In my office, I have a large plastic ladybug that holds my door open.  I have had this bug for a long time and it has followed me and held open many a door at several different jobs.  I keep it, because it has a funny memory behind it and some sentimental value.  So when I go to a new job, the bug comes with me.  A long time ago, when I was going to school at Old Dominion University, I lived in an apartment by myself - an expensive apartment, so I bartended at night at the local Bennigans restaurant.  When I was done with school and my days were free, my mom’s best friend called me one day and asked if I could do her a favor and come work part time at the construction company she worked for.  They had just had two people quit and were in need of immediate help until they could hire some people permanently, so I said yes.

Temporary became not so temporary after a while and I basically was working two jobs.  At the construction company, I was working in the service department.  This particular company built gas stations and had a department that serviced pumps when they were down.  During my time there, I became pretty good friends with one of the technicians - the one that always thought he was a funny guy (probably why we got along so well).  One of my tasks at this job was to go through all the parts that the technicians brought in from the previous days repairs and check them to see if they were still under warranty, so I had a table set up next to my desk for the guys to put all the boxes of parts - these were usually all computer parts, as gas pumps are computerized, so it was stacks of fried motherboards, etc. 

One morning I came in and there was a box on my desk.  I figured it was a bad part that one of the guys brought in and chucked it to the side until I was ready to deal with it and went and got my coffee.  When I came back and got settled in I could hear this strange noise - a scratching noise.  I looked around and noticed it was coming from the box that had been put on my desk earlier.  The scratching noise got louder and louder.  I grabbed the box and opened it to see what was in it and low and behold it was the biggest, nastiest stag beetle I have ever seen in my life (about the size of my hand) - it looked exactly like this:

I FREAKED OUT and screamed throwing it across the room.  Everyone else in the room then started freaking out and yelling at me asking why the hell I would have thrown it - umm because it could have eaten me alive - that’s why!!!  We had to call into the other building to find a male to come and catch and remove the big beetle.  Apparently, my funny tech buddy found it at a site and thought it would be funny to catch it, put it in a box he knew I would open and leave it for my on my desk - he was an ass like that!

Later, I left that company and went to work for another construction company, one that paid me enough that I could quit the bartending too.  On my first day at the new company, my buddy showed up and dropped off the plastic bug wrapped in a nice box as a job-warming gift and so that I would always remember him.  It was real nice on my first day for the receptionist to buzz into my office and say “Hey Misty, some guy just dropped off a bug in a box for you…” - WHAT???  Needless to say, that bug has been with me for a long time now.

It is no secret that I was a wild and rebellious teenager, one needs to look no further than the two devil-spawn children that were born to me to know that they are 100% punishment for my ways. One particular night during my high school years there happened to be a hurricane scheduled to hit the coast of Virginia, but hurricane warnings are an every other week occurrence in Virginia, so that was NOT going to spoil my plans of drinking myself into an early grave. I managed to get my parents to agree to allow me to go to my friend Kathryn’s house, but that was it, I was to “go nowhere else in the car and be home by 11:00” because the eye of the storm was supposed to hit us at around midnight, and as you know, you are perfectly safe in hurricane conditions up until an hour before the eye hits.

I did leave my house in my cool-as-can-be cherry red Nissan Sentra and I did go straight to Kathryn’s house, where I proceeded to pick her up and head straight for the one local gas station that did not ever card anyone, so that we could load up on some Mickey’s Fine Malt Liquor and Camel Light cigarettes (all the cool kids smoked and drank, and I always had to be the coolest of them all). Then we headed down to the beach (nothing beats heading right for the coast line in the middle of a hurricane), to a friend of ours house, where we proceeded to get hammered. At about 11:00pm, we decided to hit a store and get a little more beer and stop by another friend’s house real quick, which is where we hung out till about 12:30am, when we noticed the weather was getting really bad, we were really drunk, and we were out way later that we were supposed to be, which wasn’t too big a deal, since my parents go to bed at like 9:30 and I always sneak in the back door - they never know the difference.

