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Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
I've wanted to share these stories with GBS for years. I held off because I did not want to implicate any of the main players in the (possibly illegal) tom-foolery that happened at the time. Given that it has been over 25 years, I'd be surprised if some of the people mentioned, Bob, are still alive. So, time to share.

I graduated college with a degree in electrical engineering. After graduation I moved back to my parent's place in the Silicon Valley while I job searched. This was the time of the first dotcom boom and there was a lot going on in that area. I landed a great job with Cisco Systems after a couple of months, as a tech, but soon to be a test engineer in manufacturing. Lots of money, stock options, health care, etc. for a 24 year old. It was an exciting time.

Day one my new manager walks me around the building, introduces me to the team I will work with and a lot of other people too, that will be training me and testing me. I get my own workbench with oscilloscope, tools, etc. It is super cool. I'm told I will have a mentor to teach me the product line I will work on; diagnostics, trouble shooting, repairs. His name is Bob, he's not an employee per se, but a contractor, but he did not show up that day, but he is also really good at his work. Hmm, okay?...

Day two I show up early like an eager beaver and head to my bench. There is someone sitting there already working some troubleshooting. This guy has a foot long pony tail, hasn't shaved in a couple of days and is wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and sandals beneath his ESD smock. We introduce ourselves and this is Bob, my new mentor. He was 40 years old back then.

First things first, he shows me how to operate the industrial coffee maker, shows me the break room where there are free waters, teas, sodas, popcorn. That was the first hour of my second day. He walks me around the second floor that is all cubicles and management offices and take me to a conference room that has a big table with a dozen chairs and a couple of leather couches and tells me if I ever need a nap to just come in here and use one of the couches because the room is hardly ever used.

We finally do some work; him showing me how to run diagnostics, going over the boards in the product line and looking over schematics. He was honestly a great teacher; as good as any professor from college. Noon time comes up and he tells me we are going to lunch. "He's buying". There was a very nice cafeteria in the building with chefs and everything, but we are not going there, we are going out for lunch. How long can we be out? Lol, as long as we want.

Over the next week we went to a variety of restaurants, but that day we just hit up a local pizza joint. This is where I first learned that Bob was a hardcore alcoholic. We split a pepperoni pizza and a pitcher of beer. I had actually read the employee's handbook the night before like a good student and knew it was totally acceptable to have a drink with coworkers for a "business lunch". Okay. First pitcher is down and Bob orders a second. That goes down in minutes and a third is ordered.

We get back to work and actually working (and laughing a lot), but I am buzzed as hell the whole afternoon. That was my second day at work.


I have lots of Bob stories to share, this is just tip of the iceberg. Also, there is a reason why I chose the Guns tag. We will get there.

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Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop

Nooner posted:

umunhum is a funny name (:

It is. I had to look it up to remember how to spell it.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
Bob bought a house. After a few months working with him, "Hey! I bought a house! Want to see it?!"

Okay, sounds cool, where is it?

It's at the top of Umunhum!

I grew up as a teenager in that region and I know that Umunhum is one of the highest peaks in the Santa Cruz mountains. It's only about 3500', but for a coastal range that's pretty high. Turns out It's a one hour drive from work to there. Not even a traffic thing, just the roads and distance.

The place is cool as heck. Two story log cabin in great shape, and probably 4000 sqft total. It was huge. It had bay windows and you could see all of Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay from inside or out on the deck; and I mean all of it. It's a million dollar view. Some of the best sunsets I've seen, and massive layers of rolling fog were there.
Old couple had sold it after decades, moved closer to town for healthcare.

There was also a 4 bay garage. A side-by-side ATV/golfcart thing was in there. And super strangely, a heavy punching bag and a speed bag. There was a duck pond with a duck house and two ducks. There's acreage. I think it was only 5-10 but there were some well cut roads and all that, so it was real fun for hiking, the ATV thing, bikes.

Bob said he had two unused bedrooms and he knew I wanted to get out of parent's house (not that I didn't appreciate it, but you know what I mean) so I signed up.
He gave me a great deal, something like $500/month. That area was ~$1500/month for a studio apartment at that time.

I moved in. It was a crazy and fun time.
Plenty more to share.

Internetjack fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Oct 11, 2021

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop

CPL593H posted:

None of that sounds illegal.

