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It Happened to Me

T minus seven days…

…until I start at Tucows as their first Technical Community Development Coordinator. I’m looking forward to the challenges of both defining and doing a job that will call on a lot of my technical, commincations and people skills. I’m also looking forward to the challenge of finding just the right kind of cow-themed paraphernalia for my work area.

Come to think of it, my life is becoming pretty cow-themed: I already drink at a bar called the Bovine Sex Club. I wonder if they have any office-appropriate decorative goodies. They do have their classic T-shirt:

Photo: Cute girl modelling the front of the  Bovine Sex Club t-shirt.  Photo: Cute girl modelling the back of the Bovine Sex Club t-shirt.

It’s been almost two years since I last worked for someone else, during which time this blog has grown its readership considerably. Two of my readers, it turns out, are my new boss Ross and his boss Noss (Lookin’ forward to working with you guys, fo’ shizzle mah nizzles!). It would seem that I’ve got T minus seven days to put up some kind of “opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone and not those of my employer” disclaimer, perhaps spend some time looking at blogs of non-freelance techies and some companies’ blogging policies and of course, memorize the Mantra of the Star Employee: You don’t shit where you eat.

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It Happened to Me

Live at Dundas Square

At the end of the last Critical Mass ride, a number of us ended up at Dundas Square, where I took the time to play The Hokey Pokey for some kids. Someone captured the moment:

Photo: Me playing the accordion in the middle of the fountains at Toronto's Dundas Square.

Click the photo to see a larger version.

The rest of the photos, which includes my friend Rick Conroy, another bike-riding accordion-playing kind of guy, are here.

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It Happened to Me

Bike shopping

I’d been meaning to replace The Scorpion King — my aging Raleigh Safari 5-speed “cruiser” style bicycle — for some time now. When Deenster’s beloved bike Voodoo Polly got stolen, I gave her Scorpion King and began looking for his replacement.

In case you were wondering, naming bikes isn’t an Accordion City tradition. Deenster did it first, and after hearing that she’d given her bike some kind of art-school-y sort of name, I decided to do the name mine in response, but in a completely diametrically opposed way. Now that she’s got Scorpion King, she’ll no doubt rename him after Marzipan from Homestar Runner or after a minor character in Cats. Or perhaps she’ll name it David Hasselhoff as part of some Gestalt therapy exercise in order to get over her inexplicable fear of The World’s Greatest Lifeguard/Detective (you can’t be afraid of David Hasselhoff if you sit on him every day, right?).

I was going to put off bike shopping until next week. However, while waiting to meet with a client at a busy corner yesterday in the financial district, some bike couriers spotted me.

“Accordion Dude!” said a guy on a Cannondale while making accordion-playing motions with his arms. “Haven’t seen you at Critical Mass in ages! You comin’ tomorrow?”

“Gotta get a new bike first. Gave mine to a friend — hers got stolen.”

“Get one soon. It’s nice weather for a bike ride now.”

He had a point and I had some spare time, so I invited my friend and absolute total bike fiend Eldon to go bike shopping with me.

Our first stop was Canadian Tire (that’s a big hardware store chain for those of you who don’t live in Canada). I’d heard from New Boss Ross that they carried Schwinn Cruisers. It turned out to be a bust; while they had the bikes in stock, they were poorly-assembled and didn’t quite feel right, especially with those coaster brakes. I know they’re more authentic, but I just don’t like them.

We ended up going to Cycle Path, where I know one of the sales guys. He wasn’t there, but a nice sales guy hooked me up with a Trek Calypso with an anthracite paint job, some 1950’s-style aluminum fenders and an aluminum rear basket. I’m more about practicality and style rather than shredding.

(Apparently, getting the rear fender and basket on was a bit of a nightmare for the mechanics; I’m going to have to drop by there with a six-pack by way of saying thanks for all their hard work.)

Photo: The new bike, a late-model Trek Calypso cruiser.

The new bike. The ride on this baby is as smooth, it’s more like a throne on wheels than a bike. This is a catalog photo of the 2001 model. I have the 2002 version, which no longer has the fenders. You’ll have to imagine this bike with chrome fenders and a chrome rear basket. It’s Pee-Wee-riffic!

