" /> BRAINPAN LEAKAGE » cops

  • Fly The Friendly Skies?

      0 comments
      15th Jul 09
      M. R. Sellars

    Continued from: You Want Blonde Or Brunette On That?

    Part 4 of 4…

    I’d like to take a moment to point something out to everyone. As I mentioned in the first installment of this little travelogue, I have a blast every single time I visit Heather and the gang at Violet Flame Gifts (VFG). No two ways about it, and this time was no different. Great folks, great food, great time had by all. If you are ever in the area you owe it to yourself to visit VFG, or even swing by their website. They truly are amazing.

    However, I think you will all agree that me going on and on about what a great time I had is nowhere near as funny as me twisting off about the silliness that occurred getting there… And, as you will soon see, back home…

    As is the custom, Saturday night at VFG after a successful store event involves a party. Much food, in this particular case some killer BBQ’d ribs along with all the trimmings prepared by Grillmaster Max, and much alcohol to wash said food down your gullet. And, as is the custom, I usually imbibe enough to be the beneficiary in receipt of at least a mild hangover the next day. No exception this time, although the hangover was probably the mildest I’d ever had in my life. It was really just one of those “oogly” feelings as opposed to the standard day after maladies.

    And so, late Sunday morning, following a killer brunch prepared by Devin and the gang, we were off to the Columbus airport. Our goodbyes said, Dorothy Morrison and I checked in our luggage, grabbed our boarding passes, and headed for the security checkpoint.

    cpap
    I’ve mentioned in the past that I am dependent upon a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine when I sleep, and following suggested protocol I always transport it in my carry-on. These days, due to the heightened security, CPAP’s and I am sure many other medical devices as well, have become the bane of a traveler’s existence. It seems that someone decided such devices required an extra round of testing whenever presented at airport security. This always means that I end up standing off to the side while they swab, inspect, detect, look over, test, and otherwise run my machine through a mass spectrometer. While this takes a few extra minutes each time I check in, it has never been a major problem.

    Until Columbus…

    My first indication that something was up came while I was stuffing my feet back into my shoes. Instead of the friendly chirp usually emitted by the test equipment, my ears were pierced with an angry electronic squeal, followed by the surprised voice of the five foot nothing TSA agent wielding the swab.

    “Sir, we’ve had a hit on your CPAP machine.”

    I was equally surprised in some respects, but in others, not so much. I mean, after all, a CPAP is a little air pump with filters in it. It sucks in air on one end, and then blows it back out on the other. It’s bound to pick up some manner of foreign particulate of some sort at some point. It just stands to reason.

    I finished putting on my shoe and said, “Okay. So what do we do now?”

    She didn’t hear me because she was too busy putting herself on instantaneous red alert since I was obviously some sort of terrorist or something. Seconds after she began shouting and waving, a whole host of blue shirted para-military rent-a-cops descended upon me as if I was Bin Laden himself. I began to wonder just exactly what their million dollar spectrometer had told them my CPAP contained.

    Not wanting to be tackled, I stood perfectly still with my hands in plain view and asked again, “What do we do now?”

    The youngest of the private sector, government sanctioned SS clones stared very intently at the readout then barked, “Have you taken any medication?”

    Well, that query in and of itself answered one of my own unspoken questions. It wasn’t so much that they thought I was a terrorist. They thought I was smuggling drugs. What kind of drugs they thought I was smuggling I have no idea, but whatever it was had them awfully excited.

    Still, being an honest and helpful sort I replied, “No, but I did drink a large amount of alcohol last night before going to bed.”

    tsa-2Instead of simply dismissing the alcohol as the cause, the kid immediately took on an attitude. He sneered at me, then adopted an unnecessary sarcastic tone as he said, “That wouldn’t cause this. We’re going to have to search you.”

    My out loud voice said, “Yes sir, no problem.” However, it’s a good thing they haven’t perfected a mind reading machine because my inside voice said, “Listen up you little asshole, I’m old enough to be your father and if you take that tone with me again I’ll beat you senseless with that wand then stuff your happy ass into the X-Ray machine.”