Stuff that may or may not have been illegal definitely happened.

I'm trying to remember these stories chronologically, but there were quite a few. It gets all jumbled in my old brain.

One of the best rooms in the building was the music room. It was downstairs and had a pool table in the center but Bob had added tons of music stuff. At one end was a stack of 6 Marshall(?) amps. They were from his friend that lived in town and had no room for them. They were big. The stack was about 8' wide and 5' tall. It was a big space so there was lots of room for everything.

Plugged into them was a six string, bass, synthesizer, and a couple of mics. There was a complete drum kit. We all sucked but we could make a fuckton of noise when we wanted. We would use earplugs when we turned everything to max. The funny part to the room was that it had two barn style doors that swung out, creating enough space to drive a car through.

We opened them in the summer. The neighbor about 400 yards away did not care for this.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop

Treecko posted:

Bob sounds cool as gently caress I hope he's still around chilling somewhere

It was a fun time while I lived there; no regrets. I'd love to know if he is still surviving; but also, read on.

down n out posted:

Good natured alcoholics like Bob are a treasure and add greatly to the spice of life.

100% agree

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
My parents had an old Subaru they wanted to sell and I happen to mention it to Bob. He totally wants to buy it.

We head to the parent's place and they sell it to him.

Within about a week he's drunk driving back to the house into the mountains and wraps the car around a tree. There aren't a lot of people on the road, but within a while someone finds the crash and calls it in. The responders call in a helicopter airlift to San Francisco.

Afterwards with some re-hab Bob was mostly okay. The car was lost though.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
It was a pretty good hallucination if I was Bob the whole time. As always; truth is stranger than a variety of mental disorders.


Appreciating the name and post. The honest answer is that I have no idea. I haven't been in touch in over 17 years. And while these are a lot of fun tales, it does get a bit dark at the end. Nothing absolutely horrible, but nothing to celebrate.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
We set up a shooting range on the property. For archery and pistol shooting. It was a few hundred yards from the house and at the bottom of a hill, a safe range. It was very cool, and we actually learned a lot with practice.

Though we'd get shitfaced drunk at times and go down there with everything. Guns and arrows. It was totally rad.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop

OxMan posted:

I'm a little confused about the location here cause I thought Mt umunhum was the mountain from the San Jose side that had the missile radar base tower visible.

There was a very tall, 100'+ transmission tower about a quarter of a mile from our house. It had the blinky beacon light on top so airplanes would see it at night. We always assumed it was a radio repeater type function. Drunken friends and neighbors always wanted to climb it; scramble over the barbed wire and climb the ladder. I always thought it was super stupid because we had no idea how much power and what frequencies it transmitted and that it could possibly have enough power to be like a huge microwave. But climb it they did. I opted out every time because I was a huge wimp.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
Umunhum was a cool place, the views, the remoteness and all that. There was also a lot of weird and dodgy poo poo up there. A lot of neighbors were fine people, but there were some seriously sketchy folks. There was a guy that had some acreage not too far from where we lived. Complete survivalist/prepper/meth-head. He showed us one of his several buried cargo containers. It was full of a lot of food, a few guns and cases of ammo. He claimed to have several of these hidden on his property. There were no buildings on the property, just several trailers and RVs that he lived out of. The crazy part (lol) was that he built a motorcycle course over it all with jumps and landings and technical stuff. It was for his son that he shared custody with his divorced wife.

Kid would come up and ride his off-road BMX motorcycle all over the place; so I guess that was cool in its own way.

One weekend my brother comes up to hang out and BBQ and drink a couple beers, watch the sunset, etc.
It gets dark to about 10PM and he has to head home. He heads out down the road past the prepper's place.

He calls the next morning to tell me this:

It's dark, late at night, he's only about 5 minutes from our house. This is a dirt road at the top of a mountain.
A woman runs into the road in front of him, waving him down. She is distressed and asking my brother for a ride off the mountain. He takes a moment to feel that he isn't in some weird carjack scenario, and lets her in. Its about a half hour drive into the nearest main town, Los Gatos, and of course asks her what is up? Where does she need to go?

