room as an axe, the dwarf could pick up the axe. And before the computer printed, “There is an angry dwarf here, staring at you.” it could check the location of the axe. If the axe location equaled the dwarf then the computer could instead print, “There is an angry dwarf here holding an axe.” And if he was just in the same room as the axe it could print, “The dwarf picks up an axe.” And from there we were just a hop, skip, and a jump from him throwing it. An aggressive dwarf! That’s what we needed!

“D-d-d-dad! W-w-we figured out how to m-m-m-make the dwarf move!” I got so excited I started to stutter again. It was still early in the day. If we buckled down, I knew we could finish the whole axe thing by dinner time.

“Buck…that’s…great. You’re stuttering again. You need to slow down. Why don’t you boys give it a rest for today? I’m sure your friend would like to go home and see his folks for a bit.”

“But dad! W-w-w-we almost have the axe thing w-w-worked out!”

“You boys can work on that tomorrow.” He looked at my friend, “You run along now. I want to talk to Buck.”

After he left, my dad sat down next to the desk. He gathered all of our print outs and looked for a clear spot to put them. He couldn’t find one so he just set them down on the floor. He absentmindedly lit a cigarette.

“Son, is this what you are really interested in?”

Uh oh. I was in for another lecture. I had been working on an answer for this for days. I knew it was coming.

“Dad, it’s 110 degrees outside. What else are we going to do?” That part was rehearsed. Notice the absence of stuttering. If I thought about what I was going to say ahead of time my stutter disappeared.

“I know it’s hot outside, but look…I work with this group of engineers at work. And I was supposed to be talking to them about the software they are developing because we are starting a new ad campaign. And those guys are barely functional. They wear double knit polyester pants that don’t match anything. They talk funny.”

“I stutter sometimes.”

“Yes, Buck, but we’re working on that. Anyway, I was listening to them talk over lunch and they were getting really excited. One of them had spent the last week trying to figure out how to make some program shorter. After forty hours worth of work he was able to reduce 88 lines of code to 81. And that was his big news. That was his big revelation. And he was taking about it like it was some big event.”

“It might have been dad. The TI doesn’t have much memory. We think about that all the time with our game. My friend has been trying to calculate how many rooms we can add and it isn’t much. His dad told him something about this thing called an array and he says we can fit all our variables into one place without them being spread all over the program. We could save so many lines of code that way and have more rooms!”

“Sure. But, I mean, is that what you really want to do with your life?” My dad was searching around for an ashtray but couldn’t find one. He gave up and tipped in his hand. “I mean, 88 lines of code to 81…a few more rooms…how many hours do you spend on this stuff? People actually get degrees in this stuff. It’s madness. And my bosses actually think they can sell this machine. Lines of code, dwarves, and rooms Buck. What’s it matter? Who cares? You need to give it a rest. You need to practice batting some more.”

“B-B-But I’m terrible at b-b-baseball dad. And it’s hot.”

“You know what? I already thought of that. Your school has that big black top. You guys can pitch and do some batting practice under that. It would be hot but it would be out of the sun. It would do you guys some good to get out.”

“I guess we could do that for a little while. B-b-b-ut we aren’t even having a game this week.”

“Well you’re going outside tomorrow, and that’s final. Now go downstairs and find something to do. Turn this off for awhile and do something that doesn’t have anything to do with midgets, and knives, and lines of code.” Some ash fell on the ground while he was talking. “Damnit.” He cupped his hand, held it to his chest and walked downstairs slowly.

I paused to save our work and shut down.

“I said get down here!” I heard him yell from downstairs.

*          *          *

A rickety wooden bridge extends across the chasm, vanishing into the mist. A sign posted on the bridge reads, “STOP! Pay troll!” A burly troll stands by the bridge and insists you throw him a treasure before you may cross.

My friend and I met up over the next few days to go play baseball under the black top. We had ported our moving dwarf over to the program on his dad’s computer and it worked. But our dad’s had gotten together and now my friend’s dad was telling us to play under the black top too. Just walking onto the front lawn was a chore. I felt like an ant under a magnifying glass. But my friend was excited and waving his arms wildly as he ran up to me.

“Buck! Buck! One of my dad’s work friends came over to the house last night to drop something off and he wanted to talk to us!”

“What? Talk to you and me? What about?”

“He said that he had played our game! At first he thought it was weird that someone in the office was making an adventure game. He thought it was even weirder that they were using BASIC. So he asked around to see who it was and found out it was a couple of kids. He said after he heard that we were 9 and 11 that he thought we were brilliant and everyone in the office has been playing our game! Everyone got really excited when the dwarf started moving!”

“What else did he say?”

“He asked if we had tried FORTRAN. I told him that we had but it was just too hard. He told us we were doing great and that we should definitely keep going. Everybody in the office is pulling for us and checking up on the game each time the file changes! One thing he did say is that we are going to run out of RAM unless we come up with a language parser.”

“What’s that?”

“He told me some stuff, but it was hard to understand. We have to somehow process the two-word commands in a different way. Instead of having a whole string of possible commands for each move, we have to come up with a way to have the computer process the words mathematically and shorten the code.”

“How do we do that?”

“I don’t know, but we are not going to get that done under the black top.”

“So where are we going,” I said sounding worried.

“The library,” he replied with a smile on his face.

*          *          *

The walls are quite warm here. From the north can be heard a steady roar, so loud that the entire cave seems to be trembling. Another passage leads south, and a low crawl goes east.

Later in the week we went back to my friend’s house, but we weren’t allowed to play with the computer. No one was home but we didn’t dare logon. It was in the middle of the day when people would be using the system. My friend and I would get together and do other things every now and then, but it seemed like we never got along when we did. He was just too mischievous and prone to getting me in trouble. If we concentrated on computers, it would give him something to do and he would stay focused.

There was nothing in the library on language parsers. There was very little on programming period. We found a few of books on the subject but many of them were for older computers that were programmed by hole punching cards and feeding them into a slot. There were a couple of books about FORTRAN, COBOL, and PASCAL, but at this point we were committed to BASIC. We were only kids, and the other languages just assumed too much computer knowledge. There were a few books on BASIC, but they all seemed to cover subjects that we had already mastered. We were on our own.

But that didn’t stop us. We actually designed a rudimentary language parser in BASIC that worked fairly well for what it did. We came up with a list of words that were allowed to be used in commands. Each word was given a three digit number as a value. These values were assigned in a large array that was loaded at the beginning of the program. When the user typed in a two-word command, the words were split apart and the numerical values were determined. Those two values were added together and the sum was used in a large subroutine to figure out what the user wanted to do.

This saved tons of lines of code. It was more complicated, but in a way it made things easier. For one thing, synonyms were given the same values. For instance, the commands ‘drop’, ‘put’, and ‘leave’ all had the same value. If those verbs all had a value or say, 150, and the knife had a value of 2, no matter which word was used the sum of both words would be 152. It was a lot easier to write a line of code that would perform an action if the value of the command input was 152 instead of writing three separate lines of code for each possible synonym.

This made other tricks possible as well. We grouped similar verbs so that they would produce sums in a known range. That way we could make the computer answer a certain way to a broad range of statements. For instance, if the user typed in something that contained a violent verb such as hit, punch, or kill it would generate a value between 900 and 920. Nothing else would make a number that high. So in certain rooms where it wasn’t possible to do anything violent we could write a line of code that would print “Why are you so angry?” if the command sum was anything higher than 900. It made the computer seem intelligent and it allowed us to erase bunches of redundant code.

But there would be no computing on that day. We talked about it a lot but got bored not being able to do anything.

“I know!” said my friend, “I want to show you something really cool.”

