BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Literally.

Why would I lie about something like that?

… And yes, I do realize that right now you are all sitting there chanting, “Murv’s gonna get it… Murv’s gonna get it…”

Normally, I would agree with you, but go back to the beginning and read again what I wrote… I’m fairly certain I typed in the word, literally. As in, E K is a literal pain in my ass. Not figurative. Not metaphorical. Nope. None of that dancing about and implied torture. No husbandly lamenting about a wife’s wifeliness. We are talking about the real deal here…

I mean to say, the woman literally caused pain and physical damage to my Gluteus Maximus.

Uh-huh… I know… Now all of you are sitting there saying, “So what? You’re talking about E K. Since you say she’s so evil then she probably just tied you up and spanked you or something like that. Big deal. Just roll with it you big baby.” (On that note – The cartoon on the right is just for you “perverted types,” BTW… )

Well, though it is apparently titillating for all of you to imagine such a scenario, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be imagining it… Hey…. Hey! Yeah, you. Stop staring at the cartoon and pay attention.

Okay… so where was I? Oh yeah… As I was saying, such graphic details might be a little too much info for a relatively PG rated blog like Brainpan Leakage… And, for the record, I am now firmly convinced that y’all have dirtier minds than I do… Especially you… Yeah, you in the back row. The one that keeps staring and drooling at the cartoon… It’s a friggin’  PG rated cartoon for Gods sake… Sheesh… For shame… For shame…

So, anyway, let’s set the record straight right here and now… E K did not spank me. Well… Not in this particular case anyway. (There, did that little bit of innuendo satisfy your prurient curiosity, or just pique it? Yeah… I thought as much, ya’ bunch of sickos… When you’re all done drooling over the silly cartoon, we can continue…)

(Jeopardy thinking music)

Okay, are we all done? Finally… Good…

So now that we’ve dispensed with the mental foreplay, we’ll move on already…

We’ve established that no spankings were had. The simple fact is that this is an entirely different kind of literal pain in the ass. And, it is also one that reaches far back into history. So, since the whole nostalgia approach of the “marriage blog” mini-series seemed to go over so well, I figured y’all might like to hear this story too. So, let’s all jump into the wayback machine and have a look at this particular, and annoyingly painful, slice of my past… (Yeah, you too… Yeah you… I don’t care… You can page back up and look at the cartoon again when we’ve finished the story… Sheesh… You don’t get out much, do you?)

Okay… On with the sordid tale…

The year was nineteen and eighty six…  E K and I had met by this point, and were more or less in the midst of doing that coy, flirty thing that accompanies the first three months of dating. You know what I mean…

For men it’s crap like: Getting a haircut. Making sure your shirt isn’t wrinkled. Actually tying your necktie in a Full Windsor instead of a Half, but only after making doubly sure it actually matches your shirt and slacks. Using aftershave and maybe even a bit of cologne… Holding your farts in until you are in the next county and downwind so that the object of your affection will never know…

For women it’s crap like: Shaving your legs regularly. Wearing a shorter skirt and higher heels than you normally would on your average workday.  A push up bra. Fancy jewelry… Holding your farts in until you are in the next county and downwind so that the object of your affection will never know…

Y’all know the drill… Typical, flirty – datey stuff.

On the particular day in question, E K arrived at our place of employment, all decked out in a nice blouse, blazer, shape hugging slacks, and the high heels that were a bit too high for your average work day… The pumps were a dead giveaway that she was being flirty, because:

1. She had service calls to take and was going to be on her feet, digging around behind printers, kneeling, bending over, and all of the other gyrations that come along with taking a service call. (For the record, it’s actually pretty good exercise.)
2. She had VERY RECENTLY uncovered my particular affinity for shapely female legs and high heels. (It bears mentioning that being the absolutely brilliant femme fatale she is, The Evil Redhead has used this information to her benefit on countless occasions, ever since making the discovery.)

The only thing missing from the overall package was the shorter than normal skirt, but see #1. She had to compromise somewhere along the line, and like I said, the slacks were definitely figure flattering…

Okay… I need some alone time now…

Just kidding. Well, not really, but I have too much to do and I need to finish this story…

In keeping with the flirty stuff, E K had some tasteful jewelry on to accentuate here and there. Of course, being incredibly practical as well, one of the jewelry items was a fancy little diskette lapel pin. I mean, after all, she’s a technician, so she needed to have herself some technician jewelry, right? And, yes, the picture here is of the actual pin in question. As amazing as it may seem, she still has it after all these years. Granted, it may look a bit odd to you youngsters who have never seen a 5 1/4 inch floppy diskette in real life, but that is exactly what it was patterned after. BTW, Sorcim / IUS was a software company. They were the “publisher” of a widely used, DOS Based program called SuperCalc. If I remember correctly, the lapel pin itself was a gimme type perk she received for attending a Sorcim seminar.