She explained that she had come up the hill 3 weeks ago to visit her "boyfriend", the meth-head, and he and his buddy had her locked in one of the trailers since then. She also shares that they shoved her van off the side of the hill to limit her means of escape. Sure enough, 100' later she points down the hillside and asks if he can see it. He had a decent flashlight and shined it down the hillside, and a couple hundred feet down was a van that had rolled a dozen times lying in the brush. She had just managed to break out of the trailer that night while the two psychos were both gone.

My brother asks where to take her; police station?, shelter? wherever. She just wanted to be dropped in town and would call a friend that she could stay with. My brother gave her $40 and pretty much said okay, I am out. He then went home.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
The first time I hung out with Bob after work was a Friday. "Let's hit a pub and get food and drinks!" Sounds good to me. We go to downtown San Jose. The bar we go to does not serve food at all; so just beers and drinks it is.

After a bit I still want food so we walk a block or two to another bar, but they had stopped serving food an hour before. So more beer and drinks. There may have been some pretzels.

We then hit a third bar with no food.

We finally meander to one of those cowboy bars (where no one is an actual cowboy but they dress like it) that does the whole line-dancing evening. We are both pretty hosed up and I'm just getting a bad vibe on going into this place; like "this isn't going to end well".

Within 5 minutes Bob is yelling at some dude in a cowboy hat, "Your stupid hat and bell buckle are only that big to make up for your tiny dick!" You could hear this across the whole dance floor and bar and music. The bouncers escorted us out in seconds. Turns out that Bob had immediately started hitting on the guy's wife the second we walked in; and surprise!, the guy didn't care for that.

So we are literally sitting outside on the curb. I'm completely drunk and have no idea where my truck is, but know I couldn't even drive it if I did know where it was. I ask "what should we do?" I'm thinking we just get some lovely hotel room and sleep it off.

"Oh, my ex-girlfriend lives close by! We can crash there!" It was a couple of blocks away.

Now Bob had told me about her. They had been together for a couple of years but broke up when she could no longer tolerate his alcoholism. And we were two drunks showing up at her door around 11PM unannounced. Turns out she is an incredibly courteous person and lets us in while doing a smdh at us. I was very meek with my thank you's and nice to meet you's. The next morning we actually ate some scrambled eggs and coffee together and she was actually very super cool. Bob had hosed up by not working to stay together with her imo.

We leave. We have at least a mile to walk through San Jose to find our vehicles. First thing out of Bob's mouth when we leave the door is, "We need to get some bloody marys". And got them we did, then found our cars and drove home.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
When I was there there were only a couple gates at the far ends of the road, and everyone left them open because it was a total pita to get out of your vehicle, drive through, and then stop and secure them. We had a neighbor that installed a remote controlled gate on the shared entry to 3 properties, but he gave out enough gate openers (like garage door openers) to all the households.

I can imagine as times and people have changed so has the road.


There were not a lot of places up there, so it's entirely plausible we were in your uncle's house.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
There were two other roommates at Bob's. One was a high school friend of mine that graduated shortly after I did. School teacher; and his school was only about a half hour drive down the hill. Bob gave him the third bedroom at an even cheaper rate, which was totally cool. He was an actual musician, percussionist, so he was a huge asset to our lovely jam sessions.

The fourth guy was Chris, a long time friend of Bob's at similar age in his 40s. I loved hanging out with him, but the guy was a perpetual slacker to the Nth degree. He was also a person that had those wide "crazy eyes" all the time which made him look slightly insane. Chris loved to smoke weed, but never had much money so he would buy the shittiest dirt weed full of seeds and stems and then just pick through it all. But I swear to god this guy was smoking every minute he was awake. There wasn't a fourth bedroom, but he bought a camper, not a truck and camper, just the camper, and had it set under the eaves of the garage. I actually loaned him $500 for the purchase and I think I got paid back $350. But he did share his lovely weed freely, so it was all good.

In the few years I knew and lived with Chris, he took a course in becoming a masseuse (trust me you would not want a guy looking like he did massaging you) and dropped out before finishing. He later took up a basic HTML course at a community college and was doing well. I saw a couple of websites he built and they were pretty good for the tech of the time. The day of the final exam he decided to skip it and go get a massage instead and failed the certification. Last I remember that he was doing pizza delivery. That's all fine and well and he had good work, but he would still skip days at a time but somehow keep his job.

