[MD] (OT) The Sunday of the Mouse

[Ian Glendinning]

PS you're Austin-based right ?
Ian

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Ian Glendinning
<ian.glendinning at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Andy,
>
> "bit it farewell" ? The janitor wasn't rodent-biter Ozzy was he ?
>
> Excellent
> Ian
>
> On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 8:10 AM, Andy Skelton <skeltoac at gmail.com> wrote:
>> [I have done a lot of things. This story is true AFAIR. I tell it at
>> parties to burn my image in people's minds. It is pretty far off topic
>> but there was a request for a personal introduction. If you want
>> specifics about me, they are mostly very findable. I have Google
>> thinking I'm the most important Andy Skelton on the internet.]
>>
>> Soon after Y2K I left a tech support job in a call center due to a
>> health issue. Couldn't breathe, couldn't talk on the phone. I got a
>> temp job wrangling a pallet jack and quickly became the department's
>> database expert. Before the end of the year I switched again because
>> the corporate bullshit wasn't worth the pay. I moved from
>> multi-billion companies where I was nobody to a computer forensics lab
>> in the mother-in-law wing of my employer's house. He also shared the
>> space with an administrative assistant. When she wasn't around, it was
>> man central.
>>
>> It had to be. Computer forensics was not something we could have done
>> in a socially sterile environment. Political correctness was assailed
>> every instant by the contents of the hard drives we examined and the
>> hidden sides of people we revealed. We searched, compiled, and
>> reported to our clients about digital documentation of deceit and
>> abuse. It took a thick skin.
>>
>> We got jobs from local PD, sheriffs, staties, feds, even RCMP. But the
>> best ones were the private investigator jobs.
>>
>> I remember fondly the job we did for a woman who co-owned a successful
>> direct-marketing business with her husband. The woman came to us
>> because she knew that her husband was having an affair with the office
>> floozy. She wanted to know how deep the affair had gone. She wanted to
>> wave the evidence in his face and make him stop screwing around. She
>> wanted him to choose her, or hit the road and leave her with the
>> entire fortune.
>>
>> We had heard this all before. This was bread and butter to us. Since
>> the wife co-owned the business, she felt it was well within her rights
>> to inspect the company computers. Our job was to acquire the data
>> without the perps knowing. If the investigation were known, the jig
>> would be up and the wife might not have any standing. No problem, we'd
>> just go to the office on the weekend and skedaddle after a few hours
>> of dd'ing disks in BeOS.
>>
>> The boss saw no fizz in this foray. He'd had his fill of field work
>> for the week and his family got upset when he worked weekends. So it
>> was to be my first solo acquisition.
>>
>> I arrived at business address, a suite between a gas station and a
>> hairdresser in a 70's strip mall, with my gear and my lunch. The
>> janitor was an old friend of the wife and sympathetic to her plight.
>> He was a short, rotund man of indeterminate ancestry. A fat, old,
>> lovable mutt of a man. He cheerfully opened the door for me, showed me
>> to my workspace and then locked up and kept the lights dim so nobody
>> driving by would think people were inside.
>>
>> The janitor was really into the stealth aspect of this job. This was
>> his supporting role in a Mission Impossible film. He had parked a
>> block away. I parked right in front of the door. Whatever.
>>
>> Once I had my gear set up, he showed me around the suite. It was just
>> a bunch of private offices and a kitchen. Only two of the offices were
>> of any interest: those of the husband and the floozy.
>>
>> We later learned all of their dirty little pet names from scouring
>> their emails. The list was long and we were too respectful to write it
>> down. I just remember laughing for hours over Pussy Pants. Anyway, I
>> digress.
>>
>> The two offices were in a strange condition. The janitor had purchased
>> several rolls of blue masking tape and spent the early morning hours
>> affixing each and every item of office materiel in its place. Objects
>> were removed only after their footprints were outlined in blue tape.
>> There were five blue C's on the floor where the wheels of the office
>> chair had come to rest before the floozy had left on Friday. The
>> janitor was unbelievably thorough.
>>
>> He was also very creative. I was prepared to ignore the shattered
>> sheet of clear plastic on the floozy's floor behind her chair and
>> concentrate on the computers. While I waited for a large hard drive to
>> be copied into a file on an even larger one, the janitor told me what
>> had happened. I couldn't stop him in his glee.
>>
>> Just like I did when I was a janitor, he had a big keyring. There was
>> no place he was forbidden to tidy up. However, the lock on the
>> floozy's door had been changed very recently without his knowledge.
>> Rather than try to draw conclusions, he got busy bypassing the lock.
>> He accessed the hair salon next door, climbed into the suspended
>> ceiling with his fat little body (bless him) crawled over the wall and
>> lowered himself into the office. That was hard work, especially when
>> you have to bring a ladder with you so you can get down, and he did a
>> good job not making a huge mess of the ceiling tiles. But the 4'x2'
>> lens from one of the fluorescent lights had fallen out of the ceiling
>> and shattered on the floor.
>>
>> He had considered his options. He looked for a replacement and found
>> none. This being a Sunday, the store that sold them was closed. He
>> decided to leave the mess exactly as it lay and concoct a plausible
>> story. After marking the rough outline of the wreckage with blue tape
>> to help us avoid stepping in it, he removed the doorknob and walked
>> out of the building with gleeful giggles in his wake.
>>
>> An hour later he was back with a fresh set of keys made by his
>> locksmith friend and a brown paper sack and a look of sublime
>> satisfaction. He left the sack in the kitchen and got to work
>> reinstalling the doorknob. I had just finished copying the last hard
>> drive and was just about to ask him to lock the door after I left. He
>> stopped me with his hands full of grass and other debris from the lawn
>> and he told me the story of the fluorescent light.
>>
>> He was weaving the debris into the rough shape of a nest. He said he
>> wasn't sure what a rodent's nest looked like but it would be good
>> enough to convince everyone in the office. He climbed the ladder and
>> stashed the nest on top of a ceiling tile.
>>
>> In his story, there had been a mouse living in the ceiling of the
>> office. There was extra value to this scheme because, as we all know,
>> all floozies are frightened and sickened by the mere idea of rodents.
>> By the time she recovered from the shock of the knowledge that there
>> had been a mouse just a few feet above her head for unknown months,
>> the shards of plastic would have been forgotten.
>>
>> While on the ladder, the janitor removed one of the punch-outs from
>> the light fixture's chassis. This was where the mouse had curiously
>> climbed through just before crashing to its death on the floor eight
>> feet below. He stuck traces of fresh mouse fur to the rough edges of
>> the hole to create evidence that, in my estimation, nobody would
>> bother looking for. He did it for his own enjoyment.
>>
>> When everything was back in its place and the blue tape all crushed
>> into several trash bags and we were ready to go, he went to the
>> kitchen to fetch the paper sack out of the freezer. It was from a pet
>> store that was open on Sundays. He dumped the now frozen mouse onto
>> the pile of shards, bit it fare well, and locked the floozy's office
>> with a flourish. His masterpiece was complete.
>>
>> I never heard about the aftermath in that office so I guess it went
>> according to plan. We engrossed ourselves with the evidence I
>> gathered. It was a nasty mess. The husband had squirreled away enough
>> cash to buy a cabin on the lake where he would meet the floozy while
>> he was ostensibly out of town on business. We hoped his wife left him
>> standing naked in the rain but since she never came back for the full
>> evidence we guess she settled it without a court battle.
>>
>> As I said, it's a true story. I enjoy telling it.
>>
>> Andy
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>