He ran off to his parents’ bedroom, and came back with a small set of keys. He motioned for me to come down the hall with him. There was a bedroom down the hall that served as an office. The computer we used was in there. “Are you going to show me the computer we have been using?” I asked jokingly. He rolled his eyes and led me to the closet. It had never occurred to me to ask him what was in there. He took the key and unlocked the door revealing not a closet, but a tiny little workshop. There was a narrow bench with something that looked like a drill press, and several little bags and boxes of all sorts of things I had never seen before.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“This is my dad’s gun closet,” he said pointing to the cabinet on the far end, “and this is where he reloads his own shells.”

The hair on the back of my neck started to stand on end. My palms got sweaty. My dad had given up hunting for years at this point, but he had antique guns on display in the house. He threatened me with death if I ever touched one of them. I knew we weren’t supposed to be in this closet.

“Hey, I bet your dad doesn’t want us in here. We better leave.”

“No one is home. Dad is at work and mom is out trying to sell houses. It’s no big deal. My dad showed me how to reload shotgun shells once. This is so cool. There is gun powder in this bag. See?”

He took all of the components of a shotgun shell and fed them into the machine that looked like a drill press. He turned the crank that compressed them all together and unceremoniously tossed the finished product into a bag of live ammo.

“Hey, why don’t we go over to my house? We can play pool. That would be fun.” I nervously backed out of the closet.

Then we both heard the front door opening. My friend jumped out of the closet in a flash and closed the door. His older sister came strolling down the hall. My friend’s older sister was in high school. I never really saw her much. She was always out. I always looked forward to seeing her though. My nine year old mind didn’t understand it, but my nine year old body did. She was sixteen or seventeen. I was fascinated by her body for some reason. She had breasts. They weren’t like my mom’s. They stood out more. I was also mesmerized by the fact that her waste was so narrow yet her hips were so wide. She looked like that hour glass that they showed at the beginning of ‘Days of Our Lives.’ I didn’t see her very often, but when I did I couldn’t help staring a bit.

“What are you dorks doing?”

“Nothing! Nothing.” My friend had thrust the keys in his pocket. But he was looking nervous. Too nervous.

“Hey, you two aren’t supposed to be in here! Dad said for you to leave that computer alone for awhile!”

We glanced at each other. This was our way out. Getting in trouble for messing with the computer was one thing. Getting in trouble for playing with gunpowder was on a whole other level.

“Hey, sis! Come on. Give us a break. Look, the thing isn’t even turned on. We know we can’t program anything right now, we were just looking something up in one of the manuals.”

“Jesus, you two are hopeless.” She got this conspiratorial look on her face. It almost looked like she was about to be friendly to us, which wasn’t normal. She usually wouldn’t give us the time of day. But right now I didn’t care because she was leaning over to make a deal with us and I could see down her shirt a little. Why was that hint of a curve so distracting? “If you two can keep a secret, I won’t tell dad you were in here.”

“Alright,” said my friend hesitantly, “that sounds fair. What secret are we keeping?”

“My friend Jimmy is here and I would like to hang out with him for awhile.”

“You know that mom and dad don’t want you to have boys in the house.”

“And you know that dad doesn’t want you in here,” she said smugly.

He hesitated, “Okay, deal.”

She ran off to go let her friend in the front door. I shot a rotten look at my friend.

“Look,” he said shrugging his shoulders, “We got out of trouble. Everybody wins.”

“Why don’t we just go to my house,” I pleaded again, “It’s been a few days since we were on the computer there. I bet I could talk my mom into letting us program today if we promise to be done by the time dad gets home.”

“No way. I have to find some way to get these keys back in my parents’ bedroom. If I don’t we’re sunk. And I want to see what my sister is doing with this guy. I don’t like him. He’s a real jerk.”

“Hey, what’s up douchebags!” The boyfriend Jim had made his grand entrance. He was tall and lean. He was wearing athletic shorts which wasn’t strange considering the heat, but for some reason he was wearing a coat. It was one of those coats made out of felt with leather arms that were such bright colors. I didn’t understand at that young age what a letter jacket was, much less how much it could mean to such a small minded person. Wearing a lined coat in 110 degree heat would seem like insanity to anyone other than a 17 year old jock trying to get in the pants of trashy girl like my friend’s sister.

At that age I was just confused and concerned. He looked way too cocky, like he was about to spring up and punch someone. And she laughed as if on cue to just about anything he said. It all seemed so strange and fake. I wasn’t sure what was worse, the gunpowder in the closet or the tightly coiled jock in the hall. Playing pool seemed like heaven. I was anxious to get the closet locked and leave.

“Come on Jim, leave those two dorks alone. We can go back here. You two find something to do, but stay close and shout if you see mom’s car.”

They both disappeared down the hall. I heard a door close.

“That’s was close,” whispered my friend.

“Alright, p-p-p-put those keys away and let’s g-g-g-get out of here,” I whispered back.

“These keys are going back, but we aren’t going anywhere. I want to see what my sister is doing. Besides, she told us to watch for mom. I’m going to sneak down the hall and put these away. I’ll be right back.”

He disappeared down the hall without a sound. I was thankful to see my friend leave. I wanted nothing more than to get as far away from him as I could. But the feeling of relief only lasted a few seconds. It was quickly replaced with a feeling of dread. His sister and her creepy boyfriend were in the house doing something wrong. My friend was sneaking around the house trying to put his dad’s keys back without being noticed. I was in a room I wasn’t supposed to be in next to a closet filled with gunpowder. I was absolutely paralyzed with fear. What if his mom came back? What if his dad came back? What if the creepy jock came back in the room and wanted something? I wanted to just run out of the house and down the street, but I was too racked with fear to move. My knees started to fail me and I started to shake. I was fighting back the urge to cry. Finally he came back.

“Okay, it’s all fixed. Whew that was close!”

“We need to leave,” I pleaded. “C-c-c-ome on, I don’t feel good. Let’s just g-g-g-go across the street and do something else.”

He looked at me for awhile and must have determined that I had had enough. His life was so chaotic compared to mine. He was used to this constant background hum of bad things going on in his house. I had my problems too, but not like this. My brother and sister had already gone off to college. If there was any sort of trouble in the house, it was because I did something. Having to deal with all these unknown factors was just too much. He was sensing my panic and decided to relent.

“Okay. Pool sounds fun. My sister probably wants us to leave so she can be alone with her boyfriend anyway. Let me just tell her we’re leaving. I have to find her though. I passed her room on the way to my parents’ room and they aren’t in there. Wait here and I’ll be back.”

“Hey, I really have to pee, like right now. Can I use the bathroom across the hall and just meet you outside?”

“Sure. I’ll see you across the street.”

He ran off to go find his sister. I was so relieved that this would be over any second. I was glad to be leaving the room that we weren’t supposed to be in. I felt like a giant weight had been lifted. I bounced across the hall and opened the door to the bathroom.

“Hey!” It was the boyfriend, Jimmy. I looked down in horror. My friend’s sister was on the floor of the bathroom and her boyfriend was on top of her. At that age I wasn’t sure right away what they were doing. I remember seeing her ankles wrapped around his hips, her toes pointing straight towards me. She squealed and reached for his coat which was on the floor next to her. I started to back out of the room, but I couldn’t look away. So that’s what breasts looked like…”You’re dead you little fucking punk!”

The spring uncoiled and he leapt across the room and into the hall. He grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the wall. One hand was holding his underwear which had fallen down around his knees, and the other hand was choking the breath out of me.

“What the fuck is your problem, kid? I ought to kick your ass right now!”

“Stop it!” my friend’s sister screamed. She was now out in the hall, pulling on his shoulder and wearing nothing but his jacket. It looked so strange on her. I could see the hair between her legs. My mother had never bathed with me so I had never seen that. Was that what girls looked like down there? I was scared, shocked, confused, and had to pee all at the same time. And I couldn’t breathe. “He’s just a kid. He’s not worth it. He’s just a stuttering little retard. He couldn’t tell on us if he tried.”