The best one though was the day he came back from actually delivering pizzas and he has a brand spanking new mountain bike! This is a nice one I'd have guessed at $1000.

"Uh so Chris, where'd you get that bike??" Seriously wondering if he stole it, but he really was not that type of person.

"A guy tried to mug me when I got back to my car after a delivery." He was just off his bike but had his hand down his pants and threatening to pull out a gun if Chris didn't hand over his cash. Chris yelled, "I bet you don't even have a dick down there!" and charged the guy. Dude ran. Left his bike behind. Police were called and eyewitness's validated the story. When everything was wrapped up he asks the officer, "So what about that bike there?" Cop replies, "I don't see any bike." and walks away. Chris grabs it and throws it in the back seat of his car and drives home.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
Bob bought a Porsche one day. I believe it was a 911 model.

I came back up the mountain after running errands and there is a Porsche in the garage with the hood popped and Bob was working away on it. Changing the oil, checking the air filter, checking the brakes, checking spark plugs etc. He was actually a very knowledgeable mechanic.

"Oh, you got a Porsche! That's cool." "Yeah, this is going to be great!" was his reply.

He's out there wrenching away all day and evening. I'm in my room playing video games at 10PM and he comes back into the house, (I don't know if he'd had lunch or dinner, but definitely had a few drinks), and announces that we are good to go!

Go? When?

Now.

I'd had a few beers myself, and was suggesting we hold off until tomorrow.

Nope, we are going NOW.

Okay, as long as it has seatbelts...

We go out to the garage and he tosses the keys to me. Uh, this is your new car, you should drive it. His answer, "We'll take turns, you start."

I'd never driven a high end sports car before, I was slightly buzzed, it's a remote road, so why not?

For reference, the fastest I'd ever driven my truck on this road was 30 mph. We get out there and I am quickly hitting speeds of 60-80 mph. It drove beautifully. The suspension, or the harmonics at those speeds made the washboard and potholes disappear. That car was just hugging the road and it kicked rear end.

Of course Bob busts out a couple of beers for us and oh, guess what! He brought along a couple of joints.

So we are smoking and drinking at 60 mph on a dirt road. We finally get to the end of the dirt to the paved road, Skyline Blvd. It runs along the ridge of the Santa Cruz mountains and is a well known road for motorcyclists to test their speed abilities. He tells me to open it up. Within seconds we are at 110 mph, drinking beer and smoking weed. We are flying in more ways than one.

We make it to this small town of La Honda(?) that has a bar that Neil Young would stop by at occasionally and jam. He wasn't there that night. Bummer. But we do suck down a couple of pints.

Time to go home, and Bob's turn to drive. Going back along Skyline he had it floored, 130 mph and maybe a bit more. Still more beers and weed going on. He slowed down when we got back on the dirt and we made it home just fine.

Amazingly we did not kill anyone, any animals, or ourselves.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
Bob also instructed me on how best to gently caress a goat. For the record I hosed no goats, but I know the technique!

Bob did grow up on a farm, so I assume he knows what he is talking about.

The trick is to wear the tall rubberized rain/mud boots that go up to your knees. The goat will try to run away if you just want to gently caress straight out. The solution is that you grab the goat's back legs and drop them into the boots as well. You will get bruises on your feet, but the goat cannot escape. gently caress away.

I'm horrified while he is telling me this and finally ask, "How many goats have you hosed?"

None! He just knew how to do it. I do not totally believe him. I honestly think he may have hosed a goat or two while growing up as a teenager.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop

Waltzing Along posted:

Sounds like you hosed a goat.

I know the proper technique apparently, but I mostly keep myself to turkeys and deer.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
One of the craziest parties we had was when 4 of my cousins came to visit. They were up from Los Angeles and were road-tripping, wanted to visit, but also wanted to get some good weed. For some reason they could not score decent weed in LA; lovely and mediocre stuff, but nothing really good. I have no idea why you wouldn't be able to score decent weed in LA.

My brother though has connections in Humboldt and is coming down that night. He notoriously could get the best. The trip was doubling as a drug deal. Cousins show up on Friday night and we do the usual BBQ drinking thing. Bro is late though, will not be there until midnight. We are going off though. I love my cousins and we were just going off the rails. Booze, beer, weed, and a bit of cocaine. Maybe more than a bit.