    Now, here’s the fun part. The kid didn’t seem particularly pleased that I was being cooperative. In fact, it seemed that the more cooperative I was, the more he became convinced that I was the leader of some kind of international drug cartel that was using Columbus, Ohio as a base of operations. The next thing I know I’m standing there with the “two by two, hands of blue” dude from Firefly, and he is announcing that he is going to search me. He tells me not to move then starts to explain this process, whereupon I take it upon myself to make a suggestion.

    “Shouldn’t we move out of the way?” I said, interrupting him.

    At this point I now have a dozen passengers stacked up behind me who have cleared security and who want to get to their gates. Unfortunately, Mister Blue Hands and I have the narrow passageway blocked. He stares at me, thinks about this for a minute, and then says, “Yeah. Maybe we should move so people can get by.”

    Again, my inside voice opened it’s figurative mouth and echoing inside my skull I heard, “Well Duh… Figure that one out all by yourself there Skippy?”

    The kid is standing next to the spectrometer and watching all this. It’s obvious from the look on his face that he is working up some kind of “I’m gonna get a medal” hard-on because he thinks he’s caught himself a dangerous drug smuggler.

    Now that we had moved out of the way, bluehands started to tell me again how the procedure works. Before he made it halfway through the first sentence I spread my feet apart and held my arms straight out to my sides. He screwed a quizzical look onto his face and asked, “You know how this works?”

    My outside voice said, “Yeah, I fly a lot so I’ve seen it done.” My inside voice screamed, “Anyone who’s ever seen an episode of a cop show on TV knows how this works you moron. Just get it over with. And, just so you know, If I have to endure this anyway, I’d much rather have the hot blonde gal over there on the other security line grabbing at my crotch instead of you.”

    In retrospect I suppose knowing how a pat down works made me look guilty, especially given that the TSA kid who was daydreaming about a commendation damn near soiled his britches in excitement when I automatically “assumed the position.”

    And so, I was subjected to a full pat down while the wide-eyed five-foot nothing member of the federal rent-a-cops tore my carry-on apart. I have to say, it was kind of amusing when she started looking through the viewfinder on my camera like it was an alien artifact. But, I think what tickled me most was the abject confusion she displayed upon finding the vacuum sealed retail package of pepperoni sticks I carry just in case I’m ever stuck on the tarmac for 4 hours in an airplane that can’t move. (Don’t laugh. It’s actually happened, and I hadn’t had dinner that night.)

    Those really confused her. I mean flat out confused. I hate to think what would have happened if she had opened up my notebook and started reading the handwritten portions of my latest manuscript.

    But, anyway, when the search was over the supervisor kid seemed a bit disappointed. It was pretty clear that he thought he’d captured a hardened criminal who was stupid enough to smuggle drugs in a carry-on bag. On top of that, when they gave me back said carry-on bag, everything had been shoved back into it in such a haphazard fashion that it ended up taking me twenty minutes to straighten it out. And, on top of that, I had to ask them to return my CPAP machine. Yeah, go figure.

    But, it gets better…

    The excitement now behind us, Morrison and I strolled down the concourse to our gate, checking out the restaurants along the way since it was approaching lunchtime. For the next hour, and even right on up until we boarded our flight, the blue shirted TSA kid kept popping up everywhere we turned. I’m fairly certain he was following me.

    It’s too bad this didn’t happen around Thanksgiving. If it had, then I would be able to write a 17 minute long, forever enduring folk song about it, and then go hang out with Arlo Guthrie. (I wonder if he gets searched by the TSA?)

    But do you want to know the real kicker? We finally boarded the airplane, this time an Airbus 320, and as soon as we were in our seats the pilot came over the loudspeaker with a familiar piece of news. It seemed the auxiliary power unit was malfunctioning, we had no air conditioning, and that instead of sending someone to Sears for a DieHard battery, he had bribed some guys in yellow vests and earmuffs to give us a jump, just as soon as they could find where they stashed the cables.

    I kid you not.

