writing

The Corner Gas Station

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By M. Snarky

In 1979 I was basically a broke, skinny, long-haired, hot-headed, smart-ass 18-year-old punk between jobs. I was also earnestly looking for employment in the L.A. Times classifieds, but the economy wasn’t doing so great so there weren’t many jobs available. I eventually took a job at the Union 76 gas station at the northwest corner of Whitsett Avenue and Vanowen Street in North Hollywood, California, because, thankfully, my brother Scott was already working there as a mechanic, and he got me the job by word-of-mouth. The pay was $3.50 per hour. Don’t laugh. Granted it wasn’t much money, but at least it was above the minimum wage and enough to buy food and make rent.

I’ve managed to maintain some of that hot-headed smart-ass punk attitude, albeit nowadays is it mostly reserved for the people who deserve it; like the ones that drive like a-holes, and the ones that cut in line, and the ones that bring 20-items to the 10-item or less express checkout line at the grocery store.

I quickly found out that you meet some very interesting people at the corner gas station.

The gas station owner was a man named George Christie, a divorced, cranky, chain-smoking, coffee chugging, foul-mouthed WWII army captain who was only about 5-feet-8-inches tall. Scott was 6-2, and I was 6-feet even, and so Mr. Christie always had to look up to us when he talked to us. This seemed to perpetually piss him off and make him swear more than usual, meaning that every third word was an expletive instead of every fourth word. In one single sentence, George Christie would string together more expletives than the saltiest of Navy sailors could do in an entire year. George Christie made swearing an art form.

Mr. Christie’s primary job was a Southern Pacific Railroad (SPRR) locomotive engineer working the graveyard shift and the gas station was his little side hustle. I don’t believe the man ever slept for more than four hours at a stretch. Mr. Christie had a socially awkward teenage son (the name of whom I cannot recall), and his son had a governess with him at all times. She was a homely, chubby, middle-aged woman and it didn’t appear to us that the son had any special needs that required any, um, governing, however, Mr. Christie loved to brag about his sexual activities with the old, fat, ugly matron, which—to use the vernacular of the day—was grody to the max. I’ll spare the reader the sordid graphic details that Mr. Christie delighted in telling us.

By today’s standards that gas station was the epitome of an old school operation. Us “Gas Jockeys” wore matching navy-blue uniforms with the Union 76 logo on the right side of our chest and our name patch on the left side of our chest. No snacks or drinks or rolling hot dogs of questionable age and origin for sale; only gas, oil, a handful of basic car parts and basic car repairs and maintenance services. There was one self-service and one full-service island. Each island had two pumps with two hoses each—one pump was for regular gas and the other pump was for premium. Theoretically, we could be pumping gas for up to eight cars at once, but that never happened. There was a pneumatic black rubber tube that ran across all of the service driveways which rang a bell inside the two-car service bay when a car drove over the tube, alerting us that someone had pulled in. This is when would jump into action.

Most customers paid cash, and a small percentage of them used credit cards, including an exclusive Union 76 gas card with the distinctive orange ball logo. Generally speaking, the people with credit cards drove nice late model cars. I foolishly applied for one of these gas cards thinking I would have an advantage by being an employee of a Union 76 gas station, but it was declined due to insufficient credit history—my FICO score was stuck at 0.

We had to use these infernal manual imprint machines for the credit cards—the ones where you first insert the credit card into a slot at the top of the machine and then you place a blank, Union 76 branded pre-punched serial numbered three-layer carbon copy receipt sheet over the index pins on the left-hand side, lay the sheet over the credit card, and then slide the imprint roller over the entire assemblage from left to right, making a distinct shook-shook sound. This system did not work flawlessly. The machine would jam frequently and sometimes the imprint was off by quite a bit requiring a re-imprint. Mr. Christie was so frugal that he tracked the receipts and made us pay a dime for each one of them that were wasted. Definitely overpriced and probably illegal, but we didn’t know any better. There was no written company policy, or employee handbook, or HR department, or mid-level manager to file our grievances with: There was only Mr. Christie, and he was the self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner of his gas station fiefdom.

After imprinting, we would manually write down how many gallons were pumped, the price per gallon, and the total price that was displayed in the gas pump window onto the right-hand column of the receipt and then ask the customer to verify the total and then ask them to sign the receipt on the line, then we would tear off the top copy and hand it over to the customer. Next, we would tear off the middle carbon copy sheet and throw it away, and then ring up the total on the digital NCR cash register which would print out another receipt that we stapled to the imprint receipt, and then finally insert the bonded receipts into a slot in the front of the cash drawer. It was a spectacularly idiotic time-consuming tedious process, especially by today’s chipped credit card transaction standards, but at the time it was relatively state-of-the-art. Every now and then a nice lady would tip me a buck or two in cash before driving off which, speaking for myself here, would go unclaimed and directly into my pocket.

