BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

This is actually a Halloween story. So, why am I not deploying it on Halloween? Look back at the 10/31 blog and ask that again… I may be as stupid as I look, but I’m not about to trump the anniversary wishes to the redhead. That would be suicide.

So anyway…

Back in nineteen-hundred and eighty-five… No, not like the McCartney and Wings song… The REAL nineteen hundred and eighty-five. October, more specifically. If you want to get right down to it, October 31st, hence the whole Halloween thing. (And yes, for those of you who have been following Brainpan Leakage and have read the “Mahwage” chronicles – linked on the right – this was just a few short months prior to me doing the whole love at first sight thing with E K… But that’s another story and I already told it.)

BR (Before Redhead) I worked for American Home Video. Then I didn’t. It’s a long story involving Radio Shack, a buyout, and subsequently the unceremonious expulsion of original employees. So be it. I was fashionably unemployed with bills to pay, a bit of cash in the bank, and no standing prospects. However, it had been a number of years since I’d been on a vacation and as it happened some very good friends of mine had moved to Aberdeen, South Dakota of all places. Why? To manage a Domino’s pizza joint, but that’s another story too.

At any rate, I packed a bag, took some cash out of the bank, then hopped into the Mustang – yes, I used to be cool – and jammed gears westward then northward, to go visit. In all honesty, while this was sort of a spur of the moment thing, it wasn’t wake up one morning and go. I planned it for a few days so that my ducks were all in a row. Got myself a real, live folding map – back then we had BBS’s, not Internet, so there wasn’t a Google maps option. The Interwebz were in their infancy and called ARPnet; and they belonged primarily to the government and military.

But I digress…

The thing is, I planned it out a bit. Then, one day, I jumped in the ‘Stang and hit the road, not even thinking about the date, or what it means to a good chunk of the folks in the United States. Back then we were under the double-nickel law – that being “I can’t drive fifty-five” but you’d damn well better unless you want a ticket. Therefore, the trip was going to be about 13.5 hours. No biggie. I was in my early twenties, my prostate was normal sized, and I had a damn good bladder. Besides, we DID have rest areas back then.

Still, it was a long trip. Long about Council Bluffs, Iowa, I got hungry. And a little sleepy. So, I jumped on an exit, downshifted, and rolled myself into the palace of the golden arches. Back then my metabolism could handle that sort of crap being thrown at it.

Without paying much attention, I stretched, then wandered in through the door. As I stepped up to the register a voice said, “Welcome to McFatty’s, how may I help you?”

I replied, “Yeah, I’ll have a McBigButt with Fr…” at that moment I looked up in the direction of the voice and was greeted with the face of some kind of insane, spree-killing clown. I screamed, “GAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

The insane, spree-killing clown screamed, “GAAAAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!”

We both involuntarily jumped back a step. Well, maybe the insane killer clown did it involuntarily. Me, I was fully conscious of putting some distance between me and all that facepaint.

“What the…” I said.

The insane clown, which turned out to be a young lady of about 19 or 20 screwed up her face and gave me a look like I’d lost my mind. After a few seconds passed she said, “Happy Halloween.”

“Crap,” I muttered, looking past her and seeing the rest of the workers in various odd attire. “That’s today… No wonder all I could get on the radio was Purple People Eater, Monster Mash, and Martian Boogie…”

I ended up having a McBigButt, Large McFry, and a Large McCoffee.  But, I decided to eat in my car rather than deal with the freak show inside. Good thing too, because the McCoffee turned out to be McBattery Acid and I had to dispose of it on the parking lot. It left a pothole I’m afraid, but given what might have happened if I’d tossed it into the trash with the McScraps… Well… I shudder to think about it.

After that, I hit the interstate once more, flipping through the stations until I found something non-Halloweenie. As it happened, the first thing I found was the theme from Miami Vice. I opened the sunroof, jammed the clutch, and aimed myself for the hub city of the Dakotas. By the time I arrived I had forgotten all about the incident – and the fact that it was Halloween.

Imagine my surprise when I rolled into town at the height of the madness…

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