9/6/05

5:28 a.m. Friday night on our way up the elevator to a room party, Jeff Meyerson and Jackie expressed worry that I wouldn't enjoy hanging out with a bunch of... how did they put it?..."old geezers". Are you kidding??? Dude, when we got up to the room Bill Crider was just opening a new kegger and passing out unidentified pills and glow sticks. And then Jeff started mixing a questionable drink with Metamucil, vodka and Ensure. I know I've eaten deer brains, but I wasn't quite brave enough to try that. I assured him that my bowels were moving quite nicely and opted for some fudge, instead.

I'm kidding, of course. About the fudge.

No no no. This was not a Hollywood party. But there WAS Steve, who has to be at LEAST as entertaining as crystal meth and fiber laxatives.

I really had a great time and look forward to next year in Madison, WI. Interestingly, Madison is about the same distance from where I live as Chicago.

By the way, I am probably going to get fired today. I was assigned a case in Michigan but after repeated inquiries, never got approval on the travel request. Hell if I'm going to spend eleven days in Paw Paw, MI without knowing if I'll be paid for it.

I have two new investigators that started on Thursday, the first day of BCON. One we'll call Scrappy. She's great. On her first day she was out in the bushes taking video of her Subject. She also writes a great report that I only had to spend a half hour tweaking. When I asked her about her experience she said that her ex-husband used to be a PI and he'd take her out on cases with him. She said that when she was eight months pregnant he had her go into a hotel and bribe the clerk with $100 to tell her the room number of a man to whom she was serving a subpoena. The girl's got guts. Or her scared is broken. In any case, I like it.

My second investigator, Brawny, had a harder time of it. Brawny is a personal trainer/judo instructor. She got the cops called on her early on in the morning. I'm not sure how she presented herself, but I ended up getting a call from Officer Friendly asking me if she was legit. And of course, as luck would have it, while I was on the phone with the officer, the Subject got in her car and left. After some shameless begging I got the cop to let Brawny go so she could begin mobile surveillance.

Unfortunately, Brawny got picked up by the Subject in the grocery store parking lot a few minutes later and, after a discussion on how to conduct a mobile surveillance (i.e. don't follow so closely that you can see the Subject's eye color in the rearview mirror) we had to break it off for the day. This is not a huge deal. It happens. And she is just learning.

Brawny is, however, the worst report writer on the face of the planet. I think I have a better appreciation of what editors have to go through. When I opened the file I didn't even know where to start. I sort of felt like crying. Or eating chocolate. Or drinking one of Jeff's vodkamucil drinks.