A strange week has just gone by. Two brief stories:
1) I work at home some of the time, which means if I need to fax something, I have to shoot over to The Geek Boutique here in Maynard. You might be asking why I don’t just get one of those fax/email/copy/printer things for my home office, right? Well, screw that. I will not ever pay any of my own money for anything involving faxing. I hated faxing in the ’90s and I hate it today. A terrible invention. Anyway, there was someone new working at “The Geek” on Tuesday and he claimed they couldn’t fax stuff for me, which I know is not true, but whatever – I left and went over to the huge Clock Tower Place, former headquarters of Digital and now a holding house for many different businesses, including Monster.com. I worked in that building briefly years ago and if you’ve ever been in there, you know how easy it is to get lost. So I’m about to walk in when a group of people emerge from another door and I notice right away that one of them is Curt Schilling. Now, that’s just ridiculous. What the hell is Curt Schilling doing in Maynard, I ask myself, and why is he surrounded by a group of bean counters in suits? The only thing I could figure was that he may have been part of a group looking into buying the building. Schilling, by the way, was dressed to the nines himself for his tour of the building – gray sweat pants and a t-shirt that said “Groundforce Iraq – USA” across the front. Delightful. As you might imagine, on my way out, I got lost in that damn building and ended up running into Schilling and his geek army three more times as I tried to find the correct exit and felt like a mouse who had just been injected with something and dropped into a maze. Curses. Come to find out that Schilling is starting a video game company and he was undoubtedly looking at office space, as the press release for his company had Maynard listed as the city of origin.
2) I woke up at 4:40am on Friday for a 7am flight to Atlanta. I go down there, have my 1.5 hour meeting and get back on the plane at 4pm, fly home and as our plane hits the ground, I notice we’re moving quicker than usual off the runway – and then we just stop for like 10 minutes. WTF? The pilot then comes on and says that all planes at the airport had to stop where they were because there was a VIP about to take off. He then added that in about five minutes, if we looked out to the right side of the aircraft, we could see the VIP take off. Sure enough, five minutes later, I peer outside the plane and see Air Force Two taking off over our heads. Curses! Dick Cheney cost me 15 minutes of my life! I made up for it Sunday morning, though, when Tim Russert made him feel really uncomfortable on Meet The Press. Good stuff. Cheney ended up with the best joke of the hour, though, when, during a lighthearted exchange about the hunting incident, Russert asked him “would I be safe if I went hunting with you?”
Cheney’s response: “No, you’re not in season, Tim.”