The evening progresses and we are out of our minds. Me, cousins, Bob, Chris, high school friend. Just wasted. We are driving the side by side ATV, its suppose to hold two and we had six in it, around at midnight and head to the target range and start firing pistols. There was a .45 pistol that used clips and a .45 revolver. To be fair, we were actually very safety conscious and nothing bad happened besides a lot of terrible shooting. Everyone did fire off a good dozen rounds each. While being massively wasted smoking weed and drinking beers.

Brother shows up around midnight with a fair amount of weed. We get our second wind and are smoking the fresh dank, drinking more, eating more and just carrying on. Bob finally instructs us that it is time for the music room jam. We open the barn doors to keep it cool, and just crank out mostly lovely music for the next couple of hours.

It finally gets to about 3AM and we start to crash out. One cousin passed out on the wood floor of the kitchen, the others grabbed couches and carpet and blankets.

The next morning we are doing bacon and eggs and toast. (And bloody marys) but just chilling and recovering.

Our neighbor shows up in the driveway and he is pissed. This is the guy that lived about 400 yards away, yelling about all the noise we made. I tell Bob that I got it, my family my fault I'll try to apologize, and Bob tells me that, no, he has it. We both go out and talk with Mike, a 60-something retired tech VP from the valley.

One of the funniest things I ever saw; Mike is yelling that he moved up to mountain to retire to peace and quiet. Bob replies, "huh that is weird, I moved up here so I could make all the noise I wanted."

There was about five seconds of dead silence and I seriously wondered if Mike was about to hit Bob.

He did not and stormed off in a huff. He and his wife actually moved out of their place to somewhere down the ridgeline within a month. His creepy daughter and her creepy boyfriend moved in a while later. They were wiccans and we are pretty sure they tortured our cat.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
After Mike left, his lunatic daughter and her boyfriend moved into the place. 18 - 19 years old. I don't want to pass judgement on their belief system, but I will pass judgement on them. They were not good people.

When Mike was there we did visit the house a couple times, and it was nicely decorated and all that. Very cozy. When daughter moved in we walked down to say hi and introduce ourselves as neighbors and folks that shared the same driveway and gate. We actually baked and took brownies.

The house had changed a lot. There were now several hundred candles around, all black and red. That E/N post with huge budget for candles... I laughed when I read that because I had seen the real thing first hand. Hundreds of candles, most of them lit. Honestly enough candles burning to keep the house warm. All of the windows were covered in black sheets.

They told us about their wiccan beliefs and practices, and we were all "ok sounds neat". While the daughter did all of the talking the boyfriend said "Hi" and that was it from him. Bob was always courteous and engaging and he did the hand shake and one arm hug thing. She froze and started to shake. Shoulders massively tensed up, shaking etc. Maybe she had some past trauma or something, but it was just a quick and nice gesture that I still do all the time when I meet folks. Time to go. We head back to the house.

We get a cat. Bob or Chris brought home a cat one day. A shelter cat. There was kitty litter and kibble and cans of food and grooming supplies. It was indoor/outdoor and we followed it as it explored the property. It'd go mousing in the garage, go down to the duck pond and just stare at the ducks (pretty sure it wanted to eat them); but we got use to letting it out for a couple of hours a day and it always came back when we looked or called for it. Chris actually complained that the cat was sneaking into his camper, and he was waking up to it sleeping on his chest.

We get a call from the daughter one day that the cat is down at their place. Not doing anything horrible, but this is unacceptable. Fair enough, our bad for letting it roam so much, we'll keep a tighter eye on it, etc. We go and collect our cat.

Unfortunately we were not good to our word. A week later the cat wandered again and showed up late in the evening with a eyeball that was completely bleeding out.

We rush down the mountain to an emergency vet who cleans things up. The eye is lost and removed. We are told it was a needle-like puncture. The vet says that it is pretty rare to see an injury like that. All of us; me, Bob, Chris, high-school buddy, grew up with cats and never had seen such an injury. Maybe it was a thorn in some brush or something.

We get home and the cat is resting. It's now an indoor cat. Bob and I hop on our computers; really early days of the internet. We look around and start reading about Wiccans and "spells". Almost at the same time we both come across a spell that describes torturing a person's pet for revenge on the owner. Specifically stabbing out an eye. Again, no condemnation of a belief system, but we were quickly figuring out that 1 + 1 = 2. These people had tortured our pet. For some revenge motive against us being too loud while the parents lived there.