While we were checking out the cruisers, the shoplifting alarm went off, and our sales guy bolted out the door after the thief.

A couple of minutes later, he returned with a U-lock.

“You know,” said Eldon, “you’ve gotta be dumb if you’re going to shoplift from a store where all the staff are in really good shape.”

“It would make more sense to steal from a store where they’re all couch potatoes, or maybe one where they’re too relaaaaaaaxed, say one like Friendly Stranger,” I said.

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It Happened to Me Work

Scenes From a Job Interview

Earlier today, I had a job interview with a spiffy-cool company whose name I won’t mention just yet. The parts of the interview that would be the most interesting to most people are, thankfully, the bloggable parts:

Employee 1: Hey, Joey! Welcome to {Spiffy-cool company whose name I won’t mention just yet}.

Me: Thanks. Nice place you have here. Didn’t realise it was so big.

Employee 1: C’mon in. I’ll take you to {the CEO}‘s office. By the way, sorry to hear about the “New Girl” thing. Feeling better?

Me: Much. You know, I forget how far and wide that story travelled.

We walk over to the CEO’s office, which is right by {Employee 2}‘s desk.

Employee 2: Joey! Glad you could come. Hey, about the “New Girl” incident — hope you’re doing okay.

Me: Thanks! Yeah, I’m okay. I was more creeped out than anything else.

We enter the CEO’s office. The CEO invites Employee 1 and Employee 2 to sit in on the interview.

CEO: Thanks for coming today, Joey. By the way, I read your blog. Really wild stuff, what happened with the New Girl.

Me: It was freaky, but thankfully little harm done. Besides, I think I can drink for free on that story for months.

I’m keeping in mind that the CEO is one of the Internet’s movers and shakers, whose company is a Methuselah (nearly a decade in business!) in a field where startups appear and flame out in a matter of months. He’s so well connected that he had a bite with Jeremy Allaire not long ago and is probably one of the Chosen Few who’s seen the secret stash of erotic daguerrotypes in Bill Gates’ mansion (okay, I’m kidding about the last one).

The interview commences and proceeds smoothly. The CEO then takes me to the desk of a biz dev person so that we can talk.

CEO: {Biz Dev Guy}, this is Joey. Joey, {Biz Dev Guy}.

Me: Hello, pleased to meet you.

Biz Dev Guy: Ah, yes. I’ve seen your resume.

CEO: Yes, but have you seen his blog? And the entry about the perfect girlfriend who wasn’t?

Biz Dev Guy: Uhm, no. I’ll have to give that a look sometime.

I haven’t had such an interesting job interview in the longest time. I hope they hire me.

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It Happened to Me

What happened to me and the new girl (or: “The girl who cried Webmaster”)

pants on fire

At least a couple of readers of this blog guessed that something was wrong when the Ten Cool Things About the New Girl blog entry that I wrote last week vanished. They were right, but they probably had no idea how wrong things went. I’m going to tell the story — with names changed and a few non-essential details omitted. I’m trying to balance telling my story with protecting people’s privacy. Hopefully, I’ve succeeded.

Then I’m going to take a week-long holiday from this blog. I’m annoyed and exhausted, I have a considerable load of work to take care of, and after you’ve read what appears below, you’ll probably agree that I’ve earned it.

Not What She Appears to Be

Domino maskAmong the cool things listed in the Ten Cool Things About the New Girl entry were:

A day after I posted the entry, a reader of this blog sent me an email telling me that everything I knew about New Girl was wrong, specifically:

  • She did not graduate from computer science at UBC
  • She did not go to high school at Trafalgar College — she doesn’t even have her high school diploma
  • She does not work at Alliance Atlantis, nor is she a Web programmer
  • There’s a long line of people who’ve been lied to or taken advantage of by her

I was shocked. In a year and a half of writing The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century, I’ve never received any kind of crank message related to a blog entry.

“She’s not the person she claims to be” sounds more like a line of dialogue from a Hollywood thriller, not real life. In spite of my incredulity, I couldn’t write it off as some kind of prank. Whoever wrote the letter knew too many details about New Girl to just be some random person playing a joke. Was this person telling the truth, or was this someone with a personal vendetta against New Girl?