Cash was an entirely different animal. Mr. Christie would leave a cash drawer in the safe containing exactly $147.50 in the following denominations and quantities:
$20 x 3
$10 x 4
$5 x 4
$1 x 10
$10 – roll of quarters
$5 – roll of dimes
$2 – roll of nickels
.50¢ – roll of pennies

At the 9:00 PM closing hour, we would print out the cash register receipt total for the day, count the cash and write down the totals in an old oil-stained dog-eared ledger, and take the daily gallon readings off of the pumps and enter those numbers in their own separate columns. We would deduct the opening cash of $147.50 and do some basic mathematics using only plusses and minuses—no spreadsheets back then, just a very basic 10-key digital calculator…and you better have it right down to the penny or Mr. Christie would give you an earful of the most artfully contrived personal insults and expletives you ever heard in one breath, reinforcing his art form status seemingly without much effort. And yes, he would deduct any shortcomings from our paycheck because his default mindset was that we were all a bunch of thieves ripping him off at every opportunity which, except for me pocketing unclaimed tips, was totally untrue. Besides, I don’t believe that this would technically qualify as theft.

Other tasks to complete at closing time were locking up the water and air hoses in the metal bins at the end of the islands, disconnecting and rolling up the black rubber pneumatic hoses for the bell, locking the pumps, turning off the circuit breakers for the gas pumps and the signage, empty the blue tinted windshield washing fluid from their bins, and putting the cash in the safe. We got so good at our closing time routine that by 9:15 the gas station was a ghost town.

When dealing with cash there are scams that fall just outside of blatant robbery, for example, the Quick Change Scam, or what we called a Murphy. One day, a quick change artist came up to me to ask for change for the bus. As he was going through his rapid-fire iterations of his very polished change-this-for-that routine, I sensed that something just wasn’t adding up, so I quickly closed the cash drawer and asked him to show me the cash that he had in his hand. The bastard ran off at the speed of an Olympic sprinter. Fortunately, I only got Murphy’d for $10. The damage could have been far worse.

Mr. Christie was not impressed with what I thought was quick thinking, and fortunately he did not make me pay for the loss (which, by the way, was totally out of character for him), instead, he called his L.A.P.D detective friend and had me fill out a report over the phone with the following information:

Date: June 1, 1979
Time: Around 19:00
Location: 12505 Vanowen Street, North Hollywood, CA 91605
Phone Number: 606-0842
Alleged Crime: Theft.
Perpetrator Description: Caucasian, male, approximately 30-years old, 5-feet 9-inches tall, 140 pounds, long wavy black hair, brown eyes, black Chevron style mustache (like Burt Reynolds), blue bandana headband, white Led Zeppelin concert tee shirt, Levi’s 501 denim jeans, brown Dingo boots. I had inadvertently described at least 2-million men living in Los Angeles.

The next kind of thieves were the drive-offs. These lowlifes (who were always men, in case you were wondering) would pull into the full-serve island, flash some cash, and ask for a fill-up. In the 5-second window when we’d go to hang up the pump nozzle after filling their tank, they would quickly start their engine and drive off as fast as they could, often doing a burnout on the way out.

One time a guy t-boned a car on Whitsett boulevard as he recklessly sped out of the gas station driveway. The collision crushed his radiator and disabled his car. When the cops came for the accident, we told them what had happened, and the jerk was promptly arrested. Oh, and he had some weed in his possession too. Talk about instant karma. I hope he enjoyed his stay at the county jail.

Ironically, gas was only about $0.88 per gallon back then, and a fuel tank on a mid-sized 1970’s car was about 15-gallons. Even if the tank was bone-dry, a fill up would have only cost $13.20, which is not an amount of money worth going to jail for. Truthfully, I can’t think of any amount of money under a million bucks that is worth going to jail for. Clearly, the drive-off guys were just a bunch of dumbasses.

Fortunately, I never had a guy shove a gun in my face and rob me. Franky, it probably would not have turned out well for the robber with so many big tools and sharp things lying around a repair shop plus the readily available Louisville Slugger baseball bat hiding on the left side of the cash register stand that was always at our disposal, you know, just in case.

We had a greasy AM/FM transistor radio in the service bay area next to the cash register stand, and Scott and I would listen to local FM rock stations 95.5 KLOS, 94.7 KMET, or sometimes 106.7 KROQ, all of which Mr. Christie despised. “How can you fuckers listen to that shit!” was his typical reaction. He preferred Sinatra, “A real artist,” but Sinatra was not getting any air play in 1979. So, the moment Mr. Christie entered the gas station, he’d walk directly over to the radio and change the station to KNX 1070 AM. It was 24/7 news, weather, sports, and Bill Keene rattling off traffic reports and Sigalerts every 10-minutes or so. This was beyond boring for an 18-year-old. You bet your ass that the instant Mr. Christie left the gas station for the day, that radio was back to blasting rock ‘n’ roll. Indeed, there was an ongoing undeclared radio war between management and labor.

In practice, a gas station essentially operates as a retail business because you are selling goods like gasoline, quarts of oil, oil filters, v-belts, radiator caps, locking gas caps (there was an oil crisis going on and gas theft via siphoning was a thing), and windshield wiper blades, plus selling services like oil changes, tires, brake jobs, and tune-ups. This is where the real money was, and Mr. Christie encouraged us to upsell everything at any opportunity, but dishonesty was not allowed at any time. In other words, don’t take advantage of anyone.

We got very good at upselling at the full-serve island. It almost wasn’t fair because most of the full-serve customers were women who simply didn’t want to get their hands dirty. We would start by asking them if we could check the air pressure in their tires, and the answer was always, “Yes.” While checking the air pressure, we would note if any of the tires were unreasonably low which would indicate a slow leak. It was $20 to patch a hole in the tire. We would also check the tire tread for uneven wear or baldness and if any of them were in bad shape, we would sell one or two or sometimes four tires.

