Anyway, over the weekend, the wife and I stopped into the human circus (better known as Wal-Mart) to pick up a few odds and ends. True to form, good ole’ WallyWord delivered. As we were shopping a group of goth kids caught my attention, specifically one rather large girl. I’m not quite sure how to convey her size to you but if you think of Godzilla, you’ve got a good idea of what this broad ate for lunch. And really, she didn’t quite catch my attention so much as it got sucked into her gravitational pull. If that weren’t bad enough she was wearing a plaid skirt and I think was trying to pull off the whole dark scary school girl look or something. Anyway as I’m standing in line at the electronics counter waiting for the cashier to explain the intricacies of “swiping your credit card” to a woman who had done more drugs than the entire country of Columbia, I overhear the goth group’s conversation from the aisle next to me.

“No F&*#&in way! They’ve got a Wii!!”

inaudible mumble… I’m not sure whether this kid didn’t move his lips when he talked or the sound waves had a hard time getting around the small planet he was talking to. Either way he didn’t contribute much to the conversation.

“I know! Damnit, I don’t get paid til next week!”

more mumbles

“No they don’t have layaway… not for electronics” I have no idea whether that’s actually true or not but I couldn’t help myself after hearing that gem. I set the cd down on the counter (Bob Marley’s mom was still trying to figure out how to pay in front of me) and whipped around the corner to the aisle with the Wii. Now, I need to fill you in on two important points before I go on. Number one, we already have a Wii. Number two, I had absolutely no intention of buying another one.

“Did you say they have a Wii?!?”

“Uh… yeah… but.. um” It was like a pair of headlights had just hit a dear in the middle of the road. She was confused, scared, and petrified all at the same time.

“Where? Are you gonna buy it?” I was sure I had over sold this but apparently sarcasm wasn’t this girl’s strong suit.

“Um… yeah. Yeah, we’re gettin it.” At this point the mumbler really didn’t help his friend because he was looking at her like she had just said she weighed 95 lbs. Struggling to keep a straight face I acted like I believed it.

“Oh man… that sucks! Are you sure? I mean cause if not, I’ll get it.”

“No, we’re getting it. Sorry”

“Crap…ok…”

At this point I dropped my head and shuffled my way back around to the counter. I wasn’t gone more than 15 seconds before I hear “No! You stay with it. STAY WITH IT… I’ll be back”

At about 10:30 or so an impressive amount of noise started coming from the neighbors house. Now, this is nice little dead end street and the wookie and college guy (if you don’t know who that is a: consider yourself lucky and b: go read about my neighbors) were hundreds of miles away so this actually came as a bit of a shock to me. I stepped outside to the porch to check things out and realized the house next door was playing host to a fairly noisy party. No big deal, I mean it wasn’t too late, and it was a weekend so I went back inside to continue the Chinese water torture erm… playing cards.

Well apparently I had caught someone’s attention next door because a few minutes later there was a timid knock at the door. I open it to find a young Tommy Chong on the other side. “Hey man… uh we’re having a party over there (thanks chief, I hadn’t quite figured that out yet) and dude, if we’re being too loud just let us know. We’ll all take off or whatever, we just don’t want to have the cops called on us.” I assured the cached-out pot-head that it was no big deal and I didn’t plan on calling the cops, closed the door, and figured that would be the end of the story

I’ve got to say, I’ve never gotten such a kick out of being wrong. About an hour and a half later my dad asks me to go outside and find out why the cops are walking around our front yard looking in our cars. It didn’t take me long to put together a pretty good idea of what had happened and sure enough, when I got outside 4 cop cars were scattered along the street and there was an officer taking down the license plates of all the cars parked along the street. I asked if everything was ok and he said they were just having some problems with the party next door (go figure… I mean the stoned guy seemed like he really had it together, I can’t imagine how something could have gone wrong there). Anyway as we were talking, I heard some noises coming from the back yard. I went inside, grabbed the dog and her leash (I needed an excuse to go back outside) and went out the side door. Within seconds my dog had taken off down the hill next to our house and gone into a point at the corner of the house. About the same time I hear a muffled “… a freaking DOG!” come from the back hill of our yard (that is covered with brush, bushes, and poison ivy). As I’m starting to put two and two together, I notice that the dog is still intently pointing at something sitting next to the house. I walk over and find a purse (containing a now ringing cell phone), and a pair of high healed shoes.