Background Check

FingerprintAs luck would have it, I know someone in the Web department at Alliance Atlantis. I gave her a call.

Me: This may sound strange, but I need to know if someone works in the Web department.

Friend: That doesn’t sound so strange. What’s this person’s name?

Me: It’s [New Girl’s name].

Friend: Never heard of her. Is she new?

Me: She’s worked there since sometime last year. She told me that she couldn’t bear to see The Two Towers because she worked late nights on the site for three weeks and just sick of the whole thing by the end.

Friend: I’ve never heard of her. Look, let me check the company directory…nope. There’s only person with her first name, and she’s in Finance. Who is this person?

Who is this person, indeed.

For the first time in a very long time, I experienced that Horrible Sinking Feeling. Someone — either New Girl or the author of the email — was trying to con me. Worse still was the fact that so far, the facts favoured the stranger.

Sanity Check

Public phone keypadI must have read and re-read the email at least a half-dozen times before coming to a decision. I knew that I was too deeply involved to be objective and decided to make a sanity check. I phoned my friend Leesh in New York. She’s a dear friend whom I’ve known for ten years and has seen me at my best and worst. I figured it would be best to call a friend with loads of common sense who was far removed from the situation to be impartial and unaffected by any fallout from the situation.

“The thing that bothers me most,” I said after I telling her the story, “is that one of them is trying to screw me over.”

“Look at it this way,” she replied, “who has more to gain from it?”

Good point.

Meeting the Whistleblower

WhistleblowerI decided to go ahead with my plan. I emailed my informant, whom I’ll refer to as Whistleblower, asking if we could meet in person. It would be one thing to make these claims in a faceless medium, but something completely different to do so face-to-face. If that person was lying, I figured my schmooze-fu would be good enough to spot it.

I got a quick reply. Whistleblower was willing to meet me, and even provided a contact phone number. This was good news and bad news: good because it lent more credence to the possibility that Whistleblower was not yanking my chain, bad because it meant that the claims about New Girl were true.

We arranged to meet at Sneaky Dee’s. I arrived early and stood near the entrance so as to be easily spotted. Whistleblower, being a reader of my blog, knew what I looked like, but I couldn’t say the same.

This is such a spy movie thing, I thought. I’d laugh if the reason for all this wasn’t so craptacular.

Ten minutes later, Whistleblower arrived and we ordered drinks. I didn’t know about Whistleblower, but I knew I’d need at least one.

The story Whistleblower told me meshed with New Girl’s, but in all the wrong ways. Whistleblower, it turned out, knew New Girl from the days when they both lived in another city. While in that other city, New Girl was taking courses towards getting a high school equivalency diploma. She never completed them.

Then Whistleblower followed with a series of identity theft stories. New Girl would take online photos of various goth girls and use them as her identity in various chat rooms. She’d chat up gothguys and, in some casesm, convince them to fly up to meet her. One poor guy came incredibly close to doing just that, but the person she was impersonating caught wind of this and warned him in the nick of time.

Then there’s this little matter:

Whistleblower: Has she shown you photos of a niece and nephew?

Me: Yeah, I’ve seen them. Cute kids.

Whistleblower: They’re not her niece and nephew, they’re her son and daughter.

Me: (sounds of choking on Guinness)

I won’t go into the details here, but New Girl left for Accordion City two years ago, and the kids were put in the care of Children’s Services.

For an hour and a half, I listened to Whistleblower. I tried to keep my calm-even-during-a-crisis demeanor even though it felt as though icy daggers were being shoved into my heart.

Whistleblower recited a list of people whom I could contact to double-check these claims. There seemed to be a long line of people whom New Girl had screwed over in one way or another. In the terms of Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, New Girl has serious negative whuffie.

Whistleblower also told me that a number of friends reported seeing me and New Girl — “Isn’t that New Girl, making out with the Accordion Guy? Does he know?” The accordion might have saved my bacon again.

Whistleblower must’ve seen the look on my face — geez, I must’ve looked pathetic just then — and decided change the topic after a pause. “So…you play accordion, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, “you wouldn’t believe the kinds of things it gets me into.”