This is 10 o'clock at night and Bob goes for a pistol. "We are going down there." The rest of us are all, "okay, let's do it, but no guns". We allow a Swiss army knife. Bob concedes and leaves the gun behind. Amazingly we were all 100% sober, no drinks or weed that whole evening.

We hop in a truck and drive down there. Four dudes in their 20's and 40's showed up at their door at 10:30 at night; accusing them of cat torture. There was a bit of yelling. The crazy part is that they never denied it. Chris was off the rails screaming at them if they ever did anything like that again he would murder them in their sleep. Strangely he specified that he would murder them at 3AM while sleeping, by slitting their throats. On the other hand, if the cat does wander down there and you just call us, everything is good.

We did not have any pet issues with neighbors after that.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
Bob had friends from Kentucky that invited us to a Kentucky Derby party in San Francisco. They rented out the whole bar every year, and there probably 100 people there. Everyone was dressed to the nines. Just like you see on TV with the big hats, fancy dresses and suits. There were a few TVs on but I honestly think hardly anyone watched the actual race. Weed, coke, booze flowing everywhere. No discretion, just out in the open. It was a pretty fun party. It winds down around 1AM and we cab back to our hotel room on the10th floor of some SF high rise.

I'm ready to crash for the night but Bob magically produces a sack of weed, a sack of coke, and a bottle of Jack Daniels, out of his coat. He had none of that when we started out earlier.

Weed and coke were from a dealer at the party. Bob just took the bottle of Jack from the bar. Stole it. Like a couple of idiots we start smoking joints, chopping up lines, and doing shots. Just hanging out shooting the poo poo.

It gets around to 3AM and Bob announces he is going to get some food.

"Uh, Bob I'm pretty sure everything is closed, even room service."

"Oh there is a McDonalds right down there!" and he is pointing out the window. "They'll have food. You want to come?"

"Uh, no. Its closed." I'm pretty sure he was planning to break in and steal un-cooked food or something.

He heads out and I watch from the window. A minute later he is heading across the parking lot, and goes straight for the dumpster behind the McDonalds. He is rooting around in it for a minute and comes up with a couple sacks. This was before fast food joints would pour bleach or chlorine into their dumpsters to keep out the homeless, but Bob scored the day's leftovers that had been thrown away hours before. He's scarfing down some cold burger as he walks back across the parking lot. He gets back to the room and is offering to share anything. That was just pulled from a dumpster. There were like 6 burgers, some fish-fillet, an entire bag of fries, a couple of pounds of them. He is nuking this stuff in the room's microwave and just chowing down. I just smoked weed and snorted coke instead.

We pass out, eventually wake up and head home the next morning.

We were invited back to the party the next year, and it actually got a bit more weird.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
The next year's Kentucky Derby party was fun too. Not as many drugs, but plenty of drinking.

Bob's friend invited us to stay at his and his wife's apartment, instead of a hotel. Guest bedroom and a fold out couch in the living room. Cool and thanks!

We meet up there and there are two more to join us, the friend's younger sister and her friend as well. They were both my age in their 20's. Bob and older brother were in their 40's. The sister was totally into Bob for whatever reason. They had met before but she was totally hitting on him, and Bob didn't mind at all. At the party we were sitting at a small table on stools and she was sneaking her hand to rub his thighs and all that while we are hanging out at the Derby party.

I hit it off with her friend and everyone is coupling up. Good times.

It gets late and all six of us go home to the apartment. It's not a big apartment, maybe 800 sqft. Friend and wife go to bed. Friend knew Bob and his kid sister were hitting on each other and was not stoked on the concept. I'm not going to condemn two consenting adults, but it was a little weird. We all out-drank him though and his wife and they eventually retire to their bedroom.

Bob and sister take the guest bedroom, me and the friend take the fold-out couch. The friend and I just smooched for a bit and we eventually fell asleep. From the other room though there was a lot of noise for a while.

If you won't startle any family or neighbors, go outside and yell at the top of your lungs... scream it as loud as you can. "Oh my god! Oh my god!" "Do it!, do it! Give it to me!" "Oh gently caress yes, gently caress me!" Stuff straight out of a porn clip, but at a huge volume. Both of them were going off. The girl I was with, we just started giggling, it was so over the top.

