No, no, no. I have one better. Way back in early 2002, Kid Socrates and I were working a temp job back in northern Virginia in the office/mall underground complex by the Crystal City metro stop. The job was the best ever - show up, unbox some LCD monitors and desktop printers, put labels on them, go swap them out in various offices, bring the old ones back, repeat. We were part of a fourteen-man crew that to this day lives in infamy. Ghana Tony, I-Don’t-Work-Here-Mike, Japanese Dave, Brett Heinlein (the man could make a copy of Stranger In A Strange Land appear out of thin air, it was like a literary David Blaine trick…)
And then this old guy, had to be in his sixties. We couldn’t ever figure out his first name because he sounded like a cross between Mushmouth from the Cosby Kids and Grandpa from The Boondocks. But his last name was Goodrun, and after seeing him in action, the legend of Lech Goodrun was born.
We’re all out on the curb loading a cart of new monitors onto the truck, most of us standing around holding down the sidewalk (as you do on a temp job, getting paid by the hour) and across the six-lane busy downtown street there walks this rather attractive twenty-something lady in a nice business outfit, skirt and suit. A few of us kind of do the nudge-and-nod acknowledgement, but not Lech Goodrun. Oh no, not Lech.
This horny old geezer runs out INTO TRAFFIC, lurches across the median like a live-action game of Frogger, bounds over the curb, and catches up to this young lady, and we can hear him over the traffic with a line that shall live forever in our hearts:
“Hey baby, you got any kids?” [silence] “You want some?”
Out of sheer admiration for his chutzpah, I don’t think Lech lifted a single box for his entire stint on that crew. Truly a master of his art.
