Almost getting beat up at Oktoberfest
Thursday, March 1st, 2007
I’ve been told that stories are my bread and butter here, so I will continue with stories until I run out of them, at which point I’ll have to go out and make new stories, or at least make up new stories. This particular story dates back to October of 2005. It is the story of the most unusual way to start a relationship, leading to quite possibly the shortest relationship in history.
Oktoberfest is an annual party put on by my uncle and his friends. It’s basically an excuse to drink good beer, eat good food, hang out with good people, and give money to a good cause. With all the goodness in the air, you wouldn’t even think that something bad can happen. This Oktoberfest was the first year that the party was big enough to move out of my uncle’s front yard, and into a new venue, Oceana, which is a naval base, for all those people not from the Virginia Beach area.
The year previous to this Jeff and I had marked our cups with sharpies for every beer that we imbibed, a way for us to keep track of just how drunk we were. It was also when I was given some of the best advice of my entire life, “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.” True to form, we were drinking for about 8 hours, which makes it more like a double marathon. It was also at this Oktoberfest that I heard one of the funniest conversations in my entire life. I will recreate that conversation for you now:
I had an interesting conversation the other day with Doug. I had a story that I want to tell, but it doesn’t exactly shed the best light on me, and while it’s not horrible, it’s something that I wouldn’t ordinarily
I’m a fan of avoiding physical confrontations, I mean, why fight if you can make the guy look like a douche by talking to him without him realizing it? That’s a victory in my book. However, there are some people that I won’t even do that to. The guy at BWU last night was one of those guys.
There was a
I’ve always been told that it’s poor form to give out your number to a girl in a bar, and it is. There’s only one reason that a guy gives out his number, and that is because he’s too scared to ask for her number. Let me fill you in on a little secret – if you don’t have the balls to ask for her number, than she’s not going to bother to call you. Plus, the chances are that you like her more than she likes you. So while she may have liked you just enough to go out with you if you had been somewhat persistent in calling her, she definitely does not like you enough to go out of her way to call you. That’s just the way the world works.
Back when I was in college underage drinking was the “hip” thing to do. Not wanting to be called “un-hip” – a title reserved for my grandmother (who is called that because she had her hip removed, not because she’s not cool, even though she isn’t cool) I occasionally partook in the wonderful adventures that alcohol could provide.
My company has a somewhat dilapidated database system for entering in test questions. It’s very unintuitive, has a clunky design, and makes you go through about 5 steps to do one thing to a question. Well, the other day this system (called ITS – Item Tracking System) stopped working on my computer. Something about a MDAC package not being available. The funny thing is that it was working on everybody else’s computer, just not mine.