The next morning was a bit awkward to say the least. The girl I hooked up with was showering and I was putting away the hide-a-bed thing. Friend and wife are getting some coffee and breakfast going. Bob comes into the living room, and this is just a door and 10' from the kitchen where friend and wife are, and he loudly proclaims how great the sex was. "She let me cum in her!" Me, "Did you use a condom or anything?" Bob, "Nope! She's on birth control pills! She even showed me her container thing for them!" Again, I am fine with consenting adults and all that, but he was at a high volume of talking; and his friend is just 10' away past the door, and Bob had just slept with his kid sister.

Breakfast was full of awkward silences. Friend was fuming and obviously angry but staying quiet about his friend having just banged his sister, extremely loudly. The wife was super chill saying nice things like, "Well that was a fun night for everyone" and doing her best to keep the peace. I got to smooch my hook-up girl in a bit of privacy before we left; which was great. Bob and I headed out though, back to the mountain.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop

Waltzing Along posted:

Big brother sounds like an rear end in a top hat. Good on little sister for getting what she wanted and shoving it in his face.

The guy was actually pretty decent and sister just wanted to get her gently caress on. It was just really obvious and very, very loud; especially for a small apartment.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
Things finally come to a head at casa de Bob.

The four of us routinely ate dinner together because it was cool, and easier to cook and share together than do four separate meals. One night we are cooking a salmon fillet, making a salad, heating up a baguette. Bob is staggeringly poo poo-faced drunk by the time everything is ready. Literally staggering, slurring words, the whole deal. He starts ranting about something, not at us, but about some stupid song or band but he is going off yelling and screaming. When the salmon comes out of the oven he takes it and throws it against the wall in a fit. He grabs a full bottle of whiskey and goes back to his room.

The rest of us eat the salad and bread and leave the salmon where it is. Bob can clean that up. rear end in a top hat.

I go to my room and played video games. Funny that I remember exactly that it was Ultima Online. Chris goes out to his camper and teacher goes to his room to get some school work done.

It's getting late and dark and suddenly my teacher buddy is at my door in a panic.

"Bob is shooting his gun!"

"He went down to the firing range at night?"

"No, he is shooting it in his room." I poo poo you not.

We go upstairs and Chris is there as well, and we are all standing at the far end of the living space (hoping not to get shot). We start calling out.

"Bob, is everything okay?"

"Yeah I'm good."

"Are you shooting in there?"

"Yeah but its all good, I'm shooting through the ceiling, not the walls or floor. You guys are all good." A shot goes off.

Needless to say this is not entirely reassuring. It took about 5 seconds for us to agree to get the hell out of there. Chris just went to his camper; it was far enough from the house to be unlikely to get hit. I grabbed a pillow and sleeping bag and drove a mile down the road and just pulled over and crashed out in the driver's seat. Teacher buddy heads down the mountain to his girlfriend's place.

I was the first back the next morning. I go in slowly calling out "Bob? Bob? Is everything chill?" No answer and I'm thinking I'm about to find a dead person. I slowly go to his bedroom and find him completely passed out on the floor in his underwear and socks. There is a pistol in one hand. Finger still on the trigger. The other hand has the empty whiskey bottle. He is breathing but totally out. I grab the gun and go to his closet where he keeps his other two. I stash them all in my truck. Oh, there are six bullet holes through the ceiling as well.

Teacher buddy and Chris show up shortly and we are wondering what the gently caress to do. Bob comes around, still drunk as gently caress 8 hours later, and starts apologizing that he scared us. He immediately grabs a beer. We all have breakfast and showers and agree we are having a house meeting/come to Jesus meeting that morning.

Bob continues to apologize profusely and offers to put trigger locks on the firearms and give us the keys. He doesn't even know I have them all yet, and I honestly considered just throwing them into the duck pond. The trigger lock thing sounds okay on paper, but we know Bob will just get raging drunk again and demand the keys or steal them, or just go buy another gun. We express these doubts, but finally agree to the plan. It worked for an entire week.