Then we would ask if they wanted us to check the oil, again, the answer was, “Yes.” If the oil was low, a quart would cost $1. If a v-belt was loose or starting to fray, we would suggest replacing it which would set them back $25. We would also check the air filter, radiator hoses, transmission fluid, brake fluid, and battery fluid levels, and windshield wiper blades, all of which were upsell opportunities. Scott and I were making a ton of money for the irascible captain who never really seemed to appreciate our efforts. We certainly didn’t benefit from it financially. The only benefit we got was that it broke up the monotony of a typical day of pumping gas at the corner station, which, to summarize went something like this:

Standing around.
Ding-ding!
Pumping gas.
Handling cash and credit card transactions.
Standing around smoking a cigarette.
Ding-ding!
Pumping gas.
Handling more cash and credit card transactions.
Standing around smoking cigarettes and talking about sports.
Ding-ding!
Pumping gas.
Handling more cash and credit card transactions.
Standing around smoking a cigarette and talking about the weekend.
Ding-ding!
Well, you get the idea—this was monotony defined.

We had the regulars too, and they came from every walk of life. There were a mix of blue-collar men and white-collar men. There were shy, pretty, young college aged girls, and flirty older married women. There were twitchy sketchy drug dealers selling everything from crank (which was an early form of meth) to cocaine to weed to prescription drugs. We had daytime drunks, families in station wagons, and run-of-the-mill surly jerks.

One day about a week before the 4th of July, a man pulled up in a massive land yacht (also known as an Oldsmobile Delta 88 Custom Cruiser station wagon). After filling his tank and paying for the gas, he asked me, “Would you be interested in buying some Mexican fireworks fresh from the border?” The resounding answer was “Yes!” He motioned with his hand to follow him, and he walked me to the back of the station wagon. He rolled down the tinted electric back window with his key, dropped the tailgate down, and pulled back an old thick canvas drop cloth with stains all over it to reveal the arsenal of illegal fireworks that lay beneath. My god, it was a glorious mix of fireworks of every description! Everything from firecrackers to M100s to Buzz Bombs to real Roman candles to small and large bottle rockets. My palms were sweating thinking about how I was going to celebrate Independence Day with a bang! I motioned Scott to come over and we both bought about $20 worth of fireworks each.

The downside to this was that while we were exuberantly celebrating the 4th of July in the middle of our street with our Mexican fireworks, we underestimated the major differences between the weak Red Devil Safe and Sane fireworks, and the powerful unsafe and insane Mexican fireworks. Perhaps it was the flaming Roman candle projectiles hurling over the rooftops that prompted someone to call the cops on us. Fortunately, our fireworks arsenal was depleted by the time the LAPD rolled up, so they got a big fat nothing burger for their enforcement efforts, but this did not prevent them from haranguing us.

On slow nights we would use some of the motor oil collected from the oil changes for the best smoky burnouts you can imagine, often engulfing the gas station in a thick cloud of white smoke. The residents in the apartment building did not appreciate this. We would also work on our older cars which were always in need of mechanical or cosmetic attention or an upgrade to the audio system.

I didn’t work at the gas station for long. By the fall, I was working at Floyd Floor Mats, in North Hollywood, CA for $3.75 per hour. A lowly .25¢ per hour more you might be thinking, but it was in fact a 7% raise. This job consisted of cutting out various floormat shapes from commercial grade carpet using templates and sewing on edges and silk-screening BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Range Rover logos on them. I didn’t particularly love this job, and it lasted only a couple of months before I left for a better paying gig.

The old gas station is gone now, replaced with a shady looking used car lot that offers 100% financing. I’m sure the terms are fair. I wonder if the old burnout marks are still on the asphalt. I’m certain that Mr. Christie expired long before the turn of the 21st century.

In retrospect, Mr. Christie did teach me the importance of integrity and honesty. He also taught me how to use excessive expletives to communicate which doesn’t always go over well during PowerPoint presentations.

Instagram: @m.snarky
Blog: https://msnarky.com
©2025. All rights reserved.

An Anonymous Coward

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Sydney at rest.

By M. Snarky

Story 52 of 52

Well, we finally got through escrow hell and have moved into a community in the 805, one which we have been desiring since they were built in 2004. We’ve been living here for less than a week but have already apparently ruffled some feathers regarding our Aussie-Doodle dog Sydney and her “nonstop” barking.

Mind you, at our previous residence, we put Sydney outside in the backyard during the day when we went to work. Never had one complaint in seven years. Generally, she only barks at people when they come to the house.

At our new digs, we went with the same feed-the-dog-and-put-the-dog-outside-and-go-to-work morning routine believing that Sydney would be fine in the new place. Well, apparently not, at least, according to someone in the community who has chosen to hide their identity.

On Tuesday November 4, there was an envelope on the patio that someone had tossed over the fence, with “C’Mon, Man!” hand-written with a felt tip marking pen on the outside. Inside the envelope was a printed note with the following verbatim message duplicated in bold 48-point font here for authenticity:

Your dog started barking at 5:30 this morning and never came up for Air. You need to do something about that please. 5:30 in the morning nonstop!!!!!!! it’s now going on hour three

Yeah, lots of yelling and anger there plus some bad grammar and punctuation, but they did say please so there is a razor thin level of politeness. No knock on the door; no name; no phone number; no address; no discourse between adults—just pure rage. Kim didn’t leave for work until 6:30 that morning while Sydney was outside, and Sydney didn’t bark at all, so that first point is obviously a fabrication. We’re not here to piss anybody off, so we pivoted (as one should in these types of situations) and changed Sydney’s feeding schedule and kept her in the house during the day for the last two days.