He released his grip around my throat and grabbed me by the face, shoving his right thumb in my eye. “What about it, retard? You gonna tell anybody?”

“T-t-t-tell who? I just n-n-n-n-needed to p-p-p-pee.”

“Well if you tell anybody about this I’m going to k-k-k-kill you! Now get the fuck out of here you little twerp.” With that he pulled my face away from the wall and shoved me backwards making my head hit the wall again with a resounding thud. That last thump against the wall hurt more than anything that I could remember. It hurt so much I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t even see straight. All I could do was just try not to fall down or pee myself.

“I told you to scram. Are you too much of a retard to even run home right?”

My legs finally came back to me. I tore off in a run that didn’t stop until I was across the street again. I ran into my house and locked the door behind me. I ran down the hall to the bathroom and shut the door. I must have stayed in there for twenty minutes trying not to cry so I could come out looking normal. I didn’t want my mom to know what had happened. My friend never came over, and I was never more relieved. I decided it was time to take a break from him for a couple of days. Sex, gunpowder, and death threats were just too much for my nine year old mind to handle.

*          *          *

You are in the Hall of the Mountain King, with passages off in all directions. A huge green fierce snake bars the way!

I laid low for the next few days. I told my parents that I felt sick and did not want to play with anyone. They seemed to accept that and leave me alone. My dad was at work most of the time and my mother was just distant. She didn’t work, but she took a long nap every day. I was left alone most of the time. I found out that she really didn’t care if I was on the computer or not. She never came upstairs, and never really asked what I was doing. If she did I would just tell her I was playing with my Star Wars toys and that seemed to satisfy her.

I took the uninterrupted time to port the game back over to the TI99/4. The chance to rewrite the language parser actually allowed me to tighten things up quite a bit. I was able to erase large chunks of redundant code and add some vocabulary to the parser.

I was relieved to have some time off, but I was also missing my friend. It was easier to code if he was there. When I worked on the TI there was no chance of anyone playing the game either. My friend had not heard back from the man from the office, but it was nice to know that someone was playing it and that we might hear from them again. When I saved my programs on the TI I saved them to cassette tape and there they stayed.

It wasn’t long before dad came to me and gave me a big speech about me not being sick anymore. “I think the heat may be letting up,” he added. “Why don’t you go outside and play?”

I went out on my own. I wasn’t ready to talk to my friend yet, and I just wanted to be left alone. I thought I would sneak around to the vacant lot on the next street where the other kids played. Maybe I would find my tire slashing cousins or asthma boy venturing out into this chilly Texas day where the temperature was barely above 100. But I found no one. I knocked on a few doors, but no one seemed to be home. I had been out for about an hour looking for someone to play with and had come up empty so I was walking home down an alley a few streets away covered in sweat. I looked up and cringed to see my friend waving and running in my direction.

“Where have you been?” he asked out of breath. “I haven’t seen you for a week.”

I was really hoping that I wouldn’t run into him. I wasn’t very good at lying. I just didn’t have it in me.

“I was just trying to take a break man. Your sister’s boyfriend freaked me out slamming my head into the wall. The whole gunpowder thing was too much. I just needed a break.”

“Great! So you don’t want to be my friend now either?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said that I needed a break. A lot of stuff is going on in your house, and I don’t need naked people slamming my head into the wall and threatening me. That’s all.”

“Well why don’t we go play at your house?”

That was the last thing I wanted to hear from him. “Maybe in a couple of days. Maybe then. But I’m going to go home now.”

“Oh yeah!” I could see him getting tense. When he did this I could see his father in him. He was ropy and lean. When he got like this his muscles would tense up and he would ball up his fists. His father used to do the same thing and it scared me. But I was starting to get angry myself. I just wanted to play by myself. And my parents wouldn’t even let me do that. Every time I talked to someone else they would make fun of my stutter or call me a retard. Every time I played with my friend I was afraid of what kind of trouble I would get in to. He was escalating and I had had enough. “I didn’t need you anyway! I have plenty of friends! I was only hanging around you because I felt sorry for you!”

“What?” Now I was mad. “You can’t even pass the fourth grade! You’re family is out of control. You feel sorry for me? You’re the loser!”

He glared at me for a moment, and just stormed off. I was ready for a fight, but I was relieved it didn’t come to that. I was drenched in sweat and still a long way from home. I just wanted to get in the shade, cool off and play by myself for awhile. I decided to take a shortcut between a couple of houses. That’s when I heard the footsteps behind me. Before I could turn around he had run up behind me and slammed into me. Now he was the one with his hand around my throat. He wasn’t strong enough though. I could still breathe. I stared him down.

“No body, nobody calls me a loser!” I had obviously struck a nerve. I could see he was about to cry. “Nobody! You hear me you stuttering retard? Nobody!”

He let go of my neck, and stormed off again. It would be the last time I saw him that summer.

*          *          *

You are on the edge of a breath-taking view. Far below you is an active volcano, from which great gouts of molten lava come surging out, cascading back down into the depths. The glowing rock fills the farthest reaches of the cavern with a blood-red glare, giving every- thing an eerie, macabre appearance. The air is filled with flickering sparks of ash and a heavy smell of brimstone.

Summer was almost over, and the heat had finally let up. A cool, almost chilly breeze was starting to cause dust devils to swirl papers and dried grass in the street. It was late afternoon and suddenly there was a greenish yellow hue to everything. Dark clouds rolled across the sky, and in an instant our lawn was covered in a cold shade that continued to blanket the neighborhood. Drops of water started to dot the pavement. One fell in the small of my back. It should have been refreshing, but it wasn’t. It was invasive. It was angry. It was cold. Suddenly I heard screaming from the other side of the street. It was shrill and sharp, cutting through the crescendo of water drops now slapping the pavement.

“What are we going to do now? Huh? What are we going to do now?” It sounded like my friend’s mother. She was furious. Her voice was cracked and broken. Uncontrolled.

“Well if you could sell a house, maybe you could help us out a little! But no! You just drive around all day using gas and buying lunch for people!” It was my friend’s dad now. His sharp nasal voice was unmistakable. I could imagine him stalking her through the rooms of the house as he yelled, his tinted glasses hiding his eyes.

What I heard after that was unintelligible. I heard the sound of dishes breaking and more yelling. Even though their windows were open, their voices were starting to be drowned out by the sound of the rain. I was startled by the feeling of a hand on my shoulder. It was my dad. He had come out to see the storm.

“You best come inside, son.”

“What’s going on over there?”

“I’m not sure, but the rumor is that they made some bad investments. Oil well that went bad or something. That would be just like him. Oil was the 70’s. That’s gone now. Everyone knows it. So a guy in the booming electronics industry sinks all his money into a bad oil well. Typical. He never was very bright.”
“What about my friend?”

“I don’t think either of those kids are anywhere near that house. If they had any sense they would stay out of that storm and this one.” My dad looked up and a couple drops of rain dotted his glasses. An earth shattering thunderclap startled me. It felt like it struck just a few feet away. My dad didn’t even flinch. “Come on inside son. This is none of our business.”

*          *          *

You are standing at the north end of the Valley of the Stone Faces. Above you, an incredible bas-relief statue of an immense minotaur has been carved out of the rock. At least sixty feet high, it sits gazing down at you with a faint but definite expression of amusement.

After school started I hardly saw him. We weren’t in the same grade. There were periods when we would try to hang out with one another. We even tried working on our game every now and then, but bigger and better things had come out and we just felt overwhelmed. A game called ‘Tunnels of Doom’ had come out for the TI994/a, and it was incredible. You could actually see a 3D view of the hallway you were walking down. We had played with graphics on and off but that just blew us away. We played it incessantly. We also played Dungeons and Dragons occasionally. We came up with this complicated way to port characters from our ‘Tunnels of Doom’ game over to D&D. In this way we had an excuse to start with ridiculously high level characters after only an afternoon’s worth of work. If you could survive to the 10th floor of ‘Tunnels of Doom’ you could port over a character with 9th level spells in D&D.