Being the good citizen that I am, I of course picked up the purse and shoes and walked back to the front yard to find one of the cops.

“Officer, um I found these in our back yard over there and I’m pretty sure there are people on our back hill”
“(laughing)So you’re telling me some girl is running around back there in all that crap without any shoes on?”
“It sure looks like it.”
“Oh this is priceless”
“Do you want to take my dog with you to help find em? (hey, I was proud of her)”
“(laughing harder now) Honestly, the girl is running around without her shoes or her purse. Do you really think we need the dog?”
“Point taken”

Sure enough, half an hour later, we see the officer ushering a no-longer-shoeless girl across our front lawn and into the back of a waiting police car. So the moral of the story is boys and girls, if you DO ever happen to find yourself running from the police, you’re probably better off taking your shoes with you. Oh yeah, you also might want to avoid the poison ivy as well…

On any given day, this pattern repeats itself. I come home, do a couple of quick chores (take the dogs for a walk, take the trash out, etc) and then sit down in my recliner to unwind. It’s been a while since I’ve had a high stress job, but it’s always nice to sit down and relax after a long day. Anyway I sit down in my recliner, pull the lever to kick my feet up and set about feeding my internet addiction. Well, come to find out, the lever for my recliner is also attached to an alarm somewhere. This alarm sends out a pitch beyond the hearing of most mortals, but, apparently clear as day to my wife.

Like any good alarm, it illicits a response. In this case, the required response is for my lovely wife to ask me to do something which involved my getting up out of my soft, comfortable, and oh so inviting recliner. “Honey, can you help me move this box?” “Can you get something out of my car?” It’s hardly ever a big deal, it simply involves me getting up. It’s happened so often that I’ve started trying to game the system. I’ll sit down but won’t kick my feet up, or I’ll try to do it really really slowly. Yeah, I’ll give ya two guesses on how well that works for me.

So, tonight, we come home and after a few minutes I sit down, kick off my shoes, and recline into heavenly TV and Internet bliss. 15 seconds later, I hear “Babe?” from the kitchen.
“Can we go check the mail?” Just for the record these types of questions aren’t really questions. I’ve not been married long but I’ve learned that.
“But… but…I’ve got my shoes off?” More a pathetic grasping at straws than a valid counter point.
“So put ‘em back on” the obvious and simple, yet devastating retort.
“Hun, I just sat down and got comfortable” I don’t who I’m trying to kid… I’m reduced to whining here. It’s whining, I know I’m whining, and yet, I’m physically incapable of doing anything else at this point.
“It’s not like I did it on purpose. Please?” Once again, despite the inquisitive tone, NOT a question.
“Alright…. I guess” you didn’t honestly think that discussion would come to any other conclusion did you?

I stand up, slip my shoes on and take one step towards the door when all of the sudden what seemed like 8 police and fire sirens start to blare. Suddenly sensing a threat to her position, my wife’s back stiffens, her ears prick up, and she glares at me. It’s too late. I might be slow, but even I can sense a momentum shift of this magnitude. My eyes quickly light up as new hope springs eternal. The sirens get closer and closer until they’re nearly deafening. A police helicopter roars onto the scene and suddenly I’m 10 feet tall.
“Honey, the mail’s gonna have to wait. We’re not going out there in the middle of all this” ahh the sweet taste of victory. Talk about a comeback. I’m tempted to do a little victory dance but wisdom somehow wins out.

I sit back down and kick off my shoes and all she can do is glare. “You’re responsible for this aren’t you?” humor was obviously all she had left at this point.
“Yup, I called it in” having just fallen backwards into a win, I wasn’t exactly itching for a rematch here.

Now, what exactly was going on, we might never know. We ventured out onto the porch for a minute to try and take a look but couldn’t see much and it stunk like chemicals. My guess, some idiot blew up his meth lab but let’s be honest, I don’t much care. Whatever it was, it was big. The fire trucks and helicopter are just now leaving, nearly an hour later and I’ve been in the recliner for every blessed minute of it.

“I’m sorry babe, what’s that?” Oh… uh… I’ll have to finish this up later….

I’ve got to go check the mail.