At the end of our meeting, I paid for the drinks. Whistleblower objected, but I said “Hey — you’re a complete stranger, and still you stuck your neck out for someone you know only through a weblog. You could’ve stayed uninvolved, and you could’ve decided not to meet me, especially during a snowstorm. Thanks. I owe you big time.”

Whisteblower left and I went to use the washroom. Afterwards, as I left the bar, the waitress stopped me — I was so unnerved that I’d forgotten my umbrella at the table.

Pull it together, I thought to myself, there’s serious business to attend to.

Confrontation

I arrived at the cafe where New Girl had gone to meet some mutual friends. She greeted me with a kiss, after which I said “Could I have a word with you…alone?”

We took a table in the quietest spot I could find. I told her that I’d met with Whistleblower. At the mere mention of Whistleblower’s name, her face darkened.

New Girl: [Whistleblower] doesn’t know a thing. She gets her so-called “facts” from someone who has a grudge against me. That person will say anything to make me look bad. I can’t believe that you’d take the word of a stranger over your own girlfriend!

Me: Your photo album: are those pictures of your niece and nephew, or are they actually your kids?

New Girl: What kind of lies has this person been telling you?!

Me: Do you work for Alliance Atlantis?

New Girl: Of course I do! I’m a webmistress there!

Me: Not according to my friend who works there. She’s in the Web department, and has never heard of you.

New Girl: It’s a big department.

Me: Come to think of it, didn’t you say that the team working on the Two Towers website was just you and some other guy? That’s a small team for the site of one of the biggest films ever.

New Girl: Maybe it’s because I was a contractor and not a full-time employee.

Me: She checked the company directory. You don’t exist there. And c’mon, a contractor? Then how can you be on sick leave?

Sick leave, I thought, a perfect excuse for not having to go to a non-existent job. I’ve been played.

New Girl: I can show you proof. I’ve got pay stubs. I’ll show you tomorrow.

Me: Prove it to me now. Are you a Web programmer?

New Girl: Yes!

Me (very calmly): What’s the difference between HTTP GET and POST?

New Girl (taken aback): …uh, what?

Me: GET and POST. What’s the difference?

New Girl (looking somewhat rattled): You…You’ve got to be fucking kidding.

Her body language changed to a more defensive stance. I leaned forward.

The Old Columbo Trick

Peter Falk as “Columbo”At this point, even after all the evidence that had been presented to me, I still had the tiniest bit of hope that everyone was wrong about New Girl. I needed to hear an admission — either intentional or accidental — from New Girl herself. If I kept the pressure on, she would either cave and admit everything or make a mistake.

Me: I’m not kidding. C’mon, if you’re really a Web programmer, you’d know this. This is straight out of chapter one of “Web Forms for Dummies”.

New Girl: I refuse to answer this question. Such a simple question…it’s…it’s insulting!

Me: Answer it, and you’ll shoot such a big hole in Whistleblower’s story that I’d have to believe you. And trust me, right now, you look like the liar..

New Girl: I won’t answer it! I know the answer, but you still won’t believe me if I give it to you!

Me: You know, if you accused me of not being a programmer, I’d be dropping mad computer science on your head. I’d be saying “Get me in front of a machine! I’ll write ‘Hello World’ in half a dozen languages!”

New Girl: But I’m not you!

Me: And you’re not a programmer. You’re a damned liar.

I guess I just dumped her, I thought. This is not how I planned to spend Thursday night. I walked out of the cafe. New Girl, as I expected, chased after me.

New Girl: Look! I’m upset! My head’s a mess and I can’t think technically right now! But I promise you, tomorrow I’ll get all kind of stuff from my place to prove it to you.

Me: You can wait until tomorrow to get proof? I can’t. Why not answer my question now, and save us both time and aggravation?

New Girl: Please, baby, you’ve got to believe me…

Me: I want to believe you, more than anything, but how can I? Answer the question, please. Give me a reason to believe you.

New Girl: I can’t. I’m too much of a wreck. Look — I can show you all my papers from University! I kept them all!

I decided to use a trick I’d learned from an old episode of Columbo. It was a stupid, cheesy 70’s TV detective show trick, but it was my best shot at getting to the truth.