1981 was also the year MTV started. My friend had cable, and I remember sitting on the floor of his living room one afternoon watching ‘Rapture’ by Blonde for the first time. My friend knew all about it and had already memorized the rap part. Even the part in French. I was just confused and kept asking questions. “Where are they? Who is the guy in the top hat? What is rap? Why does she look so bored?”

But every time we would try to be friends for any length of time he would do something to ruin it. He would lie, or something strange would happen at his house. Then one day my dad took me aside and said he needed to talk to me. He told me that I was not allowed to go to my friend’s house anymore. I asked him why, but he never explained. He just said, “I’m not kidding about this. You are not to go over there. You understand me? Not under any circumstances. If he tries to talk to you I want you to come and tell me, okay?” It took me a couple of weeks to find out what had happened.

*          *          *

You are standing on the brink of what appears to be a bottomless pit plunging down into the bowels of the earth. Ledges run around the pit to the east and west, and a passage leads back to the north.

My friend had become more distant and daring with age. His parents were having financial trouble and they were ignoring him more and more. He was left alone for long periods of time, and he started playing basketball at the outdoor court at the school. One day he got it in his head that if he took a little of his dad’s gunpowder, that he wouldn’t miss it. Perhaps he wanted to sell it. Or maybe he thought the kids up at the basketball court would think it was cool. I never found out.

He ran all the way from his house and took the air tight jar out of a paper bag. He shook the powder in the jar. “See, I told you guys I could get you some!”

“Hey, let me see!” yelled one kid.

“No, no! Me first!” exclaimed another.

One child ran up to him and took the glass and held it up to the light. The others gathered around to see, and argue about who would hold it next. My friend had actually backed away and started talking to someone on the edge of the crowd.

And then it slipped.

There was no reason really. The boys weren’t fighting over it. The one boy just inexplicably dropped it. Some of the other boys instinctively jumped back knowing what might happen. But the boy who was holding it didn’t have the same forethought. He fumbled with it in mid air trying to recover his grip. He followed it all the way down to the edge of the concrete slab. He was bent over at the waste. His arms were out stretched.

One of the boys told me that the explosion really wasn’t very loud. In the open air of the outdoor court it sounded like a really large fire cracker, not an explosion. Almost everyone felt the sting of the flying glass. No one was really badly hurt except for the boy who was doubled over with his arms outstretched at ground zero.

He stood up slowly. His shirt was shredded. They say he really didn’t bleed at first, but all his skin was blackened. It took a few seconds for the screaming to start. Then a slow high pitched cry began to grow as the child ran away from the court. Even as he ran away the cry got louder and louder. My friend looked on in horror. Speechless.

Up
You can’t go in that direction.

“Someone do something! Go get somebody!”

My friend stood there for a moment, not knowing what to do. Not knowing what to say. He looked to his right and saw the screaming child running across the playground. He had no direction, no purpose. He was just reacting the in the only way he could.
“Do something! He’s burning!”

Xyzzy
Nothing happens.

In the end, my friend just ran. He ran all the way home at locked the door. Eventually one of the children ran and got an adult. They loaded the child in the back seat of a car and drove him to the hospital where he stayed for over a month.

There were surgeries and infections. There were accusations and lawsuits. In the end, their marriage didn’t survive. I never saw my friend again before they moved away. My dad had gotten wind of what happened. That’s why he told me to never go over there again. A couple of weeks later I found out what happened and went to the basketball court. That’s where I saw the blast mark. It looked so small. So much can happen in an instant.

*          *          *

Would you like to play again? Y or N

Will Crowther was the programmer that originally designed the Colossal Cave Adventure game. It is interesting to note that he worked on some of the original assembly language programs for the original routers for the ARPAnet which was the precursor to the internet. I have since learned that he wrote the game in 1975 when he became divorced from his wife. He was an avid caver and loved to play Dungeons and Dragons. He was separated from his two daughters and became very lonely. He wrote this program thinking his daughters would enjoy it and it might allow him to do something he loved which would make them closer. It is strange how such an odd thing can be born out of loneliness.

The locations of the Colossal Cave Adventure are taken directly from surveys of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky where I now live. My wife and I once took a trip to Mammoth Cave and toured the caverns. I knew that the tour would not take us near any of the locations in the game, but I kept looking for a small brick building from which a stream flowed down into a gulley. She didn’t really understand why I wanted to find this building so much, but she was indulgent and continues to be. One of my favorite things to do is sit down with my five year old daughter and play games on the computer. She is too young to yet say, “Oh dad, that game is so old…” so I often emulate older computer systems and play classic adventure games with graphics with her. We are currently playing Grim Fandango, and she loves it.

The TI99/4 and TI99/4a are widely known as one of the biggest business disasters of the home computer market. Texas Instruments lost millions of dollars, and they are no longer in the consumer electronics market. My father was later laid off from Texas Instruments when they shut down their consumer products advertising division. He had worked there for 32 years and was only two years from retirement. To this day he vehemently opposed to technology and doesn’t even own a cell phone or have an email account.

In time Digital Equipment Corporation failed as well. The advent of powerful desktop computers proved too much for them in the 90’s. They were split apart and sold off to various companies. Hewlett-Packard now owns what is left of the company and their logo. If you have ever had to use Telnet to do anything on the internet (most common users don’t have to do this, but web designers wishing to have shell access to a business server often still do this) you may be surprised to know that what you used was most likely an emulator meant to mimic a DEC VT100 machine.

My friend’s parents separated soon after the incident. A lawsuit from the parents of the injured child sent them further into financial ruin, and they moved away. Sadly, neither parent wanted their son, and he was raised by his grandparents.

Years later when I was in my 20’s I returned home for Christmas. There was a knock at the door and I got quite a surprise when I answered it.

“Hi Buck, do you remember me?”

It was my old friend. It was startling how much he looked like his younger self. He had the same face, and the same short, thin, ropy frame. He was wearing a dark leather jacket, and wearing glasses that were shaded a color of redish gray. It looked as though everything had come full circle.

He had brought his girlfriend with him. She looked extremely bored. He had been showing her where he grew up and he saw the lights on in our house and thought he would see if we still lived there. We must have stood in the entry way of our house talking for an hour. It was a very uncomfortable conversation for me. I wanted to know how he was doing, but there were so many topics to politely avoid that navigating the discussion was difficult.

Like me, he had found a way to be in college for years without ever getting a degree. Like me, he had never taken a class in computers, yet everyone wanted him to fix theirs. We talked about all the different systems we had owned over the years and the games we had played. He told me that at one point he had tried to join the army, but in basic training his elbow started to swell horribly when he was doing pushups so he was discharged for medical reasons. Currently he was between jobs and just trying to avoid most of his family during the holidays. It was a long uncomfortable conversation, and I was relieved when he finally left. I never saw him again.

I hope that my friend, and the child who was burned, and Will Crowther all found happiness in the end. I finally have. My daughter is the smartest, most wonderful and creative person I know. Almost to a fault, I indulge her and let her follow whatever her mind takes her. She has recently expressed an interest in taking ballet lessons. To be honest I can think of nothing more distasteful. Tutus, expensive shoes, and expensive classes. But I will be there every time she dances. In a year’s time I am probably going to be the most informed ballet fan in Kentucky, because I want to be there for her. Whether she wants to be a ballerina, a computer programmer, a cheer leader, or a bio chemist, I will be there with an encouraging word and love and interest by the truck load. History will not repeat itself. This is family 2.0. And my daughter can be whatever she wants to be.