However, on Thursday, November 6, there was a notice from the city’s “Animal Safety Licensing” division hanging on the front doorknob with two of the three boxes checked and a few lines underlined by hand to emphasize something of great importance:

☒ An officer of the Animal Safety called today regarding a complaint that a dog or dogs living at the above address are creating a noise disturbance in violation of City ordinance. We request you cooperation in observing the provisions of the City Code Chapter 5, Article 1, Section 5-2, Subsection (A) 7, which states: The utterance of barks, cries, whines or other sounds of any household pet which are so loud, so frequent and continued over so long a period of time as to unreasonably disturb the peace and quiet of two or more unrelated residences.

Failure to comply in reducing the animal noise could result in an administrative hearing to determine whether the action of the animal(s) constitutes a public nuisance.

☒ ANIMAL LICENSE VIOLATION (Chapter 5, Sec. 5.55)

“Every person who owns a dog or cat over the age of four months…shall obtain a current license and license tag…Any person who violates this section is guilty of an infraction.”

You must comply and license the animal by 11/16/2025.

C’mon, man! Now this person has called the K9 cops on us too, great. They didn’t even have the courage to file a complaint with the HOA first like a rational, reasonable person would, I think, because they don’t want to be identified. Granted I already have a bone to pick with petty money grabbing city ordinances like animal licensing, but one must abide to avoid further complications.

I’ll have to admit that I love the idea that Sydney was barking at the Animal Safety officer the entire time that he/she was standing at the door filling out the complaint: It would be sort of poetic.

Some research on animal licensing in our zip code indicated that we have 30-days to get licenses for our pets, so it’s clear to me that the Animal Safety stooge, er, officer, either doesn’t know the law or is openly harassing us.

Anyway, this anonymous coward person is either an old, bitter, retired crank, or a snooty Karen type with nothing better to do than stir things up between neighbors.

Either way, I will do my best to be polite if I ever do meet him or her (for the time being, anyway). The problem with anonymous cowards is that they are very good at being anonymous cowards for they have been practicing the skill their entire life.

Personally, I have never been very good at being intentionally anonymous. I prefer a spoken face-to-face kinetic conversation where voice tone and body language become part of the open two-way communication between adults. These additional queues are more easily interpreted as either friendly, neutral, or openly hostile. You’ll succinctly know how things stand communicating this way.

Anonymity, however, is the polar opposite of a face-to-face conversation. By design it is a one-way communication method—one that makes it all too easy to completely misinterpret someone’s intent as they conceal who they are. They are ghosts. My imagination tends to quickly run wild…and dark. In other words, this anonymity is a chickenshit method of communication.

Given the opportunity, someone might anonymously deflate all four tires of someone else’s vehicle.

Instagram: @m.snarky

Blog: https://msnarky.com

©2025. All rights reserved.

Future Former L.A. Resident

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Story 50 of 52

By M. Snarky

Our written plan to exit from Van Nuys (gentrified in 2007 as Lake Balboa), located in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb north of Los Angeles proper, stemmed from an encounter with a person I dubbed Dirtman.

In and of itself, taking the effort to write out an exit plan makes it a serious affair by default. It makes it tangible. It makes it actionable. It moves it from a nebulous idea to reality.

How we met Dirtman was something out of a dark comedy. You see, my wife Kim and I walk with our Aussie-Doodle dog named Sydney almost every night around our neighborhood. We arguably know it better than any of our neighbors. I wrote about Walking in My Neighborhood in detail in July of 2024. It hasn’t changed much.

We know which houses have the dogs that start barking a block away, and which houses have the dogs that start barking when you are two doors down, and which houses have the lying-in-wait assassins that postpone barking until you are directly in front of them before they release their fury…and subsequently makes you release your adrenaline. These furry fuckers are almost exclusively the mean little dog breeds. I recently wrote about my firsthand experience with Mean Little Dogs too. You can hear some of these dogs continue to bark long after you are gone and onto the next block…or two.

On a recent July evening as we were walking our usual three-mile route around the neighborhood, we turned the corner into the second cul-de-sac south of our house and this is where we first encountered Dirtman. There he was, standing on top of a large pile of dirt that was dumped in the street, stomping his feet on it, and raising a huge cloud of dust. Apparently, this dirt was originally to be used for someone’s backyard landscaping project, but since it was on a public street, Dirtman appropriated it and then proceeded to flatten it out in his apparent rage against dirt.

Next, Dirtman took off his backpack and his heavy canvas jacket­­—which was already completely out of place for a hot July evening—and then he started dragging the jacket back and forth through the loose dirt very deliberately (as if he were dredging a piece of chicken through a pan of flour), and then he threw the jacket down and started throwing huge handfuls of dirt all over the entire garment. Dirtman then proceeded to carefully pick up his jacket by the collar and gently shake the dirt off—emulating the character Pigpen from the Peanuts comic strip the entire time—and then he folded it up carefully and angrily threw it back down on the pile of dirt again. Then he proceeded to roll his body around in the dirt pile like he was a human steamroller, or as if he were practicing the Stop, Drop, and Roll fire safety technique that he learned in elementary school, assuming of course that he did attend an elementary school of some sort.