He is, of course, completely shitfaced and yelling at us for the keys to his guns. We all nope-out and then head out again. Chris even left the mountain too. I actually drove an hour to my parent's place and asked to crash for the night. When I told them why they were understandably shocked. "It's not all good on the mountain."

I call the house the next morning and tell Bob that I am out. I want to get my stuff when he is sober and I'm moving out. I call teacher buddy and he agrees. He knows someone from school with a place for rent so we took that the same day. Chris left too. He left his camper behind and I have no idea what became of him.

Bob was by himself.

Two funny follow up things. We all chucked our sets of keys to the trigger locks off the side of the mountain; gonna have to see a locksmith Bob. rear end in a top hat. The other was that it rained heavily that night and the ceiling had not been fixed yet. Bob was up on the roof trying to caulk up the holes in a rainstorm I learned later. For you see, this was not my last tale of Bob.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
One of the funniest stories of Bob came from an old high school buddy. He's at a wedding reception for a cousin just chilling on the side in a chair. This is 6 months after we had left. A guy sits down next to him and they start to chat. "What do you do for work?" "Where do you live?" etc. Just social stuff. The guy replies to my buddy that he has a cabin at the top of Mount Umunhum.

Buddy, "Really? I have two friends that use to live up there. Rented rooms but the owner was a crazy drunk and shot up the place one night."

"That was me."

My friend was sitting right next to Bob at some random wedding. They both laughed, got beers and proceeded to hang out.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop

DeadFatDuckFat posted:

Were you still working with bob by the time you moved out of there?

Yeah, we still worked together and everything was copacetic. He was bummed that we moved out but he understood. We'd still hang out for lunch and drinking pitchers. We ended up on different product lines and then he eventually went to contract for another company. They were paying him something like $100/hour. I know this because he told me when I ran into him a few years later.

Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop

Treecko posted:

Sorry I thought Bob was cool before, now he just sounds kinda like my dad. I got real hosed up once when my Dad got too drunk and decided he needed to test his 6 shooter while my uncle was teaching me to ride a horse. Neither the horse or I appreciated it.

The cat story is hosed too sorry that happened.

Oh that sounds horrible.
Bob was actually cool 95% of the time when he was sober or mildly drunk. Seriously one of the best techs I've ever worked with. It was just that 5% of the time when he was a drunken loon that sucked. You want to balance that and stay friends, but when it comes to shooting guns while raging drunk it is time to sever.

The wiccan kids actually owe all four of us their lives.
This was after the cat had been tortured. It was the summer solstice and these two idiots are doing some sort of wiccan/pagan celebration that involves a huge loving bonfire. We see it that evening and there are 30' flames coming off a huge pile of slash they had built in their driveway. We are all WTF and grab binoculars to get a better view. They are dancing and prancing around the fire in some ceremony. Don't ask me, it was just stupid poo poo. This is in the Santa Cruz mountains, years of drought, tons of fuel for a forest fire. Guess what happened. It got into the trees.

We all move and grab buckets and shovels and chain saw gear. Bob was in the passenger seat and teacher and Chris were just sitting in the bed with the gear as we sped down there. We get down there and Bob immediately orders a bucket brigade; and these two dipshits are, "Hey you can't be down here!" The fact that they were going to burn an entire mountain down was quickly impressed upon them. They cooperate and buckets and garden hoses get going. I geared up and dropped two burning trees quickly. It was about to go crown fire. Not to brag too much but I dropped them perfectly into the driveway on dirt and gravel where everyone else put them out. Trust me when I say that cutting down a burning tree is pretty intense.

The bonfire is out, the trees are out, no sparks or cinders to be seen.
Chris, with his wide crazy eyes walks up to the girl and says, "You two owe all of us your lives." There was a very meek, "okay" reply. We grabbed our gear and headed home.

And for the record, we were all drunk and stoned during the thing, as usual.

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Internetjack
Sep 15, 2007

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computers
Top Cop
One of the cool things about Umunhum was the transmission tower. Fog would build up in the Monterey/Santa Cruz area and then blow up the mountain in the evening. I'd be coming back from work or town and visibility would be at 50' at best; just thick.

The signal beacon on the transmission tower was bright as hell though, and it blinked. It would light up the whole mountain. I'd be driving home in the fog, going slow, and the whole view of the road was 50' and fog blinking to red every second. It was surreal.

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