Gomerville is honored, humbled, amused, and tickled pink to be hosting the First Anniversary Edition of The Handover.  The assignment was to write an EMS Portrait of someone who influenced the author’s career in some way.  I have written a few of these over the last few months and found it both challenging and rewarding.  I was extremely impressed by the quality and cleverness of the submissions.  Not only did I get portraits of co-workers, I also received portraits of patients and yes…a table where professionals sat.  Some of my favorite bloggers sent in submissions so I was extremely flattered to find some of them complimenting my work in their personal messages to me.  For this I am extremely grateful.  (Psssst…don’t tell any of these people what a terrible hack I am.)

While hosting the Handover this month, I found myself buried in work and had trouble meeting deadlines and keeping up with my own blog, much less so many others.  My writing has slowed some as a result.  However, seeing all these wonderful stories has given me a lot of inspiration to get back at it again.  Thank you all for that.

So, dear reader, I have an assignment for you as well.  (See, hosting the Handover lets you boss everyone around.)  While you browse this Anniversary Edition of the Handover, try and reflect on those who shaped your career.  And if you think of it, drop them a line and tell them, “Thanks.”  You know they don’t hear it enough.  And that kind of behavior should be reinforced.  Enjoy.

Life in Manch Vegas
A Sketch of My Friends

Hypoxic Witterings
Starting

Everyday EMS Tips
EMS Portrait: There is Always More to the Patient’s Story

The Insomniac’s Guide to Ambulances
Nina

The Happy Medic
An EMS Portrait

Rescuing Providence
An EMS Portrait

Street Watch: Notes of a Paramedic
Arthur

Notes from Mosquito Hill
Funny thing about firemen. . .

Medic 999
My One True Inspiration

And of course I gave it a whirl…
The W.M.B. Movement

The next Handover will be hosted by Mack at Notes From Mosquito Hill.  His subject next month will be “Passion.”  So don’t forget to stop on by Mack’s place to see what that’s about next month.

“What’s wrong, man?”

“Oh, hey Buck.  You might as well be the first to know.  I just got fired.  Not only that, I got fired by fucking email.”

*               *               *

Lynn used to be the most feared of all the supervisors.  The stuff of legend.  He was an angry ex-military man who had lost an eye that had been replaced with glass.  New employees were scared of him and all sorts of rumors floated around about how he had lost it.  One particularly wild rumor had him losing it on a secret mission in Vietnam.

He was not without a sense of humor though.  He loved to play jokes on new people who had just been hired.  His glass eye looked pretty good, and it usually took a few days for new people to notice it.  Orientation classes were always fun because after a few days one of them would invariably venture forth with a timid query, “Ummm, I was just wondering, does that supervisor over there have a prosthetic?”

“No. Of course not.  He just has a lazy eye, and he is sensitive about it.  I’m going to tell him you asked about it!  How rude!”  We were all in on the gag.

“No, please don’t!” was always the response.

“Well…I’ll let it pass this time.  But you owe me one. Glass eye.  Sheeeesh!”

And then Lynn would do the gag.  His usually accomplice was an old training officer name Danno.  They would both wait for an unsuspecting new recruit to be headed towards the bathroom.  “Goddamnit Lynn!  I told you to get out of my way.”

“Oh, yeah!  What’s your fuckin’ problem, punk?”  Lynn would always say this nice and cool.  Standing up straight and motioning with his hands to ‘bring it.’

“I’m fixing to tell you what my goddamned problem is you ugly mother fucker, if you don’t shut that hole of yours and get out of my way!”

“Oh yeah?  What you gonna do about it?  I don’t think you have the balls.”

By now the new recruit is usually looking around for some sort of help, wondering if she should run and tell someone about the fight in the hallway.

“Oh I got balls,” Danno would yell, “you’ll see ‘em in a minute when I rip out your eye and skull fuck you!”

“Oh yeah?” Lynn would yell, “What are you waiting for?”  At this point he would tear his glass eye out of it’s socket and bend over so Danno would have easier access.  It never failed to produce a squeal of terror.

Another variation that he employed when Danno was not around was to wash his eye off in the water fountain and put it into his mouth.  Then he would wait for an unsuspecting new recruit to walk down the hall.  He would fly around the corner and bump into them.  Immediately he would throw his hands over his eye and scream in pain.  The recruit would feel terrible and bend down to help him.  That’s when he would remove his hands and show them the empty socket.  While they were screaming in horror he would pretend to vomit his eyeball into his hand.  I actually saw a girl run screaming out of the building after Lynn had done this to her.

“Damn.  I hope she doesn’t freak out like that when she gets a bad patient,” Lynn said while he was washing off his eye in the water fountain.

*               *               *

Lynn was known as the strictest supervisor.  He had fired many people, and he was the first to tell you if you were on his list.  For the first year of my career I was a goody two-shoes and everyone knew it.  It wasn’t until a bit later that my subversive personality came to the forefront.  But for that first year I didn’t mess with Lynn, and because I stayed out of trouble he didn’t mess with me.  Until I got Don as a partner that is.

I was still an EMT at the time.  Don and I were given a special assignment in a new district.  We had just acquired a hospital contract in a far flung suburb and our mission was to be at that hospital’s beck and call.  Problem was they never called.  We would often go 24 hours without turning a wheel.  So we got bored, and occasionally turned to mischief.  Our so-called station was in a building across the street that housed a few doctors’ offices and a physical rehab clinic.  We were housed in what was previously an orthopedics office, and the station was a bit odd.  There were still desks, exam rooms, gurneys, and x-ray lights on the walls.  We also had the keys to the rehab clinic and would sneak in there at night to have wheel chair races around the walking track.

The trouble began one day when I mentioned that I liked cigars.  We were sick of playing Earthworm Jim on the Sega and Don decided we needed a couple of giant cigars to round out the evening.  We couldn’t smoke them inside the building so we started to set up shop out on the second floor landing.  I mentioned that we should be careful not to get our uniform shirts smoky and he agreed.  We laid out our shirts on the reception desk and looked at our new set of station keys that had been made for us today.

“Which one of these is for the door?”  I asked.  This particular set had just been cut today at our request so that we could both have a set.  The door locked when it shut and I wanted to be sure I had the new key.

“I think it’s this one,”  Don said and I put that key in my pocket.

We went outside and smoked for about an hour.  The breeze was cool.  The company was good, and the cigars were fantastic.  When it was time to turn in I fished the key out of my pocket and put it in the lock.  It wouldn’t turn.

“What the hell?”  I said, “This new key is crap.  It doesn’t work.  Oh well, let’s see yours.”

“Uh, I don’t have it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t have it.  You had the new one, so I left mine inside.”

A wave of panic spread over us both.  We were out of uniform.  We were at least 30 miles from the base station.  We were locked out of our station, and all we had was a tone pager.  This was back before cell phones too, so we didn’t even have that.

“Crap!  What do we do?  What do we do?  What do we do!”

Don got a sly smile on his face and said, “I guess we are going to have to call a supervisor.”

“Do you have a fucking deathwish?”  I looked at him in horror.  Oddly enough, Don was calm and smiling.  Don always did this when he was about to get in trouble.  He just smiled like an idiot.

After trying for about 30 minutes to take the door off the hinges using my Gerber tool we decided that the station was indeed safe from break ins, including our efforts.  So we went down to the truck, flipped on the master and used the radio to call for help.  As it just so happens, Lynn was on duty.

I had heard of the verbal beatings that Lynn gave.  His anger was legendary.  Some said that his prosthetic was good up until he got angry.  Then his eye would spin free and wild in his head while he yelled at you.  The madder he got, the more it spun off track.  There were those that said if it spun freely in his head like a slot machine you were sure to get fired, or at least get a month off without pay.