We got up and got ready to go, and I could not find my keys anywhere (try not to focus too long on the fact that I was getting ready to drive drunk, as I was once the best drunk driver in Virginia Beach - a fact that now as a mother I am NOT proud of). Somebody in the room finally suggested that I check to see if I left them in the car, to which I replied, “Umm, I never do that, but I will check!” - Well, not only were they still in the car, but the car was still running, with the AC going and the radio blaring and of course (since we are talking about my luck here) the car was locked. This was a sticky situation, because (1) we were in the middle of the eye of a Hurricane, (2) we were really really drunk and (3) I would have to call my dad to bring me a spare key if we could not break into the car with a hangar, alerting him to the fact that I was not home at 11:00, and that I was not at Kathryn’s house - safe, dry and sober.

Well of course we could not break into the car. The winds were at a thousand miles an hour and Mickey’s was oozing from our pores, so I had to suck it up and call my dad. My dad (captain/pilot in the navy w/ like four masters degrees) told me in a nutshell that I was a complete and total idiot, that he had no clue how I was even related to him and that he most certainly WOULD NOT come out in a Hurricane to bring me a key - for me to “figure it out and he hoped I didn’t die in the process.” So I did the only thing left I could do, I got our big Samoan friend Jo-Jo to wrap his hand in a t-shirt and punch in my window. This plan worked flawlessly and we were on our way - our now cold, wet, wind-blown way. We had to drive fifteen minutes with hurricane conditions on the inside of my car, since we were now windowless. Words cannot describe the anger that steamed from my father the next morning, as he woke up and saw my car in the driveway with no window, full of glass and tree branches.  But I did what he said… I figured it out all by myself and was happily sleeping off my hangover in the comfort of my warm cozy bed.

Did I ever tell you about the time I watched a Guinness Beer truck back over and kill a man? No? Oh, well then lets get this party started!

A long time ago, when I was young and hip and very cool and hip and young (you get it), some friends and I jumped in my car and drove three hours up to the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. to watch a punk band called Face to Face play live, which I really still love to this day. We got up there early in the day to get tickets and visit our favorite museum - The Walter Reed Medical Museum, or as we liked to call it “The Deformed Baby Museum” - where everything in there is real and chillin in a jar of formaldehyde.

Anyways, it took us forever to find a damn parking spot outside of the club when we got there, but we finally did and we went to the ticket window to purchase our tickets for the evening. Once that was done we were off for a day of fun. There was a huge Guinness Beer truck double-parked in front of the 9:30 Club, which I am pretty sure was there to deliver beer to the club. A guy that needed to run into a store real quick decided to double park his car too and he walked behind the Guinness truck. The Guinness truck had just started up and was already backing up to try and inch it’s way back out into traffic. Now this is a HUGE truck and it is backing up at a rate of MAYBE 2 miles per hour and making that godawful annoying beeping noise as it is doing so and somehow, this guy did not see the truck and did not hear the beeping RIGHT NEXT TO HIM! In a matter of seconds, the truck hit the guy and knocked him down so that his head was perfectly aligned with the tires. Then everything seemed to move in slow motion like out of the Matrix - you saw the truck go up and down like it had backed over a speed bump and you heard people screaming from all directions to the driver to STOP!!! He had no clue what he had done and the back part of this truck was not fully attached to the front, so he did not feel any impact either.

It was too late. He had run over the guy! It all happened in a blink of an eye and it happened 5’ in front of us - WE.WERE.IN.SHOCK! The guy’s head was flat and there was blood coming out of his ears, so it was pretty obvious that he was killed immediately. The driver was inconconsoleable - he was crying hysterically, and the guys wife, who had been in the car and watched the whole thing happen was in the same state. 

We stood there, still in shock until the ambulance and police left.  We were kind of confused on how we were supposed to feel at that point.  I mean, we drove three hours to have fun, but we ended up watching someone die right in front of us - what do we do?  We seriously had this conversation…What do we do?  Are we horrible people if we go on about our day like nothing happened, like we did not just watch someone’s life end in front of us?  That conversation lasted mmmm, about 4 minutes (because we were young, insensitive assholes) and we hopped into the car to go see more messed up crap at the Museum.  We came back to the site of the now infamous “Guinness Killing” later that night for our show - and had a blast!

Moral of the Story:  If you see a Guinness Beer truck on the street, RUN - DO NOT WALK, as far as you can from the truck.  Guinness Beer truck drivers are specially skilled killing animals!!!

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