Page 233 - NIXBOOK

There was a guy who lived in town, bought an $85,000 dollar Mercedes Benz convertible. This was a long time ago; back when
the yearly registration stickers for the license plates cost a good percentage of the car’s value; in his case, several hundred dollars.
So he never bought the annual stickers. His work around was to buy a trip permit for a few bucks; good for three days. He could
buy three trip permits a year, which he did. So when the summer weather was nice and the top was down on his car, he could
drive it for a total of 9 days. We made darn sure he did not try to push it to ten.

Car crash scene; police and fire units arrive and the fire department’s new lieutenant, transferred from some other department,
arrived and started throwing his weight around, which in that case looked like him telling me where to repark my patrol car. I
just stared at him blankly, because I had never before experienced a fire department Lt. telling me how to do my job. (Also..never
experienced after, either.) Did I move my car? No, no I did not. Because 1) I don’t take orders from fire department personnel
and 2) My patrol car was actually perfectly fine where it was. Because I know how to do my job. Hey guess who got fired from
the fire department a couple years later for being Too Difficult to Work With?

Somebody called 911 to report a swarm of bees. I responded to the scene and yep, found an impressive cloud mass of buzzing
swirling bees in a parking lot. I called a beekeeper and he showed up to professionally mitigate the situation. To my alarm and
amazement, he walked right up the large growing clump of bees on a bush. “They won’t sting when they’re in this state,” he
explained. “A new queen has left the hive, took some worker bees with her, and they’re starting off on a new place to live.” He
reached into the giant mass of bees on the bush – the clump was about the size of two basketballs in mass. He casually started
parting the bees with his bare hands, digging around. He wasn’t getting stung at all so I edged in for a closer look. “Look, here’s
the new queen,” he said, pulling out (with his bare hands) one bee that was bigger than the others. He placed her in a box and
as we watched, all the other bees started to move over to her. Eventually when he had most of them, he sealed them up and
took them away to start a new life in one of his bee houses. I wondered how many people tried his technique with worse results.
‘Hey everybody watch this, they ain’t gunna sting me, I learnt this from a professional once!” And then at the autopsy the medical
examiner is all like “Poor bastard, didn’t know those were African Killer Bees …”