When he arrived it was like a storm blew in.  It was past midnight.  He slammed the door to the supervisor van.  He slowly walked over to the two of us standing in the parking lot.  For a few moments he said nothing.  He just stood there.  He took it all in.  The wind was staring to kick up and our pant legs would flutter against our calves occasionally.

“Maybe one of you idiots can tell me why I’m here instead of in my bed sleeping.”

“Because we screwed up?”  I offered.  I figure it was just best to own it.

“Thank you, Buck.  At least I know this is going to be an honest conversation.  I agree.  YOU SCREWED UP!”

I tried desperately to see his eye, but it was too dark.  It looked like it wasn’t spinning, but I couldn’t be sure.  What followed was a verbal lashing the likes of which I had never known.  Don tried to open his mouth and explain something occasionally, but Lynn would just hold his hand up and yell, “Shut your hole!  Does it look like I’m done chewing your ass?”

At the end of it he walked up to me.  There he was.  Nose to nose.  Mano a mano.  Now I could see his eye.  It wasn’t spinning, but it was off kilter.  One eye was boring into my soul.  The other was pointed at the restaurant across the street.  “What does this mean?” I thought to myself, “What does this mean!”

“Buck!” There was a long silence while he stared me down.  “Here is the freaking key to the freaking door.  Don isn’t the keeper of the key.  You are.  You hear me.  You keep the key!” Now he turned to Don, “And YOU!  Don’t you dare contaminate him with your useless bullshit.  Now get you goddamned shirts, and get back in service!”

He got in his van and drove away.

“Suck-up,” said Don.

“Blow me,” I said.

*               *               *

As time went by I became a paramedic, and then a field training officer, and then a critical care paramedic.  And I found that Lynn became less and less of a feared supervisor, and more a confidant.  I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime over the course of the next few years I stopped living in fear of him, and started to take long smoke breaks and bounce ideas off him.  I also became part of the inner circle that knew the real story about his eye.

“When I got out of the army I thought I was still all that and a bag of fucking chips,” Lynn once told me over the course of a Camel Light.  “I had my papers, but was still in.  I was in my class A’s when I was attending this big whoop-tee-do downtown.  A lot of big wigs were there and there was free champagne.  So I started knocking a few of those back.  I was young and dumb, and that shit doesn’t taste like anything, so I start getting pretty numb.  Well, I was holding one of those flutes when I got too drunk to stand and when I fell the glass actually broke into my face, and I screwed up my eye.

My buddies loaded me into a car and drove me down to Parkland down the road here.  Keep in mind that this was back in the day when insurance mattered and people withheld treatment.  They found out I was a serviceman, and worse than that I was technically out.  They made some phone calls and I had no insurance.  The doctor came in my room and talked to me about it.  They couldn’t do the surgery.  They would patch me up and stitch up the hole, but getting an eye surgeon to save it was out of the question without insurance, so I woke up the next morning wearing an eye patch.”

Lynn confided other life lessons to me.  He used to manage a couple of Subway sandwich shops and was famous for firing his own wife from one of the stores.  His work ethic has always been hard core and over the top.  He also once told me the horrific story about him being an army medic who was sent with a group to clean up the Jonestown massacre.  He was part of the operation that investigated and cleaned up 918 dead bodies which was something that still haunted him.

*               *               *

A few days before his termination Lynn came out with a group of us to lunch.  He had recently had some trouble with his neck that was also related to the original fall that injured his eye so many years ago.  He had recently underwent surgery to fuse two vertebrae in his neck.  He had been wearing the neck brace for about a week, everyone loved to screw with him.  We were all seated at a table and he was directly across from me.

“Goddamn, that is one fine looking woman,”  Jimmy said under his breath looking beyond and behind Lynn.

I looked up and saw no one, immediately catching onto the gag, “Oh yeah…those are nice,” I said softly while looking at my plate.

Lynn started to look around but had to turn his whole body.

“Lynn!  What the hell are you doing, man?  Play it cool.”

Damnit,” he muttered going back to trying to drink without a straw from his water cup.

Jimmy let a few seconds go by before doing it again.  “Oh my God,” he said under his breath looking over at me, “she has got to be in pornos or something.  If she bends over like that again I am going to have a heart attack.”

Lynn’s eyes got wide.

“Don’t you do it,” I told him, “you’ll ruin it for the rest of us…OH…did you see that?”

“Goddamnit,” Lynn said, “I don’t give a damn, I’m going to look!”  He turned his whole body around to find two ladies in their 60’s and a small child.  “Fuck you guys.”

*               *               *

“So why did they fire you?  What the hell?” I was only halfway surprised at Lynn’s termination.  He had recently been taken out of his Field Supervisor position and given the new position of Support Services Supervisor.  This sorry consolation prize was supposed to be a hint to start looking for another job, but Lynn didn’t get it.  He looked at it as an opportunity to gut the whole place and make it run with new efficiency.  But the writing was on the wall.  AMR had come in and bought our little company, and started streamlining us to death.  Half of the supervisory staff had been let go prior to this.  Everyone saw the writing on the wall except the angry, one-eyed man with a bullet proof work ethic.

“You know what?  I don’t even know why they fired me.  No one had the balls to tell me.  I got the details of a severance package in an email this morning.  I have just been sitting out here smoking and wondering what the fuck to do with myself.”

This may have been the only time in my life where I had ever seen him vulnerable.  We talked for a while and theorized that the job of firing him had probably been delegated down the chain of command a few times until so much time had passed that HR had sent him a severance package.  I asked him what he was going to do, and he said, “You know what?  I have no fucking clue.  I guess I’ll go home and be with my wife.  That’s what’s been important all these years.  You know, after all the death and destruction, after all the dead bodies, after loosing my eye, after having my neck fucked up, after all the stress and blood and puke and stupid people…the thing that always kept me sane was that short period of time every night when I go home to her.  We always make a snack, get in bed, and watch some TV together.  We laugh, we complain, and we carry on.  I have always worked so much that most days about an hour or two of that is all I have to look forward to.  And all these years it’s been enough, believe it or not.  Those mother fuckers can take my eye, and they can fuck up my neck, and they can take my job, but no one’s ever taking her away from me.  I was thinking about sticking around and giving these bastards a piece of my mind.  But instead I think I’ll go home and catch my wife before she goes to work.  She can play hooky with me today, and tomorrow I’ll try to see if anyone wants to hire a pissed off old man with one eye, a neck brace, and a paramedic cert.  It was nice knowing you Buck.”

 He slowly stood up, and walked off.  I never saw him again.

Gomerville will be hosting the Handover Blog Carnival this month.  I have been looking forward to this for some time and hope our readers enjoy the results.  This is also the first anniversary of the The Handover, so Gomerville is honored to be hosting the event during this milestone.

 The Topic: An EMS Portrait.

I have a small project going on that some of you may know about.  I am writing a series of blog portraits about people who have influenced my career.  I have found this extremely rewarding.  The experience of sitting down and writing about what someone means to you just cannot be compared.  I have revisited some wonderful memories and learned a bit about myself in the process.  So of course I wish my fellow bloggers to give this a try.  Below are a couple of links to my attempts at this style of writing.

 The Nimrod Movement

The Dorabella Movement

 Submissions are due no later than midnight on Monday the 25^th.  I will post the results on the 29^th.  Please send all links to your submissions and inquires to my email address: buckman@gomerville.com

The next Handover will be hosted by Mack at Notes From Mosquito Hill.  He is way more organized than me and already has his page up.  His subject next month will be “Passion.”  I have confirmed that he is not talking about the fruit.

 Have fun and happy blogging.

“Where?” I yelled back.

“I don’t care!”

