Page 144 - NIXBOOK

Dude in an old 4 wheel drive pickup truck went down an old narrow overgrown disused dirt road. Got down to the bottom and
hit a wetland area and got too stuck for even 4x4. In an effort to back up and turn around, he ran out of gas after about an hour.
That’s when I came along. “What even are you doing down there anyway?” I asked the guy. “I used to come down here when I
was kid, back in the day. Just got back into town and decided to relive my glory days, so to speak.” He declined any of my offers
to help so I left him. Even when he got gas back into the tank, he was still going to have to figure out how to get unstuck.

Office shenanigans: Crusty old Sergeant Bill (born in 1940, so he was well over 60 years old at that time) used to cover his bulletin
boards and office walls with papers he thought were important. Once I noticed just how many stupid (and forgotten) things he
had on his walls, I started covertly adding random new ones to his collection; things like official-looking but completely generic
court case judge’s opinions, old weather reports for cities on the East Coast, and recipes for obscure ethnic foods. I also came
across a stash of really old phone books and I put seven of them in his office, scattered here and there and buried under piles of
papers. He didn’t notice those for months, and when he finally did he thought he himself had been collecting them over the
years. That was almost too easy, so I experimented with other methods to mess with him. We had in our front office a rubber
stamp collection, the usual sort you’d see in any office – our stamps were: “ROUTE TO PROSECUTOR” or “CLEARED FOR
PUBLIC RELEASE” or “FAXED”…things like that, you know. Anyway, I found a stamp that printed out “DO NOT COPY.” I guess
for sending police reports to folks who legally should not copy it. “What can I do with this one?” I thought. With no other ideas,
I simply stamped it on a blank sheet of paper, ran it through the copier so it was copied, and then set it in Bill’s office. I was
rewarded a couple days later when I saw him wandering around the office with a more than usual confused look on his face,
holding that sheet of paper: a photocopy of a stamped DO NOT COPY. In desperation, he started questioning the police clerks
for help: “Mary! Mary! What is this? Why is this on my desk? What does this mean? Why does this say Do Not Copy?” he kept
asking the them, showing the sheet to them. He was genuinely perplexed. It was perfect. “Bill I have no idea..” they told him.
They probably thought he had done that somehow himself and forgotten why.

I wasn’t the only one who messed with Bill. A couple of other officers once taped an old pager under his desk. Every time they
called it, it would buzz and rattle and vibrate his metal desk. He had no idea what was going on. After a few days of that, with
him growing increasingly frustrated, somebody suggested it must be his electric typewriter acting up, so perhaps he should
unplug it. They gave him about a half a day of peace and then they started calling the pager again, about once an hour, which
caused him to just about lose his shit because his typewriter was unplugged and yet that damn noise was going off again.