    Maybe I should start packing jumper cables in my carry-on. Wonder what the TSA would think about that…

    More to come…

    Murv

      Festivals, Humor, Life, Touring, Writing
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  • Who Is This, And How Did You Get In My Computer? PART 2

      0 comments
      18th Mar 09
      M. R. Sellars

    Continued From:

    Who Is This, And How Did You Get In My Computer? PART 1…

    The modem had finally negotiated a compatible communications protocol and was “speaking” to another device somewhere. For all I knew, that somewhere was halfway around the world, or just right next door – remember, Caller ID was just an idea from the land of Sci-Fi back then…

    I waited impatiently for what was going to happen next… Having seen Wargames more than once – I did work at a video store, after all – I was pretty much bracing myself for some idiot to type in “SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?” then tell me his name was Joshua and that he controlled all of the nuclear missiles in the country. If that happened, I was going to be even less happy than I already was.

    The screen cleared and the phosphor green cursor winked at me from the upper left corner of the monitor. I sat watching, my hands in my lap and one eyebrow raised as I waited for something more to appear. After what seemed like a full thirty seconds had passed, the cursor dropped down two lines on the screen of its own accord, as if some phantom had just hit the enter key twice.

    A second or two later, one laborious letter at a time, the word “hello” appeared.

    I was still perturbed, but now I was also slightly curious. Obviously I had a live person at the other end, and I was assuming they were aware that they had one too. After all, they had just kept calling and calling until they managed a connection, so this apparently fit into their plan somewhere along the line.

    Of course, I did have one thing going through my mind. BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems – a precursor to the Internet) were seriously gaining popularity around this time. I, myself, frequented several, and while I ended up actually hosting and running one a few months after this incident, I wasn’t doing so at that moment. Of course, someone with a number close to mine could have been, and this could all be a matter of a mis-dial. This would mean the person at the other end might be just as confused as me right now since there was no welcome screen or login prompt being displayed.

    I stared at the glowing word on the screen a moment longer. The thing was, BBS popularity was big among the 11-14 year old crowd, so I really needed to avoid typing back a string of expletives damning this person for interrupting my night, lest it be some tween with a Commodore 64 who would go running to mommy and daddy screaming that some guy at XXX-XXXX telephone number was cussing at him.

    Keeping this in mind, I rested my fingers on the keys. “Hello,” I typed back, much faster than my mystery caller had. Of course, I typed around 85wpm back then. Now, it’s more like 60wpm. Arthritis seriously sucks… But, I digress…

    The person at the other end slowly typed again, “hello”.

    I rolled my eyes. It seemed I didn’t have a rocket scientist calling me, so the likelihood of it being a tween with a hastily – and incorrectly – scrawled BBS number from a buddy at school instantly grew.

    I set my fingers flying across the keyboard once again. “Sorry, but this number isn’t a BBS. It’s the number for a private individual.”

    I waited for a response.

    It came. “ya so”

    Apparently the mystery tween was also a smartass who didn’t have a shift key or a grasp of punctuation. The latter two, while irritating, I could forgive. The first one, not so much… So, not really having patience for that sort of thing – I was young, remember…not that I have all that much patience for it now either, but I was much worse back then – I control-keyed myself over to the command menu and disconnected the call without bothering to type an answer.

    Now, the thing about modems is this – they only do what they have been told to do. And, back then (even today for that matter, though it is far more transparent than it was in the good ol’ days) you would generally tell them to do something with what was called an “AT” command. Why? Because all commands started with the letters “AT” of course, which more or less stood for “ATTENTION”… So, it was pretty much “Attention modem, do this” – although it took the form of commands like ATA (Attention modem: Answer) or ATS13=0 (Attention modem: set bit on register 13 to zero – essentially “off”… binary and all that jazz…)

    My point here is that with the exception of telling the modem to disconnect the annoying a$$wipe kid who was connected, the last thing I had told the device to do was initialize in the Auto Answer mode. Since I had not “reset” any registers, as far as it was concerned, it was going to answer the phone.

    So, when the phone inevitably rang again, it did what it was intent on doing.

    I suppose I could have picked up the phone, or  quickly entered a re-init code before the third ring had sounded, but I didn’t. I just muttered, “Little f*cking bastard,” and sat there as the system connected and warbled through a fresh protocol negotiation.

    The screen cleared and I was faced with “hello” once again.