So, anyway, enough rambling on about ancient technology being transformed into jewelry. Let’s get back to this particular day in history…

E Kay’s truck… Yes, my dear and lovely used to drive a truck…  Anyway, her truck was going to be in the shop for some routine maintenance, which effectively left her without wheels, but she still needed to take service calls. Unfortunately, the outfit we were working for at the time, TC Service, didn’t have company vehicles for us to use. So, in order that my lovely be able to take her scheduled service calls, I loaned her my car. As it happened, said vehicle was the Mustang LX I was desperately trying to pay off… Yeah, that’s one of those, “another stories,” but if you read the “Mahwage” series of entries, you know what I mean.

So, after a bit of flirting and lustful stirrings brought about by E K in high heels purposely reaching for things behind her desk while standing in front of it, if you know what I’m saying, I sent her on the road with parts, tools, and my car. After that, the day continued in a relatively uneventful fashion. I configured a few Leading Edge PC’s, fixed a printer or two, answered some tech support calls… The usual crap… The Evil One completed her service calls and returned, both she and my car completely unscathed. Life was good.

As it happened, that evening was filled with “other obligations,” so E K and I were not going to be able to spend it together. Not exactly the best situation, given the fact that she had purposely lit my fuse, so to speak, but hey, stuff happens. Of course, we did the flirty-flirty thing through the afternoon, and retrieved her truck from the shop, then when quitting time rolled around, stole a few kisses before going our separate directions for the evening.

I hopped into my car, and at a point somewhere around halfway home, I felt a very sudden, very sharp, very intense pain in my right butt cheek. If I remember correctly, I even let out a yelp.  It was reminiscent of being nailed by a bee. Since it happened to be late summer, I assumed this was a real possibility.  Something else I considered was a cherry from a cigarette. At the time I was a smoker, so I had to wonder if I had inadvertently knocked the fire from the end of a smoke while shifting gears or some such.

Well, of course, I reached down and felt about in the seat while hiking myself up onto my left hip and dancing around in a circle, all while trying to keep the car in between the dashed lines dividing the lanes on I-170. However, no matter how much feeling about in the seat, or on my own ass I did, I found nothing.

Still, the pain continued.

Well… I have to admit, I have a fairly high pain tolerance. I’m not at all sure from whence it originates, but I can actually take a lot of abuse… Just ask E K… But, let’s not go there again… Seriously, though, I really do have a fairly high tolerance for pain, so since I couldn’t find the source I decided my best bet was to just ignore it. Besides, at this point, the initial shock of the pain was fading and it had settled down to a dull ache. The ache was making its way into the background as well, so I figured I’d be all good. Eventually, it would just go away.

And it did. For the most part, anyway. I mean, there remained a minor ache and soreness throughout the rest of the evening, but nothing anywhere near as intense as the initial stab of pain.

Life rocked on, I met my various obligations, and even had a quick chat or two with E K on the phone, just because I couldn’t stand to be away from her for more than an hour at a stretch unless I was unconscious. The evening grew late and eventually it was time to hit the sack. Following my regular routine, I emptied my pockets, then started getting undressed so I could go to bed. About the time I undid my pants and went to pull them off, I discovered that they seemed to be hung up somewhere around the right side of my ass. As in, they wouldn’t come off. At about the exact instant I started to tug on them a bit, the pain that had earlier ravaged my butt cheek exploded forth once more.

Now I was hopping about on one leg, cussing, and about to trip over my half-removed britches. Fearing that I was going to perform a flawless face plant on the floor, I twisted around and perched myself on the corner of my waterbed side rails, and rolled up onto my left hip. Reaching back and feeling around, through the fabric of the pants, my fingers now came into contact with a small lump on my rear, right about where my wallet had been residing earlier. Perplexed, I slipped my hand into my hip pocket and felt around some more. Within seconds I had hold of the offending object and pulled, much like the whole mouse yanking the thorn out of the lion’s paw scenario. Except, it was just me doing the yanking, and the paw in this case was my ass.

When I brought my hand up into the light, besides a bit of blood, I also found a gold, diskette shaped, lapel pin pinched between my fingers.

The next morning, when E K strolled into work, I waited for her to park herself at her desk, which was nearby and facing mine. After exchanging some flirty good mornings, I raised an eyebrow and asked, “So, were you trying to make sure I didn’t forget you last night?”

She furrowed her brow and cocked her head to the side. “What do you mean?”

I pushed back from my desk, stood, took the few steps in her direction, and then dropped the lapel pin on the desk blotter in front of her.

“Oh, I was wondering where I lost that!” she exclaimed. “Where did you find it?”

I shook my head. “You probably don’t want to know.”

I did eventually tell her, of course. A few minutes later, in fact. However, looking back on it now, that was probably a mistake in and of itself. You see,  it was at that point in our relationship that she became aware of my higher than normal tolerance for pain, and she has been trying to find my breaking point ever since…

But seriously… All joking and silliness aside, I think you can now see why I can truthfully say that, “E K is a real pain in my ass…”

More to come…

Murv

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