I glanced over the edge to make sure there was no one downstairs.  Then I just chucked the table over the side of the landing.  It smashed on the floor below, but there was so much noise I couldn’t hear the crash.  The landing was narrow, and this gave the four of us more room to move.  Flame was starting to roll all over the ceiling now despite our best efforts to shoot it back.

“Damnit, we need another line up here!  I don’t have a radio!  Who’s got a radio!”  Bill was yelling through his facemask, and was now looking at the little antenna sticking out of my pocket.  “Give it here Buck!”

He reached over to me to grab my radio.  He ripped the velcro loose and pulled.  It was just at that moment I remembered that I had put my glasses into their case and placed them in the same pocket before making entry.  I saw the case tumble off into the distance.  It was lost in the black smoke instantly.  Those were the only pair of glasses I had.

I couldn’t hear what Bill was yelling into the radio.  It was something about a hose, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough.  I hadn’t been a fireman very long, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if a fire is rolling so hot that a full stream from a two inch line has no effect on it you don’t have long before its time to give up.  The water was just turning to steam.

Then I heard a lot of yelling to my left.  I looked over and saw the helmet lights of several more firemen.  I wasn’t currently holding the line, so I decided to go over and see if they had another hose.

“You got another line?”

“Nope, we’re a truck company.  We’re gonna tear some shit up.  Here, help out!”

He handed me a closet hook.  I couldn’t tell who he was although it looked like a crew from the neighboring district.  They had already started pulling down the ceiling in the room adjacent to us.  One fireman pulled down a large section and fire sprang out, licking the drywall around it.  Another fireman saw this, walked over to a wall opposite from that side of the room and jabbed his own hook in the wall.  Again, flame shot out.  I was in yet another corner of the room.  I buried my hook into the wall and pulled, exposing yet more flame.  I looked behind me a saw the metal air vent near the ceiling glowing red hot.

“Time to give up!  We’re surrounded!  This is some bullshit and we need to leave!”  One of the truck company guys was yelling at me frantically through his facemask.

“We’re leaving, get your guys out!”

*               *               *

It had been a slow Christmas Eve.  We had only had about three or four ambulance runs.  As the evening progressed, the calls trickled until there was nothing.  All the taxpayers where enjoying their holiday, and no one thought it necessary to call 911.  It was bitterly cold outside and snowing hard.  I would later read that it was only two degrees outside when the fire started.  But early in the evening after dinner all I could think about was the hot cup of coffee I was enjoying before turning into bed early.  I was hoping to get some sleep on a quiet night before going home just in time to open presents with my family.  I had stepped put onto the apron to enjoy looking at the snow fall for a few minutes before turning in.

But the silence was interrupted when the tones dropped for a fire alarm.

We pulled up to a very large house in a posh area of town.  The people in this area were so well-to-do that we often used commercial building tactics and preplanning for the residences.  This particular residence was just below 8000 square feet if you include the basement. 

There was a little smoke showing in whisps, but the air was still clear inside the residence and the family was still inside.   We knew we had to act fast, but it had not become dangerous yet.  If it was slowly building in the walls we might have plenty of time to locate it and cool it off before it got enough air to burn hot.

“We just had this fireplace installed,” she told us.  “This is the first fire we have started in it, but something is not right.  The wall is so hot.  It just didn’t seem right.  The kids noticed some smoke outside and we called you all.”

“How long ago did you light the fire, ma’am?” asked our captain as he pulled out the thermal imaging camera to inspect the walls.

“Three hours ago or so.”

“Really, three hours?  It was hot all this time and you never called?”

“I wasn’t sure what to do.  I thought it might cool down.  I don’t know anything about fireplace construction.”

Our captain was now pointing the camera higher up the wall.  “It looks hotter as you go up.  Ma’am there may be a bit of fire inside your wall.  We are going to have a look upstairs as well, and we’ll get this figured out.”

Just as he was finishing his sentence we heard yelling from the husband upstairs.  Something about smoke coming from the walls.

After that everything was a bit of a blur.  To be honest, I do not have much fire experience, and I was never much of a fire fighter.  At the time I worked for a tiny suburban fire district that catered to the rich and famous.  No one on the department had fought a house fire in three years.  The residents in this area were so rich that all the houses had super sophisticated sprinkler and alarm systems.  The occasional faulty alarm made the bulk of our fire runs.  My whole fire career up to this point had consisted of me carrying an ax while I looked for an alarm panel.

Being a paramedic in this district was different.  We made medical runs all day long and constantly responded to the neighboring towns for mutual aid.  To be honest, our own district called for an ambulance about one a month, but we averaged about 8 to 10 runs per day.  And that’s how our salaries got paid.  And that’s why I was hired.  Being a fireman was just an afterthought.  I had zero experience and even less interest in the profession.  However, I was about to get a crash course in how not to fight a fire. 

*               *               *

I made my way back out onto the landing to tell my crew that it was hopeless and we had to go.  As I was yelling as much through my facemask it became apparent that they had come to the same conclusion.  We were going to pack up the hose and back out slowly but we heard this horrible creaking and groaning sound that slowly turned into a rumble.

“Go! Go! Go!” shouted Bill who was coming at me like a freight train.  If I hadn’t started running myself I surely would have been trampled by the others.  As it was though, they were going to have to work to keep up with me.

I abandoned the low and slow routine that comes with structure fire fighting.  I was running just as fast as a short squatty man in 70 pounds of gear can run.  The staircase ahead was L-shaped, with a landing halfway down turning to the left.  As I reached the top of the stairs I could hear the roar of the house coming down around me.  I couldn’t see through the smoke and I had no idea where the last step was.  I simply kept running forward and slammed into the wall in mid flight, sliding down the drywall to the first landing.  I then sprang from that and reached the bottom floor without touching one more step.  Seconds later I was outside the house.

I ran about halfway to the street, and turned around to count heads to make sure everyone was behind me.  Thankfully, all four of us where kneeling in the lawn panting and gasping for breath as the entire roof caved into the house.  My friend Tim started shouting that he was burned and I rushed over to him.  He was tearing off layers of gear screaming, “My neck!  My neck!”  As I got to him, the difference in temperature made it look as if he was on fire himself.  The environment we just left was close to 800 degrees, but out on the lawn it was only 2.  Smoke and stream were rising off of us as if we were covered in dry ice.  I pulled back his collar and found an ember that had made it’s way into his coat.  I brushed it off and started laughing.  He looked at me for a moment as if I was sadistic or insane.

“No! No! No!” I yelled.  “You’re going to be fine.  It was a tiny ember.  I’m sure it hurt like a bitch being sealed up in your coat.  But all you will have is a little blister, which is a damn sight better than having a wholehouse fall on top of you! 

*               *               *

The rest of the night was an exhausting marathon of dragging hose, moving hose, emptying hose, rolling hose, laying hose, and whatever else you can think of to do with hose.  If it was round and had water in it, I carried it somewhere.  This of course became tiring after a while.  Add to this the fact that we were constantly getting wet and the water would freeze to us in sheets.  I lost track of how many times I had to walk over to a tree and bang myself against it repeatedly to break the ice off.

Without my glasses I was completely useless.  Everything was blurry anyway, but the fact that the place was shrouded in snow made it intolerable.  People kept ordering me about by pointing a finger and saying, “Go over there and do so-and-so.”  Shortly afterwards I would be found wandering aimlessly in the neighbor’s yard looking for some non-existent object.

The only thing left to do was surround the house and drown it.  And that we did.  Two deck guns and a stinger turned that 8000 square foot house into the Fortress of Solitude.  The house could no longer burn.  It was encased in ice.

