UPDATE: Results in extended entry

Want to know what it's about? See the Shamming/Sharing intro post.

Our third offering. Is this anecdote the truth or am I pulling your leg?

My dad and I have a lot in common. I got my work ethic from him. I got my anal retentive personality from him. Even my job shadows what he did for a career.

Until a few years ago my dad did quality assurance for the Air Force. When he started it was called Quality Control then it was Quality Assurance and for the last upteen years it was called Non Destructive Investigation. Whatever they called it, it's what we civilians now call QA.

He did stress tests and other analysis on live birds. That's aircraft in service, y'all, not actual feathered beasties. He had much cooler toys than I do. I have a PC and some nifty software. He had irradiation machines, X-Rays big enough to scan the wings of a C-130 Hercules transport and more tools than you can shake a fist at. He was forcibly retired (high year tenure) a few years ago.

He's not sitting idle though. He kept his side job for the FBI. He isn't a spy or anything. He does the upkeep and maintenance on the surveillance aircraft used by the Buffalo FBI. And I used to help him.

That's right, I worked on airplanes for the FBI. Well, to be precise I worked on FBI airplanes for their contractor and that contractor just happened to be my dad. For many years I would go up to the Niagara Falls Air Force Base with him on the weekends and do odd jobs while he did the important stuff. I washed square acres worth of plane wings over the years (seemed like it anyway). Towards the end of my time in Buffalo I was doing some cool stuff too. Engine checks, firing magnetos, instrument checks, testing the smoke screen generator...lots of cool stuff. Once I even got to fly one of the planes.

It was after the completion of a 100 hours maintenance cycle and the agent (not sure if I'm supposed to say his name so I'll just call him Agent Bob) was there to go over a couple of things that he thought were quirky. We all ended up taking a short flight so he could show Dad what the quirks were. When we were up to altitude Agent Bob gave me the controls. That was very cool. And scary. I don't have a whole lot of specifics in my memory because the majority of my one and only piloting experience was spent staring at the attitude indicator and repeating a mantra of "Holyshitholyshitholyshit" to myself. It might have been better if I'd spent some time with Flight Simulator before then but it was still pretty cool.

Current Shamming/Sharing roster:

1 Correct
jim
Mike the Marine
MojoMark
Sue
Tiffani

0 Correct
Everybody else more...

Posted by: Jim at 07:45 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 559 words, total size 3 kb.

Update: Results in the extended entry.

See the intro for particulars.

Our second entry. Is this anecdote a lie or is it the truth?

One time...at band camp... (Heh. Just kidding.)

I was the class comic in school. Not the class clown - I didn't go for making a fool of myself back then. But I was always there with a quip or cutting remark, a joke or anecdote, a one liner or tidbit appropriate to the situation, etc. I was a cut up.

Anyway, I was not quite smart enough to restrict my cuts and comments to just other students and I would frequently be a class distraction as I tossed bon mots around (usually when I was bored with the subject and/or didn't like the class). One time in 11th grade History class (Mr.Balsavage was the teacher) I was being particularly irritating crafty and Mr.B (who was a teacher I liked so I don't know why I was being such a jerk) walked over to me, bent down so we were face to face and said "You are the type of person who shoots from the hip and then leaves." I knew immediately that I had stepped pole vaulted over the line. That marked the end of my cutting apart teachers and put quite a damper on my mouth overall. Even to this day I'm far more selective of my targets and will generally put my self up for a joke before I take somebody else down with one.

Current Shamming/Sharing roster:

Sue: 1 correct
Everybody else: nada

Just a note about how I'm writing these. I am thinking up some element of Jimstory and then running a random generator (Excel is my favorite multi-purpose number playground) that tells me if I should write it up as a sham or a share. That way I won't get trapped into that humanistic need to balance out the number of true ones with the number of false ones or have to do a true one after a couple false ones & vice versa. more...

Posted by: Jim at 04:06 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 449 words, total size 3 kb.

Big Update / Rules Change: 20 April '04 - Instead of accumulating a scorecard throughout the month (which was nifty but ended up being work) a point will be given to each correct participant when the individual sham/share is closed. They'll also be coming out whenever I think of something apropriate instead of the semi-schedule of one or two a week. It was getting tedius for me and hopefully this will be enough to make it fun again. Other than these changes the rules noted below are still valid.

Update: Results to Shamming/Sharing #1 are in the extended entry.

I had this idea for something that might be cool - I got it from the Sex, Lies and Cheddar X post. Once or twice a week I'm going to post something about me. It might be true or it might be a lie. You guess if I'm shamming or sharing. When the next one is posted I'll give the answer to the previous one (so there will always be at least a couple of days for people to jump in on it). At the end of the month I'll tally up who's got the most correct responses and the best one(s) will get some points. I'm thinking maybe 5 for the top dog, 4 for the second, etc down to 1 point for the fifth finisher. It'll depend on how many people play along. Oh, and Lovely Wife, Dopple-G, others who know me in real life: If you know for a fact that the anecdote is true or false please don't guess. If you don't know, feel free to play along.

Sound interesting? Here's your first one to judge:

I have a scar above my left eye that goes through my eyebrow. I got this in a snowball fight in Buffalo, NY when I was but a lad. My opponent in the snowball fight used a chunk of ice and put a bit of snow around it and this missed blinding me by about a half of an inch. Because my face was frozen I didn't realize I was bleeding profusely at first and I chased him down and beat him thoroughly. I stopped when I saw all of the blood and thought I'd really hurt him. I went home and my Mom went into hysterics when she saw me literally covered in blood. He was bigger than me too, by the way.

Am I shamming or sharing? Lemme know. more...

Posted by: Jim at 09:36 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 527 words, total size 3 kb.