From: Robin Lee Powell Newsgroups: alt.humor.best-of-usenet Subject: [alt.polyamory] Re: Cat Doors [was Re: An Idle Question About Sleep] Date: 26 Feb 1999 17:23:22 GMT Subject: Re: Cat Doors [was Re: An Idle Question About Sleep] From: james_n@ece.uwaterloo.ca (James Nicoll) Newsgroups: alt.polyamory In article , Robin Lee Powell wrote: >james_n@ece.uwaterloo.ca (James Nicoll) wrote: >>In article , >>Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet wrote: >> >> snip >> >>>(Are cats in the store really a good substitute for an alarm? Well, >>>with *your* cats, probably.) >> >> I have to admit the one time it came up they were no help at all. >>Once the bleeding started, they all hid. Finding all the cats was actually >>rather difficult: I was sure Blotchy had bolted out the hole in the front >>door but it turned out he had just gone semiliquid and wedged himself into >>a space I wouldn't think he could fit into if I hadn't seen it. >> >All right, we gonna get the story here or what? :-) > >-Robin, itching to make an abhou post. This is the burglary story I've been telling since '96. Folks who have heard it may want to hit 'n' now. Sunday, about 5:30 pm. Jasmine and I are sitting down to eat. We just had a disagreement about what to watch on TV: she wanted to watch a show on forensics but I thought the dead guy looked too much like the pork chop I was eating. At this point, Jasmine hears a thumping downstairs. For no good reason, I had not rounded up the cats and turned on the alarm I thought the sound, if there *was* a sound [I certainly heard nothing] was probably Blotchy jumping off of the upper shelves. I get up and amble on down to the store. Once I am down there, I notice a man, dressed only in track pants, standing in the front foyer. Now, I've had unobservent customers damage my door not noticing it was lokced before and at least once I have forgotten to lock up at all so I assume that he is a customer of some sort. Had I noticed the large hole in my front door, I might have made a different assumption. "May I help you?" I ask. "Do you have a woman? I really need a woman." he replies. Realising instantly that someone with such a poor grasp of the demographics of gaming could not possibly be a gamer and suddenly noticing the big hole in my door, I say "wait a second" and walk back to the alarm keypad in the back. At this point Jasmine comes down to see what is taking so long. "Get the fuck back upstairs," I explain. She assumes that I am either being broken into or am presuicidal [Low tolerance for vulgarity], so she goes back upstairs. I hit the panic button on the keypad. I had paid extra for an alamr capable of inflicting severe hearing damage so when the alarm came on, it was being hit in both ears with large, angry tent pegs. At this point for no sane reason *I walk back to the fellow*. "The police will be here in 3 minutes. I'd leave." He takes this badly. He shoves me one-handed, which knocks me back about two meters, but I stay on my feet. He grabs a paintball gun off the wall and tries to shoot me with it. "That's not a real gun, you moron" I helpfully point out. He heeds my advice, reverses his hold on the gun and swings it at me like a baseball bat. In the comics, people can always think stuff like "I must leap back agilely to avoid the steel bottle on the end of that Sting Ray [TM] paintball gun!" In real life, I think "Mu-uh say, I seem to on one knee and my head is ringing. What happened?" So, I put my hand up to the side of my head. I notice right away that my head is no longer symetric and the left side seems to have acquired a complex topology. Also, as soon as I touch my head, blood rushes down my arm. I instantly realise I have to get off the white rug. The burglar has run out the door, pausing only to return the paintball gun [so nobody would accuse him of stealing] and to ask Jasmine, who is on the baclony, if she knows where there are any women. Note that Jasmine is very obviously female. By the time I think of what to do, I've filled a pool of blood a meter wide on the floor. I remember there's a dirty towel in the bathroom. There's a clean one too, but why risk ruining it? I stuff the towel in the hole in my head around the time Jasmine comes down again. Insert another argument. I want her to go to Barrels [the restaurant next door, whose owner was my landlady at the time]. She wants to put her shoes on first. For some reason, I am having a hard time formulating arguments so she wins. The police show up, in the form of a bicycle cop. We chat amiably until his radio goes off, telling him there is a break in in progress at 54 Benton, two doors down from me. He asks if I mind if he goes to investigate. I say ok because it wasn't like he was giving me first aid. Fran, my landlady shows up. She knows first aid, checks me out, pronouces me ok but I'll need stitches. Second wave of police show up. They've caught him [on the third break in attempt] and tragically had to beat him into a jelly like consistancy to get him to stop moving. He had broken his foot going through my door, for example, and then run three blocks on it. So, I post saying that the writer's group I was suppose to chair is called off. I call someone to go to the room it is in to tell people. I call my capenter to come patch the door. I find my cats. I decide that if I am going miss the comedy workshop, the least I can do is write a funny report for the police: four pages with footnotes and the police seem to think it is pretty good stuff. Much later, I get around to going in to get the flap of scalp put back and stitched. Only 4 stitches. Enough of a concussion to render me unable to do change in my head for about a week. No serious damage done. The fellow who broke in on day 4 of his parole. He's off his meds and on other drugs and is only in town because his brother [who'd like to see him locked up for life, I'm told] invited him down to lok for work and a place to stay. Back into the slammer he goes for another few years. This is apparently his pattern: does somethign violent, gets hammered by the cops during the arrest, goes to jail for a few years, gets out, repeat cycle. Eventually he'll kill somone or get killed. On the whole, one of the funnier things I have ever had happen. WHere were my adrenal glands when all this was happening? Where were my 'run away' instincts? Obviously, they had fled the scene earlier. I never felt a twitch of anything but mild annoyance during the whole shebang. Jasmine says it is the most romantic thing anyone ever did for her*. James Nicoll *And broke up with me four months later.