He didn’t say one single word, but he did sneeze uncontrollably a few times. By now, his perspiration was turning the layer of dirt that was stuck to his face, neck, and arms into a thin layer of dark mud, looking like something you’d get in a fancy day spa for $500. Maybe he was just trying to channel an Aboriginal man living in the outback.

It was next to impossible to tell how old he was with the coating of dirt and mud, but I would guess he was thirty-something. His dark eyes had a glazed, wild look in them indicating that he was probably very high on something, and I did my best not to make direct eye contact as we passed him at a distance. I once read in some psychology article somewhere that direct eye contact with a person who is having an obvious mental breakdown can trigger a violent reaction. This no-direct-eye-contact technique comes in handy here in the suburbs of Los Angeles where the crazies now rule the streets.

As we walked past Dirtman, I noticed that the gate at the end of the street that leads to the infernally busy Balboa Blvd was wide open. The only thing missing was a flashing neon sign that said, “Open.” This was unusual because everyone who lives on any of the six cul-de-sacs that dead-end at Balboa know to keep the gates closed and locked to prevent the encroaching homeless population from entering the neighborhood, or at least offer a minor deterrent for the lazy ones. I believed keeping the gates locked was common knowledge around here, but someone apparently didn’t get the memo. It was probably a preoccupied teenager staring at the screen of their smartphone.

As I walked past the gate, I closed it and made sure that it locked. Kim said (in the sweetest, most sarcastic voice one could ever hear), “Great; now he’s trapped in our neighborhood.” It made me chuckle at first, but in the next moment I realized my folly: By not knowing the true state of mind of this Dirtman fellow, closing that gate may have seemed to him like I was locking him in and now my mind was racing with all sorts of wild what-if scenarios of nasty in-your-face verbal altercations and unrelenting physical violence. Then I remembered that I had my pepper spray with me and felt a sense of relief, but I kept him in the corner of my eye anyway.

As we turned the corner out of the cul-de-sac to continue our walk, Kim uttered the words that no husband ever wants to hear: “I don’t feel safe in our neighborhood anymore.” This sent a chill down my spine. We have lived in this neighborhood for 26-years. This statement meant—in no uncertain terms—that we were going to need to start planning our exit NOW. Our hand was forced not by a job change, or by a bad economic situation, nor by any other internal, familial, or personal issues; it was forced by externalities that we have no control over.

Granted, this homeless population has been slowly yet perpetually closing in from all of the major boulevards and streets around our neighborhood: Roscoe Blvd to the north, Saticoy Street to the south, Balboa Blvd to the east, and Louise Ave to the west. We found ourselves living on an island surrounded by a sea of homelessness and lawlessness.

Street takeovers, street gang graffiti, deadly assaults on public transportation, homeless encampments, wildfires started by people living in homeless encampments, robberies, burglaries, RVs in various states of decay parked on the streets, abandoned cars, piles of trash, fires, squatters, open drug deals and open drug use in the middle of the day, and people sleeping on the sidewalks have been pervasive for years, but it has mostly stayed in the periphery of our neighborhood. I’m sorry to say that we had become mostly desensitized to it because you see it everywhere, every single day!

The city and county of Los Angeles are abject failures on so many levels that it truly was only a matter of time before we would be forced to leave in order to preserve what waning sanity, patience, and hope that we have left. Mind you, this is not a trivial decision. I was born in Los Angeles, and I’ve lived here for most of my life. I met Kim (who was born in Burbank) and we got married and raised our children here. Our eldest son Travis died here. It makes me so sad that this formerly fantastic city—a city of the world—is now entirely crestfallen and has become so incredibly untenable that it repels its own native sons and daughters.

Los Angeles has completely lost its soul and there is zero sense of community anymore. It is now mostly populated by cliques who are only looking out for themselves. The harsh reality is that tribalism rules the day here as the corrupt cabal in city hall continues to circle the drain.

What was once a shining city on a hill, Los Angeles is now an imploding, burning city poised at the gates of hell. The City of Angels has completely ceased to exist—nowadays it more closely resembles Gotham City.

The reasons most people moved into the Valley in the first place was that it was not like living in Los Angeles: The Valley was less congested with traffic and less crowded, it was cleaner, it had better schools, it had newer malls, it was suburbia on steroids for all of the right reasons. But now the Valley has simply become an extension of Los Angeles for all of the wrong reasons, and it is hard to tell the difference between the two anymore.

Fortunately, our little 73-year-old post war tract house sold quickly, and we close escrow soon. We bought a place in another county as far away from Los Angeles as our jobs and careers would allow. I hope the new neighbors will forgive us for being from L.A. On second thought, maybe we should downplay that little fact

Best of luck with the 2028 Olympics, Los Angeles, but I’m sure that the city will put on a lovely façade as only phony Tinseltown can do, and then it will be back to business as usual: broke, broken, corrupt, dysfunctional, and crime ridden. I wonder where they’ll hide all of the homeless people and their derelict RVs and travel trailers for the television coverage of the games. Maybe the city will give them an EBT card and directions to Slab City.

