Pulled into the parking lot at work today (well, not exactly the parking lot but a small parking area next to the mess of parking lot construction) only to see small piles of snow everywhere. Crap. Snow. I saw something today that I never want to see again during the length of my contract: This afternoon, one of the warehouse guys was taking a palette of 20 Dell Optiplex desktops that the team had completed staging back to the warehouse. He was trying to pull the palette through the dock door with a palette jack. They guys didn't have any shrinkwrap with them to wrap all of the CPU boxes, so the boxes were all loose. Sure enough, he pulled and the entire palette of 20 machines crashed to the floor. I hope to God they work when we plug them in at the users' desks. Other than that, not too much unusual happened today... until this evening...
Carol and I are watching TV when we hear the sound of metal against concrete, almost like a pickaxe. Carol checks out a window and says that some teenagers across the street to the side of us are doing something in their driveway. After a while, I'm still hearing things so I get up to look, to see them destroying a chair at the end of their driveway. What the hell? They're using baseball bats, shovels, broom handles... what the hell are they doing? I see one of them throw something down the street. It's not the first time that something a little odd has gone on over there... nothing bad, just odd... So we ignore them for a while, but then I realize they're next to our house, on our property, hitting things and throwing things. When I hear something hit the streetlight post outside I start trying to figure out what they're doing. They're just being teenagers - hooligan teenagers. They're throwing some objects around - something that's about 4"-5" square. I can't tell what it is. I watch them using a broomstick as a bat and they're hitting stuff. They're all over our lawn... Time for a call to 911... I nice woman tries to get as much info as possible, but I'm not doing well trying to describe the kids (a bit too dark). She'll send a car. I say something like "I'm really sorry, I just can't tell what these teenagers are doing" and she says with a chuckle "That's OK, you usually can't tell what teenagers do these days!" There's more throwing, so I grab my digital camera and go outside to see what's up. There's pumpkin all over the driveway - OK, so that's what they're doing. A police car rolls-up. two instinctively run but stop and all four of them walk over to the squad car. I stay behind by the house and try to listen from a distance. I can't hear them, but the cop asks them where they live and he has them walk to their house. That's when I walk over, let him know that I called and mentioned that they stuck what I though was a shovel into the lawn. The officer turned on the spotlight to light up... something that looks like a broomstick with a piece of pumpkin on top of it. After a quick discussion, he promised me he'll get the kids to clean up and I walked back into the house. Sure enough, the kids start going up and down the street, picking-up pumpkin pieces. I see them go home, get a flashlight, and continue their pickup. WOW. It's like they were just teenagers trying to have fun and just got a bit carried away and didn't shirk their responsibilities to pick everything up. Now, the paranoid in me hopes that there's no retaliation for me calling the cops...
2008
2006- Season Shot
2005- The uproar over the "inside voice"
2004- Oh, no pix
- Fire drill(s)
2002- The Away Team