I'm cuffing you for your own protection.
Apr. 12th, 2002 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quislibetYesterday was a strange day.
"This is my partner in crime," said Steve the carpenter, who has been working on the landlords' kitchen, introducing me to his co-worker as we stood on the back porch and watched the drug bust. He pretended a nervous look over at the police. "Oh, maybe I shouldn't say that right now."
Two large black vans were parked on the street across from my house and a stealthily unmarked cop car (as opposed to the stereotypical unmarked car that is instantly recognizable) had just pulled up to the front van, in which two men were sitting, when I walked by on my way home from the grocery store. "Turn off the engine and get out of the car!" said one plainclothes cop, although at the time I noted only a man in a t-shirt with a gun, so it was my fervent hope that this was a law enforcement official and not some armed miscreant.
He and his partner pulled the guys out of the van, frisked them and cuffed them (supposedly for their own protection, as mentioned above).
I went inside and put perishables in the fridge and went out to the back porch where Steve and his co-worker stood. As we watched, three marked cruisers came by (the station is only a few blocks away) and the suspects were taken away in separate cars; one, the driver of the front van, was submissive, the other quite angry and unhappy. The main plainclothes man went back to the other van, used a key (presumably obtained from one of the suspects) to open it up, and yelled to his partner, "Man, you've got to see this!", and reached in and held up between thumb and forefinger what appeared to bea sandwich bag full o' white powdery goodness. I heard him say something about "--- loaded!" in an incredulous tone, and soon tow trucks came for the vans.
Not a common scene on the edge of Salem's Rich Person District.
Earlier yesterday, as I walked from the cafe to the grocery store, I noticed a couple having a screaming argument in the vicinity of Walgreens; a woman advanced angrily on a man who continued backing away, although their overall movement described more of a circle than a straight line, so perhaps one or both of them was/were waiting for a bus or something and didn't want to go too far. I dunno. She wanted him to get the fuck out of her face, among other things; he listened with either patience or quiet mockery.
The morning started when I got up early to take the cats to the vet by taxi (I don't drive, and J. had to go to work [*]). As the taxi arrived I was still trying to get the Kitten in the cardboard box (we had only one pet carrier, and that went to Big Kitty -- we have quite the original names for our cats -- who can tear through cardboard rather easily). It became apparent that this was simply not going to work -- such a small cat, but she becomes so large when you try to put her in a box -- and so somehow I managed to get them both in the plastic carrier. The cross-town taxi ride with meowing pets cost only $2.35, one benefit to living in Salem, I guess, and the driver didn't have change for my $10 so he said I should pay for it when I called for a return ride. The cats got a clean bill of health and some booster shots, and I purchased a second pet carrier from the vet, and then another cab came to take us all home. The driver stopped a block or two away from the Feline Hospital to pick up an elderly woman who had a cat carrier (with cat) of her own among her luggage. She was going to Danvers. "Oh, you have cats too!" she said, getting into the front seat. (Had the taxi not been a station wagon, I'm not sure how two passengers and three cat carriers would have fit.) "You're black just like my Muffy!" she exclaimed, looking in one. (In fact Muffy appeared to be black and white, from the glimpse I saw, unless Muffy was some absent or long-dead cat and not the one in the carrier.) She went on about how she's always had cats, and as a girl had cats and ducks and chickens and even, briefly, a bat, until her mom found out about it. Anywhere from one to three cats meowed piteously as we drove along.
---
After the drug show was over, Steve the carpenter asked if I had the day off, and I explained about the part-time job and the student-ness and so on. He said if he had it all to do over, he'd teach American history, but he never finished college and found himself in the carpentry and construction trade more or less by accident and then found that he liked it well enough and could make three or four times as much money as a teacher might (and, say, twice what I can expect to make if I ever become a tenured professor). So maybe if he can retire around 52 or so as he hopes he might go back to school and take up teaching as a second career for the fun of it.
Oh, to have marketable skills that I enjoyed jusing.
Except...
Last night a high school friend of mine told me on the phone how she's possibly found, at last, her dream career, after doing graduate school (studying central Asia) and then working odd jobs and then finding gainful employment more or less ignoring her education background in a telecommunications company working as a sort of middleperson between engineers and marketers and customers in Developing Nations. Now it turns out that this combination of knowledge of Central Asia and facility with languages and understanding of modern telecommunications systems and practice in helping science and non-science people understand one another makes her a perfect candidate for intelligence work, and so she will begin training in the classics department of a small nearby university.
Classics department? Well, apparently the expertise they provide is how to build up a picture of what is going on in an alien culture -- and one where you can't just ask or infiltrate easily -- from fragments and scraps of diverse evidence.
Applied classical studies. Who would have thought it?
But I think that's probably not for me.