Well, this weekend while back visiting in St. Louis, my wife (Juliet) and I drove through Jack in the Box. We pull in to that beautiful haven of culinary delight and place our order. At the window while we’re waiting to pay, Juliet sees one of those “Its not to late!” signs with a picture perfect piece of cheesecake. “Oooh, that looks great!” she says. “Eh, not so much really.” Now let me clarify, I have nothing against cheesecake. I have something against cheesecake made by any fast food joint. I mean, that’s pretty reasonable right? I thought so too.

“Oh yeah, you don’t LIKE cheesecake do you?” I realized, at this point, that I had just managed to get myself in trouble; I simply couldn’t figure out how. I mean she said this as if she were accusing me of crimes against humanity or something.

“What do you mean? Of course I like cheesecake. I just don’t li..”

“No you don’t. You didn’t get any fried cheesecake (yes, you really can get fried cheesecake) at the fair (never mind that we had gone to the fair over a week ago). You don’t like cheesecake!”

Instinctively I started to defend myself. I started to explain that I had eaten my weight in fried foods at the fair and didn’t feel like having to my stomach stapled once I inevitably popped. And then it dawned on me…

I hadn’t done anything wrong here.

After a quick mental review of the situation (you have to be certain about these things), I cautiously asked “Wait a minute, why are you mad at me for this? I haven’t done anything to you… have I?”

“Well, I could just picture me spending hours over the stove to make you a cheesecake and you rejecting it”

“Wait a minute…. WHAT?”

“You know you would.”

“So I’m in trouble for a scenario that you played out in your mind but didn’t ACTUALLY happen?”

*sheepishly* “Yeah”

“Wow…now I feel married”

EDIT: Just for the record, in this post you should not be surprised if I maybe, slightly, exaggerate just a tiny little bit. In fact, you should expect it. (read as: Yes, mam, I’m sorry mam… it wont happen again mam)

Ok, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way I figured that my triumphant return to posting should probably be another installment of the Co-Worker Hall of Fame. If you haven’t heard of the CWOF before… well then scroll down genius. Alright, let’s jump right in….

Friendly Phyllis

Once again, Phyllis is a person that everyone has worked with, or at the very least known. Phyllis can be male or female, young or old, but I promise you, you’ve all dealt with a Phyllis. Back when I worked at the library there was this sweet old lady who had worked there for about a million years. She never really did much but no one ever thought of firing her. For one she was just too old to fire. I don’t know old she really was but she used to walk around mumbling about how this new fangled light invention would never catch on, so take that for what its worth. And, when someone’s been at one place for so long you can’t ever be sure how change would affect them. You remember in The Shawshank Redemption, what happened when they tired to release friendly old Brooks? Yeah, so did every person who worked with Phyllis.

Anyway as I said, Phyllis was very nice and friendly… too friendly. You see, Phyllis didn’t have a lot of friends, unless you counted her cats (and to be honest I can’t count that high), so when she came to work 2 days a week, it was the Word Series of her social life. Anyone who was unfortunate enough to cross paths with the slowly shuffling Phyllis, automatically lost 45 minutes of their day. I’m serious. Making eye contact was the equivalent to smoking half a pack of cigarettes, both noticeably shortened your life span. It wasn’t so much that Phyllis was unpleasant to talk to, it was just that she talked about the most boring topics in history. I mean this woman was like Ben Stein (Bueller…Bueller…Anyone?) on 3 different depressants. I once had a 30 minute conversation (and by conversation I mean she talked and I contemplated how relaxing Chinese water-torture sounded right about then) with Phyllis about the proper stitch to use when knitting a sweater for a pet. Seriously. I’m not even close to kidding. For the love of everything holy I wish I were joking. I know it sounds horrible but when talking to Phyllis you honestly questioned whether the conversation or Phyllis would die first. That line is gonna be funny right up until she does croak… she really is a sweet lady.

Just a quick side note: Other favorite topics for Friendly Phyllis’ include:

• Their children
• Their pets
• Computers
• Dungeons and Dragons
• Their children’s pets
• And last but not least, their ailments (arthritis, aches, pains, rashes, painful rashes, unfortunately its all fair game)

The Toad

Your Co-Workers Hall of Fame got me reminiscing about the summers I spent working in an oil refinery to help pay for my college mis-education. The refinery was owned by Amoco, which should tell you something about how long ago this was.