Me: So you really did graduate from computer engineering?

New Girl: Yes I did, from UBC!

Me: And you took the “Algorithms” course?

New Girl: Of course!

Me: And you have all the papers you wrote?

New Girl: Yes! I kept them all, and I’ll show them to you tomorrow!

I imagined what kind of excuse she’d have when the papers mysteriously “disappeared” the next day. It was time to set up the pieces for checkmate.

Me: I want to see the one we always called the “Hell Paper” at Queen’s — the mandatory fourth-year paper. You know the one, where we prove P = NP?

New Girl: I did that! I proved P = NP! I placed near the top of the class, and the professor used my paper as an example!

Me: You proved P = NP?

New Girl: Yes!

Me: Gotcha.

I’m not going to bore you with the details of what the whole “Is P equal to NP or not?” question is, other than the fact that it’s one of the Great Mysteries of computer science. From a mathematician’s point of view, solving it would be a bigger deal than solving Fermat’s Last Theorem. It’s so big a deal and so hard a problem that there’s a US$1 million reward to the first person to submit a viable proof.

Simply put, I’d just broken up with either the biggest liar I’ve ever dated or the greatest computer scientist who ever lived. Somewhere, Alan Turing’s coffin was experiencing fantastic rotational torque.

I’d outsmarted her into lying and giving herself away, just like my childhood literary hero, Encyclopedia Brown.

It gets worse

The next day, I decided to give New Girl’s supposed home phone number a ring. I was beginning to get the feeling that it wasn’t actually hers. A woman answered the phone.

“Hello,” I said, “my name is Joey deVilla…”

“The guy with the hat and the accordion,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “I’ve been meaning to have a word with you.”

Eek.

And so began an even stranger conversation. The apartment wasn’t New Girl’s, but this woman’s. The woman’s musician friends had seen me with New Girl at Kensington Market, where I sometimes busked and performed at open mike nights.

“And there was night you were at Grafitti’s with her…”

“Last Thursday.” How is it that everyone but New Girl can provide evidence to corroborate their stories?

“So the stories about her fat cats and the noisy birds…they’re not her pets, they’re yours?”

“Right.”

She then told me about how she and New Girl met, at rehab meetings. Rehab?!

And later, since New Girl had no place to stay, she let her stay on her couch. They grew closer and became lovers. Lovers?!

And then came the story about how New Girl tried to hide her pregnancy. Pregnancy?!

Apparently there was a third kid, born shortly before I met New Girl. The kid was adopted a few days after its birth. A couple of weeks after having given birth, she was flirting with me. I felt ill.

I spent that night drinking copious quantities of Irish Stout.

Enough already

“Dude,” said my old buddy George the following day, “you were saved by your blog!”

It’s true. I posted a gushy entry about New Girl, someone saw it and came forward to tell me the truth. Maybe the Blogger or Moveable Type people should print up stickers and T-shirts that read BLOGS SAVE LIVES. I’d buy one.

As a programmer who used to work in the P2P world and is about to start developing software to socially connect people, I used to look at issues such as social software, trust networks, determining the truth without a trusted third party, identity and reputation in a rather abstract way, kind of like the way a non-chef watches programs on the Food Network (“Hey, an omelette made with an ostrich egg! Wouldn’t that be neat to cook?”). Now that I’ve experienced the real-life version of all these concepts, I’d like to look a little more seriously into their programmatic equivalents — might as well turn this lemon into lemonade.

As for me, I’m unharmed and New Girl didn’t rob me. I’m really feeling incredibly craptacular, very creeped out, and — perhaps as some kind of defense mechanism — mildly amused at the ridiculousness of the situation. I’m proud of the fact that somehow I managed to keep my head mostly together during this descent into TV-movie-of-the-weekdom. I’m also exhausted — this kind of crap is incredibly draining, even for Mister-Play-Accordion-All-Night-Long. I’m taking a one-week vacation from blogging to get caught up on work, sleep and life in general.

To all my real friends out there, thank you for telling me who you really are.

To New Girl, all I can say — and I mean this with all sincerity — is “seek professional help”.

To Whistleblower, I owe you a debt of gratitude. You probably saved me from a lot of misery.