Perhaps Dirtman was simply a metaphor for this insane, dirty, scummy, out of control city.

Vaya con Dios, Los Angeles.

Instagram: @m.snarky

Blog: https://msnarky.com

©2025. All rights reserved.

Musings on Smartphones and Dumb People

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Story 48 of 52

By M. Snarky

You see it every single day here in Los Angeles: People staring at their smartphones while they are supposedly working, or while walking down the street with their dog, or while driving their car (as they dangerously weave between the lane lines), or while at a Taylor Swift concert. These people are usually completely oblivious to anything that is happening around them, and so it is apparent that smartphones are great at blocking out situational awareness, perhaps by design. These people will be the first ones to go during a zombie apocalypse, and when you think about it, they are already in a semi-zombie state anyway, so it isn’t much of a stretch.

More often than not, these same people also have their Bluetooth earbuds crammed into their ear canals as tight as possible so that they can listen to music, or podcasts, or news, or Matt Foley: Motivational Speaker audio books. It is my opinion that they are intentionally tuning out the world and living inside their own personal bubbles. They never respond to you when you say “Hello” as you cross paths (making them seem rude, cold, and indifferent). They don’t hear you when you yell “Watch out!” as they blindly step onto the street while staring at the screen of their smartphone and walk directly into the oncoming path of a speeding city bus—ironically throwing themselves under the bus.

Then again, maybe it’s best to let Darwinism take its course and not interfere with the natural laws of the universe.

The headlines speak for themselves, “Man dies while taking selfie in front of a bison bull.” “Man dies falling off of parking structure while playing Pokémon GO!” “Woman dies in car crash while sexting her boyfriend.” The list goes on and on. Does this imply that smartphones are deadly? No: It only proves that there are too many dumb people walking around amongst us.

I don’t believe that smartphones have truly made people any smarter than they were before smartphones were invented, in fact, I’ll argue that the opposite is true because this has been my experience. It amazes me that even with the entire knowledge and history of the world at their fingertips—knowledge and history that previously required people to either go to a local library or ask their grandparents if they may thumb their way through their latest Encyclopedia Britannica edition—people still believe that Elvis is alive; that the earth is flat; and that the moon landing was a hoax. Indeed, cognitive dissonance is alive and well in the U.S.

I do believe that too much Internet bandwidth is consumed by the millions of pointless, viral cat and TikTok related videos du jour instead of by people seeking knowledge or facts, both of which appear to be in short supply these days. The last time I checked, knowledge and facts are still tariff free, so there is no additional cost to obtain them…and yet they languish. Half-truths, untruths, myths, rumors, and outright lies seem to rule the day.

Now that smartphones have AI capabilities, I think this is only going to accelerate the dumbing down of Americans. It’s going to be interesting to see how it progresses. I used to believe that AI in its absolute sense was isolated to city, county, state, and federal government politicians, you know, the smartest people in the room—just ask any one of them—and you can see how that turned out for us. If you believe that AI is somehow going to save us, you may only be half right because AI also has the potential to destroy us. I sense that AI will end up doing both in an endless creative destruction cycle. Buckle up, kids.

If there is a dystopian AI controlled Tyrellian evil robot future on the horizon, people won’t even look up from their smartphone screens long enough to notice. The masses will be led to their demise by means of a viral, cleverly gamified extermination program in which all of the “accidents” will seem plausible. May I suggest starting with the ones who have the most daily screen time as they pose the most danger to society? Come to think of it, this gives doomscrolling an entirely new meaning. Just kidding—obviously, it should start with the politicians.

Instagram: @m.snarky

Blog: https://msnarky.com

©2025. All rights reserved.

Lifeguard Queen

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This is an AI generated image that looks remarkably like the Lifeguard Queen of my youth.

Story 42 of 52

By M. Snarky

Late summer, 1974, North Hollywood, Calif. The walk from our apartment at 5342 Cahuenga Blvd to the North Hollywood Pool was about a mile, and for 25¢ you could swim all day. With only our towels in hand and one quarter each in our pockets (Grandma Opal Hess would say, “two-bits”), we walked directly west down the dry and dusty Union Pacific Railroad tracks that paralleled Chandler Blvd to North Hollywood Park, and then turn left at Tujunga Ave where the pool was located on the west side of the street just beyond the public parking lot. When the temperature rose above 100-degrees, it was like walking through the sweltering heat of a desert, but it was always worthwhile because I knew she would be there.

I had just turned 13, my younger brother Scott was 11-1/2, and our younger cousin Chris was 10-1/2. The three of us were accidentally representing the poor white boys of North Hollywood with our holey T-shirts, cut-off jeans, knee-high tube socks with holes in the heels and the toes and our worn out Keds and Converse sneakers. We had no food, no water, no sunscreen, and usually no extra money – not even a nickel for some bubble gum. Our parents were so broke that we would often have to resort to scouring the neighborhood for returnable soda bottles to collect enough money for the pool entry fee.

Whenever we did have any extra change, we would stop by the Winchell’s Donut House near the corner of Lankershim Blvd and Chandler because it was on the way to the pool, and we would have been foolish not to pick up a few 5¢ donuts.