For those who don’t remember, Amoco sported a red, white and blue logo and at one time was known as American Oil Company. Before that it was Standard Oil of Indiana. And before that it was the source of J. D. Rockefeller’s billions. A while back, the former American Oil Company was swallowed up by British Petroleum. If we could only harness the energy of old J. D. spinning in his grave it would put us a long way down the road to energy independence.

All of which is a round about way of making the point that this was a different era. One where companies took a paternalistic attitude towards their employees – jobs for life, health insurance, pension, that type of thing. In return, the employees kept the place running, bought the company’s products and agreed not to be too blatant when they broke the rules.

Part of the system at Amoco was summer jobs for employees’ kids. It was great for the kids who were paid two or three times what their friends made as car hops. And it was great for the company, which got a small army of college kids to take care of all the dirty jobs that had been put off since the previous summer.

Before I get to my coworkers, I should probably share a couple of my own exploits.

One summer my job description included driving the hose truck to the scene of any fire that might occur. When I mentioned that the truck was a stick and I only knew how to drive an automatic, I was told, “Don’t worry, nothing will happen and, if it does, you’ll figure it out.” It did and I didn’t. I drove to the fire in first gear being passed all along the way by people WALKING to the fire. And these folks were not in the habit of moving quickly, even to a fire.

Another summer I drove a dump truck. By this time I had learned how to drive a stick and, to ease my boredom, I transformed my route into a racecourse – upshifting, downshifting and generally avoiding the brakes. On one, record-setting lap, I learned that the center of gravity of a fully loaded dump truck is considerably higher than that of the average racecar. It is, in fact, possible to balance a dump truck on two wheels for a very short period of time. I suspect it is also possible to roll a dump truck over on its side but I decided against further testing. As far as I know my lap record still stands.

OK, so maybe I should be nominating myself for the coworker hall of fame but I was just a crazy college kid. My coworkers were professionals. And when it came to bending the rules and playing the system for all it was worth these guys had a lot to teach me.

I have especially fond memories of the time I spent working in what I’ll refer to (for reasons that will soon become clear) as the Pond. My job consisted of putting metal bases on cardboard tubes to create a carton. After I had created several of these cartons, I stacked them neatly on a palette and they were picked up by a forklift and taken away to be filled with road tar. The driver of the forklift was a large chap with an unfortunate resemblance to a toad. The forklift inevitably became known as the Lily Pad. The Toad mounted the Lily Pad at eight-thirty every morning, hopped off briefly for lunch and then reoccupied his perch until three-thirty in the afternoon.

If you’re counting hours I should probably explain our workday. Our shift was officially from eight to four-thirty with a thirty-minute break for lunch at noon. This meant you were required to be on the job by eight. By on the job, I mean physically at the location where you would perform your job if you actually were to perform your job. Once you were at the job-site it was generally understood that you had half an hour to get ready to actually do your job. Getting ready meaning performing such tasks as putting on your gloves and finishing your coffee and donuts.

This half-hour ritual was repeated at closing time with a slight twist. Company policy was that work stopped at four o’clock and that you had a half hour to put things in order. At four-thirty, you were free to head to the shower room or home depending upon your level of odiferousness. This actually translated into a workday that ended at three-thirty, a clean up that lasted until four and a short walk to the shower room where you hid behind a wall until four-thirty when you were free to actually enter the shower room.

The wall we hid behind was a sort of demilitarized zone between management and labor. An area we agreed not to penetrate between four and four-thirty each day. This allowed our side (the workers) to pretend we were getting away with something and the other side (management) to pretend we weren’t. The system worked amazingly well except in rare instances where a person’s job actually required him to cross the demilitarized zone during the forbidden half hour. At such times, it was necessary for all involved to develop psychosomatic tunnel vision. Later, the offender was severely chastised for his poor planning.

When the system truly excelled was during the incredible half-hour lunch hour. The official lunch period from noon to twelve-thirty was sacrosanct. It was the employee’s own time during which he could (within the bounds of law and reason) do anything he chose. Back at The Pond, we slept. These guys were incredible. They could be talking to you at eleven-fifty-nine and snoring at the stroke of noon. They slept on cardboard boxes, in the back of pickups, on wooden benches and sitting on a forklift. At twelve-thirty they woke up and finish the sentence they had been in the middle of at noon.