[*] That's right, I don't drive. Get over it. I will be taking driving lessons once my prospectus is done, however, so there.
"This is my partner in crime," said Steve the carpenter, who has been working on the landlords' kitchen, introducing me to his co-worker as we stood on the back porch and watched the drug bust. He pretended a nervous look over at the police. "Oh, maybe I shouldn't say that right now."
Two large black vans were parked on the street across from my house and a stealthily unmarked cop car (as opposed to the stereotypical unmarked car that is instantly recognizable) had just pulled up to the front van, in which two men were sitting, when I walked by on my way home from the grocery store. "Turn off the engine and get out of the car!" said one plainclothes cop, although at the time I noted only a man in a t-shirt with a gun, so it was my fervent hope that this was a law enforcement official and not some armed miscreant.
He and his partner pulled the guys out of the van, frisked them and cuffed them (supposedly for their own protection, as mentioned above).
I went inside and put perishables in the fridge and went out to the back porch where Steve and his co-worker stood. As we watched, three marked cruisers came by (the station is only a few blocks away) and the suspects were taken away in separate cars; one, the driver of the front van, was submissive, the other quite angry and unhappy. The main plainclothes man went back to the other van, used a key (presumably obtained from one of the suspects) to open it up, and yelled to his partner, "Man, you've got to see this!", and reached in and held up between thumb and forefinger what appeared to bea sandwich bag full o' white powdery goodness. I heard him say something about "--- loaded!" in an incredulous tone, and soon tow trucks came for the vans.
Not a common scene on the edge of Salem's Rich Person District.
Earlier yesterday, as I walked from the cafe to the grocery store, I noticed a couple having a screaming argument in the vicinity of Walgreens; a woman advanced angrily on a man who continued backing away, although their overall movement described more of a circle than a straight line, so perhaps one or both of them was/were waiting for a bus or something and didn't want to go too far. I dunno. She wanted him to get the fuck out of her face, among other things; he listened with either patience or quiet mockery.
The morning started when I got up early to take the cats to the vet by taxi (I don't drive, and J. had to go to work [*]). As the taxi arrived I was still trying to get the Kitten in the cardboard box (we had only one pet carrier, and that went to Big Kitty -- we have quite the original names for our cats -- who can tear through cardboard rather easily). It became apparent that this was simply not going to work -- such a small cat, but she becomes so large when you try to put her in a box -- and so somehow I managed to get them both in the plastic carrier. The cross-town taxi ride with meowing pets cost only $2.35, one benefit to living in Salem, I guess, and the driver didn't have change for my $10 so he said I should pay for it when I called for a return ride. The cats got a clean bill of health and some booster shots, and I purchased a second pet carrier from the vet, and then another cab came to take us all home. The driver stopped a block or two away from the Feline Hospital to pick up an elderly woman who had a cat carrier (with cat) of her own among her luggage. She was going to Danvers. "Oh, you have cats too!" she said, getting into the front seat. (Had the taxi not been a station wagon, I'm not sure how two passengers and three cat carriers would have fit.) "You're black just like my Muffy!" she exclaimed, looking in one. (In fact Muffy appeared to be black and white, from the glimpse I saw, unless Muffy was some absent or long-dead cat and not the one in the carrier.) She went on about how she's always had cats, and as a girl had cats and ducks and chickens and even, briefly, a bat, until her mom found out about it. Anywhere from one to three cats meowed piteously as we drove along.
---
After the drug show was over, Steve the carpenter asked if I had the day off, and I explained about the part-time job and the student-ness and so on. He said if he had it all to do over, he'd teach American history, but he never finished college and found himself in the carpentry and construction trade more or less by accident and then found that he liked it well enough and could make three or four times as much money as a teacher might (and, say, twice what I can expect to make if I ever become a tenured professor). So maybe if he can retire around 52 or so as he hopes he might go back to school and take up teaching as a second career for the fun of it.
Oh, to have marketable skills that I enjoyed jusing.
Except...
Last night a high school friend of mine told me on the phone how she's possibly found, at last, her dream career, after doing graduate school (studying central Asia) and then working odd jobs and then finding gainful employment more or less ignoring her education background in a telecommunications company working as a sort of middleperson between engineers and marketers and customers in Developing Nations. Now it turns out that this combination of knowledge of Central Asia and facility with languages and understanding of modern telecommunications systems and practice in helping science and non-science people understand one another makes her a perfect candidate for intelligence work, and so she will begin training in the classics department of a small nearby university.
Classics department? Well, apparently the expertise they provide is how to build up a picture of what is going on in an alien culture -- and one where you can't just ask or infiltrate easily -- from fragments and scraps of diverse evidence.
Applied classical studies. Who would have thought it?
But I think that's probably not for me.
[*] That's right, I don't drive. Get over it. I will be taking driving lessons once my prospectus is done, however, so there.