And to all you ladies out there, I’m back on the market. Only those without skeletons in their closets need apply.

See you folks in a week.

Get this story in dead-tree form

never threaten to eat your coworkers

This story ended up in an anthology titled Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of Blogs in 2004. I once had a copy, but someone — whom I can’t remember now — borrowed it and never returned it.

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funny It Happened to Me

The Best Christmas Present Ever

Crablouse in a Santa hat

Earlier today (December 24, 2002)

I was in a store on Queen Street West that specialized in the kind of funky clothing that appealed to club-goers and the snowboard/skateboard set, looking for cheap presents for my cousins. The manager saw me and asked “You don’t still have crabs, do ya?”

It took me a moment to realize what she was talking about.

“No, I don’t,” I replied, “that was my friend.”

Riiiiiight.

I’m going to kill his ass, I thought.

Four years ago, a frantic phone call (December 1998)

nokia s110

The Nokia S110, my phone at the time.

Four years ago, I was at the same store, buying a sweater for my cousin. While standing in line waiting for my turn at the cashier, I got a phone call.

“Joey, I need your help!” said the voice on the other end. It was my friend — whom I’ll call “X” — and his voice was panicked.

“What happened?”

“OhMyGodIThinkIGotCrispyCrittersFromTheBathroom
AtThisReallyCoolGayBarInNewYorkWhenIWasVisiting
MyBoyfriendAndTheyReallyItchAnd…”

His voice was so loud that I had to hold the phone a couple of inches away from my ear.

“You got what?” I asked “Crispy Critters? Is that fried chicken? What the hell are you talking about?”

“CrispyCrittersJoey!” he repeated, still speaking a mile a minute. “IMean…” and then he slowed down to enunciate every word “I…HAVE…CRABS!

He said it loudly enough for everyone around to hear, at which point they all took a step away from me. The cashier — who today is the manager — grimaced at me.

“Hey, I don’t have crabs, my friend does,” I said to her.

Friend, huh?” she said incredulously.

X was still rattling a mile a minute on the phone.

“JoeyYouHaveToHelpMeItItchesLikeCrazy
AndICan’tAffordTheCreamCanYouLendMe
SomeMoneyItItchesItItchesItItches!”

He was phoning me from a pay phone near the Eaton Centre, not far from where I was. I arranged to meet him at the large fountain on the bottom floor, as it was near a Shoppers Drug Mart where we could buy the anti-crablouse goo.

I hung up and noticed that everyone — the people in line as well as the cashier — were giving me funny looks and keeping their distance. The cashier took my credit card the with the tips of her thumb and index finger, holding it as if I’d handed her a very full week-old diaper.

Damned X, I thought to myself. He gets the STD and I get the “unclean” treatment.

Rendezvous

eaton centre fountain

The Eaton Centre fountain.

Minutes later, I was walking towards the Eaton Centre fountain. X ran towards me, ready to give me a hug when I stuck out my left arm, firmly placing my hand on his chest.

“Can we skip the hug while you’re still a travelling flea circus?”, I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he replied, a little sheepishly.

“I know that there’s some kind of cream for it, but I don’t know what it’s –”

“Slut-o-cillin.” (That’s not the real name of the cream; I just can’t remember what it was).

“You sound awfully familiar with the treatment.”

“Oh, I’ve had them before.”

“Of course.”

Ooh…Pants!

pants

On the way to the drugstore, we passed by a store that had a sale on pants.

“Hey,” said X, “before we go to the drugstore, can I try these on?”

I threw him a look that said Have you completely lost your mind?

“Oh yeah.”

I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent credit record

credit cards

The pharmacist was young and easygoing, but concerned about me. “He might not be the only one who needs slut-o-cillin. If you’ve had sex with him recently…”

“Oh, he’s tried,” I said, “but no, I’m just buying it for him.”

“That’s a little…unusual. I mean, I thought that because you were buying it for him that you were…ummm…together.”

“Oh no,” X said. “Joey’s such a breeder. You know he says he’s never had a cock in his mouth? Not even once?

“Keep that up and there’ll be no cream for you, fleabag.” I muttered.