    I keyed in, “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

    “no” was the response.

    I typed back, “Some of us have to go to work in the morning.”

    “ya me to,” my mystery caller laboriously returned. (BTW, I am misspelling my mystery caller’s entries as close to the way they were misspelled as I can remember.)

    I raised an eyebrow… Okay, either I had an adult or a lying tween. I was leaning toward lying tween, but one never knew. You still don’t these days. Susie Silky Thighs in the hot sex chat room could be a 52 year old drunk guy sitting there in his underwear pulling his pud for all you know. I think there was even a viral video out on the net where someone used that idea for a commercial or something… Yeah, I know… Oh look, a chicken… (I really, really do think that chicken thing is friggin’ hilarious…) Oh, and BTW, I don’t hang out in hot sex chatrooms… I’m married to E K, so why would I bother? My ex-boss did, however, and probably still does… yeah, ‘nother blog.

    So, anyway, mystery caller says he/she has to go to work in the morning too.

    “Okay, so don’t you think it’s bedtime?” I typed back.

    “not yet,” was the reply. “what ar you dooing”

    “Getting annoyed,” I replied.

    “ya”

    I decided to ask the obvious question. “Who is this?”

    “you no” came across the screen.

    I replied, “Obviously I don’t or I wouldn’t have asked.”

    By way of a response I got, “pool open yet”

    This one gave me pause. Obviously this was someone who knew me, or  at the very least knew I had a pool. If it was one of my friends then they already knew whether or not the pool was open, so I couldn’t imagine them asking such a question. I turned in my seat to look around at my windows. The blinds were drawn so I didn’t figure I was being watched, unless this whack job on the other end had X-ray vision or something. I allowed my gaze to linger for a moment on the headboard of the bed where I had my loaded .357 magnum stashed. I considered getting it out and laying it beside the keyboard, but thought maybe that was being just a bit too paranoid.

    “Who is this?” I typed again, none to excited about the creepy stalker feeling I was now getting.

    “i see you tammarow” was the only answer I received before the modem clicked and the call disconnected.

    I sat for nearly an hour waiting for another call, but it never came.

    Before finally climbing back into bed I saw to it that I checked the load on my pistol and shifted it to be within reaching distance if something awakened me unexpectedly… You know, like a psycho killer stalker or something, know what I mean?

    The next morning I was still ruminating over the whole incident, and doing a lot of looking over my shoulder as well. I called all my friends with computer equipment and asked them if they were screwing with me, to which I received believable answers to the negative. I told my co-workers about it and even a couple of my regular customers who had become slightly more than acquaintances but not quite good friends. They all agreed that it was a bit weird, and one even suggested I contact the police. Of course, even then I knew better than to believe the cops would do anything about it. I mean, after all, what could they do other than take a report? That way there would be a paper trail when my corpse was found hanging from a swing set in the park with my hands chopped off, or some oddball crap like that.

    Yeah… big help…

    It was sometime after lunch – mid afternoon as I recall – when Scott Ruddle wandered into the store and listened to me tell the story.  (In case you are new here, or don’t remember previous references to Scott, he ended up being my best man when E K and I married. He’s also the person upon whom the character Detective Benjamin Storm, from the RGI novels, is based… Yeah, that Scott Ruddle…) So, anyway, this was well prior to the beer can tossing… (see: There I was, Just Sitting By The Pool…) In fact, we had only just recently met and the friendship we eventually developed hadn’t even officially been launched just yet. At this point he was one of those “pretty good acquaintance – semi almost friend” types. As he stood there nodding his head and adding an occasional “no sh*t?” to let me know he really was listening, it suddenly dawned on me.

    I stopped mid sentence and stared at him, then started shaking my head. “You friggin’ bastard,” I said.

    No longer able to contain himself he started laughing.

    And, so began my psyche damaging, sometimes very odd, but lasting and incredibly true friendship with Sergeant Scott Ruddle and his wife.

    Now you know why I’m just a bit addled in the head…

    And, yeah… Now he’s a cop. Like I’ve said before, welcome to my world…

    More to come…

    Murv

      Humor, Life, Nostalgia
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