At the front counter of the pool house, you handed over your hard-earned quarter to the attendant for a ticket, then you took the ticket over to the men’s side of the pool house where there was another counter. There was a hand painted sign above that counter that said, “No Cut-Off Jeans!” and, “No Swimming in Underwear!” and “No Urinating in the Pool!” There was another hand painted sign above the door that exited to the pool deck that said, “Rinse Off Before Entering Pool.” Being the ignorant youth that I was, I would have argued that the no cut-off jean policy was dumb and that the no swimming in underwear and no urinating in the pool rules were obvious, but why do I need to rinse off? But rules are rules, and in a public space they must be posted…and obeyed, that is, if you want to avoid getting kicked out.

There was this persistent rumor going around that there was a chemical in the pool water that turned bright red if you peed in it, which signals to everyone in the water around you AND the lifeguard staff that, a) you are a rule breaking savage, and b) you will be promptly removed from the pool, Pissboy will be tattooed onto your forehead, and you will be escorted off of the premises by two burly lifeguards, and banned for life from entering any of the Los Angeles County Parks & Recreation managed public pools. I will tell you unequivocally (although not without some level of embarrassment) that this was indeed just a persistent rumor that I believe was likely propagated by the lifeguard union.

Anyway, you gave the male attendant your ticket and they would hand you a mesh bag with what I can only describe as a large diaper pin that had a number stamped on the end of it which matched the stamped metal number tag attached to the bag. The first time we went to the pool I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the mesh bag or with the pin. After observing what the other men and boys did with them, I quickly figured out what to do, so I put my beat-up shoes, tube socks, T-shirt, and cut-off jeans in the bag, attached the pin to my swim shorts, and handed the bag over to the young man behind the counter who promptly hung the bag on a rack in numerical order.

Scott, Chris, and I, after rinsing off in the remarkably cold water (why was there never a hot water valve?), walked out onto the pool deck like we owned the place. Around the entire pool deck, about every ten feet or so, painted in fire engine red, was “NO RUNNING!” in huge, stenciled letters. More rules. So, with our towels draped around our necks, we briskly walked over to our favorite spot on the deck near the far southeast corner of the deep end where I could observe the high lifeguard chair from afar, which was the throne upon which my Lifeguard Queen sat.

She was a tan, brunette beauty with hazel eyes, wearing Ray Ban Aviator sunglasses, a white sun visor, and the iconic red one-piece Los Angeles County Lifeguard issued bathing suit. Being an official lifeguard, she also had the shiny metal whistle on a lanyard around her neck and a large megaphone by her side. She was a magnificent, powerful sight to behold, and I was crushing hard.

Mind you, I was not creeping on her or staring or ogling – I would simply glance over at her every now and then, hoping that one day she would notice me and smile and maybe wave at me. I had no idea what I was going to do if she ever did acknowledge me like that, but I probably would have suffered a heart attack.

I was comfortable in the water and thought that I knew how to swim, but I truly didn’t know how to swim well. You could say that I only knew how not to drown, just like most other recreational swimmers, I suppose. It wasn’t until I took professional swimming lessons decades later at Los Angeles Valley College for Ironman training with my wife Kim, that I realized how bad I was at swimming. How bad? It went something like this: On the first day of training, coach Stuart directed us (about three-dozen people) to self-seed ourselves along the pool coping thusly, “Advanced swimmers in the right-hand lanes, intermediate swimmers in the middle lanes, and beginning swimmers in the left-hand lanes.” I considered myself an intermediate swimmer and lined up in the middle lane.

Then coach Stuart said, “Okay swimmers, we’re going to split lanes for this drill in a clockwise direction, so we don’t swim into each other. Tom, Frank, Lisa, and Caroline will demonstrate this for you.” The four of them jumped into the middle lane and with a “Yip!” command from the coach, they started swimming in single file along the left-side next to the pool lane divider and when they got to the far end of the lane they turned around and came back along the right-side pool lane divider, passing each other without crashing as they swam in opposite directions.

Coach Stuart continued, “Does everyone understand this?” and we all nodded our heads in acknowledgement. “Now I want everyone to swim a few laps to warm up – Yip!” And with that, we jumped into the water and began swimming as directed. When I got back to the coaches side of the pool after a couple of laps, coach Stuart signaled me to the coping and asked me my name. “Okay, Kent, move down a lane to the left.” I moved down as directed. After a couple more laps, coach Stuart signaled me again and said, “Brad, move down another lane to the left.” I complied. By the time the warmup was over, my name was Norman, and I was standing in the wading pool.

But back in 1974 at North Hollywood Pool, I felt like I was channeling Olympic Gold Medalist Mark Spitz, and I was positive that I caught the queen’s eye once or twice as I swam by her elevated throne.

On the opposite side of the pool from the lifeguard chair were the two glorious springboards – one set at 1-meter, and the other set at 2-meters. These were our favorite activity to do at the pool. We got pretty good at doing jackknifes and swan dives (or so we thought), but big fat cannonball and cherry bomb splashes were our favorites. We mostly just goofed around doing boyish things like belly flops, lazy forward flips, mostly out-of-control back flips, and “Change-your-minds” where you acted like you were going to dive straight into the water but tucked into a cannonball at the last second.

