This Is Why I Need A Personal Assistant

Longtime followers of the Sneed blog are well aware that Sneedlet One had a lot of hair. Today was haircut day for him. I think the results are a huge improvement.





I had a totally embarrassing thing happen to me today. I was supposed to be at a bowling tournament in Phoenix and I messed up the start time, leaving my partner stranded there alone. This was not a single screw up by me, but was the culmination of several mistakes on my part.

I am the sort of person who doesn't make these type of mistakes as a rule, so it is very disconcerting to me to have done so. Plus, I will have to deal with the other guys, who will conclude that I simply blew them off.

Each year the state bowling association holds the statewide tournament, either in Phoenix or Tucson. Two years ago it was in Tucson, last year in Phoenix and I when I agreed to participate this year, I assumed that it would be in Tucson. My first mistake. Only after I had committed to bowl and my teammates had made the arrangements, did I realize that it was in Phoenix this year. I tried to back out, but we couldn't find a replacement bowler.

The format of the tournament is that there are three sessions of bowling. There is a singles event, where you bowl three games as an individual, a doubles event where you bowl with a partner and a five-man team event. The singles and doubles events are held one day and the team event is on a second day. That's the rub for me. Two days in Phoenix.

Normally, we bowl the tournament on consecutive days, Saturday and Sunday. So it is either drive back and forth to Phoenix twice or stay overnight, neither an appealing option to me. After last year I vowed never to travel to Phoenix to bowl again.

I knew that we were bowling in the team event on June 16th, next Saturday. I made the assumption that we were bowling the other events on the 17th, which also happens to be Father's Day. That was my second mistake. This morning when I got up just before six, I happen to glance at the paperwork for the tournament that has been hanging in the kitchen for two months and discovered that I was supposed to be in Glendale, AZ at 8:00 am. Since it is a three plus hour drive, I was screwed, so I called and left a message, along with my apologies.

This reminded me of another famous no-show incident I was involved in. I slept through an FBI stakeout, showing up in time to see the stakeout shut down and the agents leave.

Most people would not associate me with an FBI stakeout unless I was the suspect, but I was on the FBI side in this case.

Back in the 1970s when electronic monitoring was far less sophisticated than it is today, I was recruited by the FBI to provide technical assistance in an attempt to catch an extortionist. This guy was threatening to disrupt the water service here in our fair city unless he was paid a bunch of money. I was helping to pinpoint the location of pay telephones that he was using to make calls to the local water authorities.

We worked late into the night one night, communicating with him as he moved about the city from pay phone to pay phone. At about ten in the evening, he suddenly announced that he was done talking and would call back at five the next morning. I was sent home, with instructions to be at the FBI command post at four-thirty the next morning. I woke up at five minutes until five.

I threw on my clothes and sped downtown, ran up five flights of stairs, arriving just in time for the agent in charge to tell me that I was late and that the guy was in custody. Talk about humiliation. My big chance to impress the Feds and I impress them as a moron. Story of my life.







Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky


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