All of which was fine and within the rules but didn’t leave a lot of time for lunch. And, believe me, after a hard morning on the Lily Pad, the Toad NEEDED lunch (as did the rest of us). So we ate lunch at eleven-thirty and napped at noon.

I have to admit it was several weeks before I truly understood the beauty of this system. I thought we were merely goofing off. Actually, we were involved in a masterful game of labor-management chess. This was brought to my attention one day when, at eleven-fifty, sated on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I crawled off to my cardboard box and fell asleep. Almost immediately, I was awakened by a coworker demanding to know what the hell I thought I was doing. Did I want to get them all fired?

Now, I’m not at the top of my game when I get woken up suddenly but that wasn’t the source of my confusion. I mean we were all slacking off. They were still eating, I was sleeping what’s the big deal?

The big deal was explained to me like this:

1. Lunchtime is noon to twelve-thirty. They can’t touch you during lunch. The boss catches us sleeping, we tell him to shut up, he’s keeping us awake
2. We stop work and eat lunch at eleven-thirty. The boss catches us eating at eleven-thirty, he writes us up. It’s like getting a bad mark in conduct in grade school. It makes the boss feel like he’s doing his job but nobody pays any attention.
3. What you can’t do is sleep while you’re supposed to be working. Get caught sleeping at eleven-fifty-nine, you’re fired. Get caught sleeping at twelve-oh-one, no problem.

Summary: Eat when you’re supposed to be working, sleep when you’re supposed to be eating. That, it turns out, is why they blew the whistle at noon.

What he didn’t tell me was that you could also get in trouble for working during work. It happened like this:

I’d spent Tuesday night impairing my ability to function. Come Wednesday morning work just didn’t hold its normal charms. Eventually my addled mind came up with a solution to my boredom. I would test the limits of carton-making technology. I set out to make cartons faster than they had ever been made before. And I did. I was in a carton-making zone. Cartons flew from my workstation, piling themselves into a veritable cardboard Everest.

Eventually, the Lily Pad drifted my direction. “What the hell you think you’re doing?” (This was almost always the first sentence of any conversation I had with my co-workers.) I thought it was pretty obvious what I was doing but responded that I was making cartons. “Well stop it!” the Toad croaked. Now I was truly confused and it must have showed because the Toad took pity on me and explained.

“The world only needs so many cartons of road tar each week. We make what they need by Tuesday and they’re gonna find something else for us to do Wednesday through Friday. So we gotta pace ourselves. You come in here and start piling up cartons and somebody’s gonna wonder why they ain’t full. We fill ‘em and they start wondering why they got so many cartons of tar sitting around and they put us to work somewhere else. Or worse, they start selling more tar and then we gotta work harder from here on out!”

Case closed. I spent the rest of the day stacking cartons – very meticulously – on palettes for the Toad to haul away and hide. It was a week before I got to make another carton but at least I slept well at noon.

Absent Albert: Absent Al is probably the most frustrating Co-Worker I have ever worked with… that is when he was there. It was one of those fun situations where Al showed up just enough to let me know that I’d need to be covering his duties. When he was there good ole’ Bert would critique my work and that of every other employee in the entire company. It wasn’t a big company but you had to admire the man’s dedication. This had a double affect of sorts. The first was that Al always seemed busy when he was there and the second was that no one else really minded when Al decided to take one of his patented days off. That is except the person who had to do twice the work to make up for this lazy sod of a…. well this just isn’t that kind of a site.

Anyway, the fact that Al was less reliable than my grandparents’ 300K mile Buick wasn’t even the worst part. It was the excuses he would come up with. Over the course of a few months, Bert had a few illnesses, a couple of family emergencies (which usually consisted of him doing odd jobs around the house before going out to lunch), and his back gave out more often than the French army. After one such bout with 24-hour polio, or whatever it was that week, and the mandatory 3-day recovery period, Al heroically made it in to work on a Friday… and promptly asked to take a week off for his summer vacation… his SECOND summer vacation.

So, as you might imagine I took issue with Al questioning my work ethic one day towards the end of summer when I decided that I would indeed take the personal day I had requested 3 months in advance. Apparently we were a bit behind because good ole Bert had come down with a bout of pneumonia and hadn’t gotten his work done. Evidently sitting around in his robe all day and then chasing the ice cream man around the block put excess stress on his lungs. Will wonders never cease? Anyway when I told him that I was still taking the day off, Al got mad.

