I posted this story elsewhere, but since it actually has a little to do with photography, y'all might be amused:
I showed up at work this morning, swiped my badge at the gates, was about to go through when half a dozen Santa Clara policemen came charging out with guns drawn. I'm standing there, trying to process the information. Is this some sort of a drill? When I realize that they are talking to me, calling me by name and telling me to get down on the floor with my hands in plain view. Six glocks to none, they have me outvoted, and I comply. They put cuffs on me, grab my stuff and hustle me into a side room, saying that they'll explain it to me in a moment. .... Into the wayback Sherman. Last week, I got an email from a friend who is planning a cruise to Alaska, and wants to rent some good camera gear for the trip. He's planning on renting Pentax gear (all he has at the moment is a point and shoot, but used to shoot 35mm Pentax/Ricoh). He's asking me advice, we make plans for me to loan him my spare camera and some glass, I though some other fun toys in the car to show off, so that everything will be ready when we do make the plans, and if it's short notice, they won't be in Santa Cruz when he and I are in San Jose. Friday night, after work, I was killing time, making several phone calls to various people, trying to make plans, waiting on calls back. The office is almost under the flight path for SJC, and I've been curious how my bigma (Sigma 50-500) would work for that. While I'm waiting for calls, I set up the bigma on my bushhawk, and wait for a plane to fly over head. While I'm waiting, I try taking some shots of nearby buildings. At some point I see some security guards walk past but they don't say hi, or even seem to notice me. What had happened was someone had seen "someone with a gun" in the parking lot. Told the guards who went for a look, and didn't see anything. Something got logged and apparently the night supervisor found out about sometime around midnight, looked on the video and saw me with something that looked like a gun. ... back to this morning I explain what happened, they search my car, find the camera gear, let me out of the cuffs. I show them how the bushhawk rifle stock works, and I show them, and the folks from HR the photos I took Saturday with that setup. At some point I lose track of how many times the Santa Clara police, and HR ask me "You understand why we had to do this?". HR offers to let me have the day off, and they'll square it with my boss, who knows nothing about this, but I decline. A little later someone from HR shows up in my cube with a $25 card for the cafeteria. The woman from HR, once again, thanks me for being so cooperative. I, once again, point out that it's very easy to be cooperative when six people are pointing guns at you. On my way home from having dinner with a friend (who explained that she can no longer even talk to me because it upsets her new boyfriend) I reflected on the place I worked my first 9 years out of college. The president had a display of WWII era rifles (with firing pins removed IIRC) on display in his office (Allies, Japanese, & German maybe?). One year for Christmas he bought everyone in the company a cheap .177 pellet rifle and we had a pellet range set up in the office. When I was working 60-80 hour weeks, usually until 2-4 in the morning, I would often take a 10 minute break by pulling out my pellet pistol and doing some target practice. When someone at the company bought a new gun, they would often bring it in (unloaded of course) to show it off. It certainly is a different time and place. -- Larry Colen l...@red4est.com sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