*               *               *

We got back to the station at about 6am on Christmas morning.  The next shift had learned of the fire and some had already come in to help with the clean up.  I wasn’t much good for anything.  I was blind, tired, could barely walk, and was prone to falling asleep every time I sat down for longer than 20 seconds.  At 6:30 the tones dropped again for a roof collapse at the local elementary school.  The weight of the snow had apparently made the structure give way.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me!”  All I could do was sit on the floor.  I had no energy left.  Thankfully there were enough people on hand to manage all the trucks.  That call turned out to be the real thing.  No one was hurt, but they were there for hours.  Thankfully, my partner and I were allowed to stay behind.  She was kind enough to give me a lift home.  I was unable to drive without my glasses and had to abandon my car at the station.

I arrived back home at about 8am on Christmas morning.  Exhausted, blind, sore, and disgusted, but happy to be alive.

Christmas was wonderful despite the circumstances.  My daughter was still a toddler and did not really yet grasp the concept of Santa Claus, but she would squeal with delight whenever she was presented with a gift.  After a while we figured this out and let her open all the presents.  I eventually fell asleep on the floor in front of the tree and was soon evicted and banished to the bedroom for snoring.

*               *               *

Upon my next shift I was greeted by all my excited co-workers.  “So Buck!  What did you think about your first real fire?”

I will tell you what I told them.  And mind you I still believe this to this day:

“That was quite possibly the stupidest fucking thing I have done in my entire adult life.”

“What?” They all looked shocked.  They were still high from the thrill of it all.

“Let me tell you something.  I nearly got crushed and burned alive the other night.  I lost my glasses, and just about ruined Christmas for my little girl.  More important than that, my little girl almost lost her father.  And what did I risk my life for?  Was it for a child trapped upstairs?  No.  Was it because someone’s life was in danger?  No. Was there any danger to life or limb at all during that entire affair?  You bet there was.  Us.  We were the only thing in any danger there.  And for what?  So that we could attempt to save somebody’s stuff?.  Yep.  That’s it.  I risked my life for somebody else’s pile of stuff.  Consumerism at it’s finest.  Someone, who I might add, who was too fucking stupid to call 911 until well after the walls had been on fire for a couple of hours.  I can see it now, ‘Honey, why do you think the walls are so hot next to this brand new fire place that’s just been installed and has its first fire burning in it?  It wouldn’t be because anything is wrong, would it?  Naaaaahhhhh.  Couldn’t be.  I’m rich and stupid and nothing bad can happen to me.  Give us another fucking glass of merlot to fortify my denial and abject stupidity.  I want to let this bitch get good and rolling before I embarrass myself by calling the professionals to take care of it.  An army of burly twits is waiting to descend on our house and save all our stuff.  And in the end insurance will pay for it.  Raise your glass then.  Cheers.  Here’s to being rich and stupid.’  Screw this profession.”

I meant it, and I still mean it.  All of my coworkers at the station looked at me in horror.  There were all sorts of argument as well as insults to my character.  But I think fire fighting is one of those things where most people in the profession can’t see the forest for the trees.  When I pressed them and asked, “Is your life really worth risking for someone else’s stuff?”  I got no answer.  Don’t get me wrong.  There must be a fire department.  There will probably always be one.  People have to perform rescues.  People need to be cut out of cars.  There will always be hazardous spills.  But for the life of me I still have no idea why a sane man would run into an empty burning building to try and save someone’s stuff.  It’s just beyond me.  And thankfully, I no longer have to do it.  I quit quite some time ago and have no wish to go back.  Attention all snooty merlot-swilling nouveau riche idiots: I am more important that your stuff.

Well, at least I’m still alive to tell the tale.  I am sure there will be various opinions on my stance.  There are legions of fire fighters out there ready to defend their wish to be the witless pawns of the insurance industry.  Let the flames begin!

It did, however,  lead me back to blogging.  And that statement may need a little explanation.  The female lead in the series is this little thing by the name of Billie Piper.  She has got just the right mix of innocence and trashiness to drive a dirty old man like me to the point of distraction.  So I had a few spare moments the other day, and I googled her.  Low and behold she comes up wearing all this skimpy stuff.  “Ho ho!  What’s all this then?”  I said as I clicked a few links.  Turns out she was in a show called Secret Diary of a Call Girl.  So of course I start looking into this, and it turns out that the show is based on the blog of a real person.  “Ho ho!  What’s all this then?”  I said as I clicked a few links and found this, the real thing.

Belle de Jour is the blog of a real London call girl, and I found it to be a fascinating read.  The thing that really struck me was how similar it was to my own blog.  Our tastes seem to be the same.  She doesn’t bother with pictures or other flashy things so many people like to install nowadays, just plain text on a clean background.  She writes vignettes about her profession in a creative non-fiction style.  And the thing that I found really odd was that there were so many similarities between professions.  Most of the clients are only seen once, and rather quickly.  It usually isn’t on their best day.  Embarrassing things happen with bodily fluids and the aftermath is tastefully and discreetly dealt with by a professional who learns about life in the process.  After reading quite a bit of her blog I have come to the conclusion that she would have made a fantastic paramedic.  Whether or not I would be a successful whore will probably also remain a mystery.  And I doubt anyone is googling me on the internet while thinking about wrecking me low and sideways, but I can always hope.

But this experience has inspired me to get back at it myself.  (Writing I mean, not selling my body.)  And to come full circle, even Doctor Who has me thinking about blogging.  For those who are not initiated, the Doctor is a character that owns a vehicle that allows him to travel through space and time at will.  He observes his new surroundings and occasionally becomes engaged.  Always exploring.  Always searching.  And so I have enjoyed getting in my little time machine and revisiting parts of my life, trying to poke and prod it to see what comes out and what I can learn.

And so I promise a new post soon.  I am also hosting the Handover next month so I had better shape my act up.

Anyway, a few members of the old management remained and were not very pleased with the new people.  At the time an 800 number existed for the employees to anonymously call in concerns about ethics violations, and other sensitive complaints that warranted investigation without reprisal.  Apparently the two members of management left over from the old regime had used this protected line in order to voice some of their complaints.

I was brought into an office one day where all the new management was huddled around a desk listening to a recording.  Our regional manager had made a few phone calls, and had the tapes of those ‘anonymous complaints’ sent to our office.  We were instructed to listen to the tapes over and over again until we were sure which employees had made the calls.  A couple of weeks later one of those managers was terminated and the other demoted to a regular field position.  I did not participate in this meeting.  I was silent.  I also did not stay there much longer after that incident and many others that would make your skin crawl.

Unfortunately, this is the world in which we live.  These are the kinds of things that happen in corporate America.  I also have inside knowledge about other people who have been fired from other companies due to posts they made on the internet.  However, for several reasons I cannot mention any of the details of those events here.

But make no mistake.  I have seen good people whose families and mortgages were dependant on their income lose their job due to politics or because they had reported ethics violations.  These people and their families suffered financial hardships that changed their lives.  Some lost their retirement.  Some had to start careers in other fields and basically start their lives over again.

So, please…when you read my last post about anonymous blogging, take things seriously.  Blowing the whistle may be the right thing to do.  Starting a union may be the right thing to do.  But please be careful.  Don’t lose your retirement.  Don’t lose your house.  Don’t lose your career.  Don’t be careless.  The purpose of my post was to empower you to do the right thing.  (And be a super nerd.)  A little paranoia is healthy in these instances.  I live an ethical life.  I have reported people when I had to.  When I put my daughter to sleep at night I do not worry about where she will sleep next month.  I don’t worry because I am a super paranoid nerd.  Don’t play with fire.  Don’t be careless.  Don’t blow the whistle unless you are sure you have covered your tracks.

Anyway, this has been fun.  Later on in the week I will teach you how to make an untraceable phone call.  The whip cream on top will be that you will be able to make it appear like it is coming from any number you chose.  So go ahead and call that ethics hotline.  Have your computer read a script to hide your voice on your untraceable number.  Its nerdy good fun.  See you then.