“Oh, so that’s how its gonna be huh? I guess that lets me know about your work ethic.”

I went off… “Are you kidding me?!? YOU’RE talking to ME about work ethic? You must be outside your mind!”

“Well I mean we’re behind and you’re taking the day off. I just don’t think that’s right.”

“Well isn’t that dandy? First of all we’re not behind, YOU’RE behind. Second of all, you don’t take days off, you take days on!”

After everyone else in the office, including the owner, were done laughing, Al finally realized exactly what it was I had said…. late as usual.

The neighbors that moved in down stairs are a bunch of college guys. I’m not quite sure how many there are but at this point it doesn’t really matter. I’ll just refer to them from now on as one singular person, College Guy, because I’m quite sure they share one brain, and quite possibly not even that, among how ever many of them there actually are. You know Bluto from Animal House? A genious compared to these whiz kids. They’re loud, dumb and most of the time drunk. Usually that means they’re my kind of guys. However, living next to them… not so fun.

To be honest, any morning that I don’t have to step over one of them passed out on the steps, I consider a moral victory. They’ve had the cops called on them twice now and one got arrested for throwing a beer bottle at the cop as he walked away. I’m telling you, its a veritable think tank down there.
The last new neighbor is a Crackhead and his dog.. and not just any crackhead. He’s the king of all crackheads. He’s passed more drugs through his hands and body than every single Columbian combined… ever. He’s this 50 something burned out hippy who shuffles around almost silently. I say silently because he’s got this hound that howls at anything that moves. People, cars, leaves… the wind… everything. I hate that dog. And, even though he looks all calm and nice, I have no doubt that if you got between Crackhead and his drugs he’d shiv you with a sharpened crack spoon in the blink of a bloodshot eye.

Anyway, I think its about time for Wendy to have some company in co-worker infamy. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to the next inductee….

Smokey Joe - Now, everyone has probably worked with someone who smokes. In fact, I currently work with several people who do. Every couple of hours they go take a 5 or 10 minute smoke break outside and that’s that. Well a while back I worked at a pizza joint for a couple of months. Joe was one of the guys on my shift… lucky me. This guy was a 20 something high school dropout who was personally responsible for 50% of Marlboro’s annual profits. Normally I wouldn’t have much cared that he smelled like a surviving passenger of the Hindenburg, but Joe’s passion for smokes severely cut into his work time. Often times, we’d forget that Joe was there until he’d proclaim it time for yet another smoke break. In fact, it got so bad that the manager still instinctively checked out back for Joe 4 weeks after he had been fired.

I personally, had no idea that someone could smoke that much. You know in the movie Courage Under Fire, when Matt Damon’s character is being interviewed and he lights up off the butt of the smoke he just finished? Amateur. Right before he got fired, Joe had taken up the ploy of keeping a deck broom by the door and any time it opened he’d grab up the broom and start acting like he’d been scrubbing the walkway the entire time. That worked out pretty well for him until our boss pulled up one night and sat and watched Joe smoke 10 cig’s over the course of 30 minutes while doing absolutely no work. He got fired on the spot and didn’t even have the respiratorial fortitude to argue his case. He just stood there wheezing angrily and as his crowning glory flicked his still lit cigarette at the manager before storming off… and of course lighting up another.

Welcome to the Hall, Joe. I hope my tax dollars don’t end up supporting you when you get emphysema.

“I can’t believe they took it man!” At this point I thought he might start to cry and I wasn’t sure I could handle that.

“What happened man?” An obvious question I know but what was I gonna say?

“They came and took it again… I can’t believe it!”

“Well, thats what they d…. wait, again? Did you say again?”

“Yeah… well, they took it last week but my brother saw it sitting on this lot and I still had the key so we went and got it.”

“You mean you STOLE it back.”

“Well it was my truck.”

“Well I guess they still wanted it to come and get it again.”

“I know… I cant believe they took it. I just looked out the window and saw it on top of the truck.”

“What you mean you parked it here?”

“Yeah.”

“Right in front of your house?”

“Yeah.”

“You parked a stolen car, in front of your house… where they repossed it from the last time?”

“…. (suddenly realizing this might not have been the best idea he’s ever had) uh… yeah, when you put it that way it sounds pretty stupid huh?”

“Man, you’re priceless.“