The pharmacist rang up the bill; the slut-o-cillin cost thirty dollars. I had a twenty in my wallet. “How would you like to pay, sir?” asked the pharmacist.

“Uh, is there a bank machine nearby?”

“All out of cash. I tried getting some on my break.”

“Let’s try Interac then.” I handed him my bank card and he swiped it in the debit machine. We failed to get a connection to the bank computer. With the Christmas rush, the lines were all tied up.

“Do you have a credit card, sir?” he asked.

“Yes, but I’m…uh…really trying to avoid putting this particular order on my credit record…aw, hell. Take it.”

I turned to X. “If this credit card purchase ever ends up haunting me, I’m going to fucking kill you.”

Merry Christmas, Itchy

Christmas tree with crablice ornaments

Before we parted ways and I headed home, X turned to me and spoke. “I know I’m a pain in the ass a lot of times, but I wanted to say thanks. I don’t know too many people who’d do this for me.”

“You’re welcome. Just try not to get into this kind of trouble all the time, willya?”

I reached into my wallet, pulled out the twenty and gave it to him.

“Use this to wash all your clothes and your sheets too. In hot water. Maybe not in your usual laundromat, ’cause you’re not going to win any popularity contests.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is the best Christmas present ever.” That little bit of gratitude made it all worthwhile. If he weren’t such an ant farm, I’d have given him a hug.

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Joyous Kwanzaa, and Rockin’ Festivus, everybody. May your holidays be safe and infestation-free!

Categories
It Happened to Me

Karin the enabler

Photo: Karin.

 

Karin the party machine. Taken this summer at the Bovine Sex Club.

Every time I hang out with my friend Karin, I end up drinking waaaay more than intended.

Last night, we set out to go catch 8 Mile — “It’s the white Purple Rain!” I remember remarking at one point — with Karin and her friends Ed, Kirk and Tara. Paul, Kat and I caught up with them at The Bishop and the Belcher, a nearby pub, where Karin and company were having dinner.

“Joey, why aren’t you drinking?” asked Karin, using a tone of voice that is normally reserved for lines like “Poor little kittens, did you lose your mittens?”

“Not in the budget,” I said, “I just have money for the movie.” I was planning on dropping by the Velvet Underground later, where I can land at least a couple of free drinks, and the busking afterwards would help cover the entertainment budget for the next week.

(Attention employers: I really need a job.)

“We can’t have that,” said Karin, who signalled the waitress and ordered a pint of Stella Artois for me, followed by a half-pint.

We got to the movie theatre only to find out that it had been sold out. Paul and Kat opeted to go home, while the rest of us went to the nearby restaurant/bar/dance club/meet market Fez Batik.

We’d barely bellied up to the bar when Karin put a pint of Heineken in my hand.

After that came the shots of Liquid Cocaine: Jagermeister and Goldschlager.

This was followed by another round. Then another pint.

Then back to my house, where we put on the Gorillaz and finished the rest of the birthday beer, save the giant Heineken bottle.

At just after midnight, everyone departed — Tara and Kirk were quite looped, Ed was catching up with other people, and Karin had to be at work at 9 this morning. I walked her to Spadina and hailed a cab for her. I would’ve said that she was leaning against me for support as we walked, but I’m sure I was doing pretty much the same.

I stumbled back home, fully intending to get my second wind and go to the Velvet to catch up with some friends who’d be there. But first, I needed to lie down for just…one…moment…

…and woke up some time around 5 a.m. with a parched mouth and a full bladder.

On the way to the bathroom, the power went out. Soon after that, but well after I’d crawled back into bed, the power came back on. The sunken halogen lights in my bedroom ceiling glowed with Satan’s vengeance. The dining room CD player dutifully started playing The Gorillaz at a volume inappropriate for 5 a.m., so I had to stumble out of bed to shut it off before it woke any housemates into a justifiably homicidal rage.

There was more to the night than just drinking. There was some really good ‘n’ saucy conversation, but alas, it’s all pretty much unbloggable. You’ll just have to use your imaginations.

I’m doing considerably better now — I’m just a little dehydrated and only mildly disoriented as I type this.

Karin, you enabling hussy, this is all your fault.

Let’s do this again soon.