On the last August day of the summer pool season – which was coincidentally also an extremely hot day – a Speedo wearing whale of a man swam right into the diving lane impact zone as I launched myself off of the springboard. I was in midair when I heard the whistle blow, but I didn’t see him until it was too late because I was looking across the pool to the Lifeguard Queen of all my dreams who was blowing said whistle. I collided with him upon entry of my almost perfect starfish belly flop, the impact of which knocked the wind out of me. I involuntarily inhaled a lungful of water which burned my lungs like fire. I began gasping uncontrollably for air under the surface of the water as I started sinking. The last thing I remembered was hearing a muffled splash next to me as I was looking up at the blazing, shimmering sun through the rippled surface of the water.

When I came back to my senses, there she was, smelling like Coppertone coconut tanning oil, leaning over me with the bleach scented chlorinated pool water dripping off of her face and hair and red swimsuit, giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the warm concrete pool deck. Her lips tasted like cherry flavored ChapStick. She was even more beautiful close up. Was I in heaven? I looked into her stunning hazel eyes and smiled. She pulled back and asked, “Kent, are you okay?” She knew my name! THE LIFEGUARD QUEEN KNEW MY NAME! Wait! How did she know my name? What happened? Never mind – let it happen! I started to say, “I love you, Lifeguard Queen!” but before I could say anything, I was rudely awakened by a big splash of pool water. Alas, it was all just a very vivid dream, probably intensified by the heat, hunger, and dehydration. But it seemed so real.

On the way out through the pool house that day she was working the front counter. We made eye contact, and I bashfully looked away. She said, “Cool Tee-shirt!” I was wearing a classic white Coca-Cola Tee-shirt with the red arm and neck ringer bands. I blushed. Then she said, “Have a nice day – see you next summer.” My heart skipped a beat. In an awkward, broken voice, I barely got, “See you next summer,” out of my mouth. At that age, “next summer” always seemed such a long way off and it would never come soon enough.

Summer, 1975, North Hollywood, Calif. This year we had secondhand BMX bicycles that we pieced together to get to the pool faster! On opening day, we raced each other down the railroad tracks from the apartment to the pool. All along the way we kept trying to one-up each other to see who could bunny-hop the highest or ride a wheelie the longest – this turned into a serious competition! Breathless, we locked our bikes to the rack at the pool and rushed to the front counter to get our tickets. The three of us; Scott, Chris, and myself, breathing heavily and dripping with sweat, didn’t even register with the attendant who just smiled at us as he took our quarters and handed us our tickets.

The singular thing that was occupying my mind was the Lifeguard Queen.

This time, the cold shower before entering the pool area was appreciated after riding our bikes so hard in the summer heat. We speed-walked toward our regular corner when we heard “Slow down!” coming over the staticky public address system, clearly directed at the three of us. We complied and slowed down – barely. As we briskly walked behind the queens throne I glanced up to get a brief look of her highness without being too obvious, but this time, the occupant of the throne was not the queen, instead, there was an imposter in her place: the throne was being occupied by one of the male lifeguards. Noooo! Where in the world was my Lifeguard Queen? Wahhhh! Sadly, I never saw her again. The pool days were never the same afterward. I felt an emptiness in her absence and became less enthusiastic about going to the pool.

Although I didn’t learn what her real name was, I imagined that it was something regal like Elizabeth, Genevieve, Catherine, or Margaret.

The summertime always reminds me of those carefree days at that pool with my brother and cousin, but mostly, I wonder about the Lifeguard Queen.

Old crushes die hard.

Instagram: @m.snarky

Blog: https://msnarky.com

©2025. All rights reserved.

Zombie Shifts

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Story 41 of 52

By M. Snarky

For the last three months I have been working the overnight shift on a retail store network equipment refresh project for a global shoe brand. Due to contractual obligations, I am not at liberty to disclose the company name, but what I can say is that they’re kind of a big deal and I’m grateful for being part of this project.

However, working the night shift is hard for us humans. It throws our circadian rhythm so far out of whack that what once was perhaps a pleasant samba groove in 4/4 time becomes an offbeat primal sound more like that of a chimpanzee on meth beating on a metal trash can with a crowbar.

Getting out of the familiar 8 AM to 6 PM daytime rat race schedule and into the 6 PM to 4 AM nocturnal racoon schedule – the wee hours of which, incidentally, are the same as those of the tweakers, serial killers, zombies, vampires, and aging rock stars – is certainly not for everyone. I don’t love it, but it is necessary and mercifully temporary.

Your instincts are that when it gets dark outside, you are supposed to be winding down, not up. By 2:00 AM, you find yourself in an epic mental battle between your mind desperately wanting to sleep and your mind needing to stay wide awake and mentally sharp. You oscillate between these wildly opposite mental states. It’s not easy. It’s an eternal battle between Greek gods Hypnos and Argus Panoptes.

But you find ways to stay awake, like reading a book, listening to upbeat music, or playing a newly discovered online version of Whist, a popular 19th century card game that Dostoevsky mentions in The Brothers Karamazov that I had to Google when I read it. Whist was a predecessor of modern Contract Bridge, which is my dad and stepmom’s favorite card game. Sometimes I find myself doing all of these at once.

I feel oddly guilty about pouring a dram of whiskey at 4:00-AM and getting up at the crack of noon. It feels strange going to sleep for 8-hours and waking up on the same day. And even though I do typically sleep for 8-hours, I still feel tired. But why though? I mean, it’s just a time shift, right? I should feel totally normal, right? Well, not exactly…

In 1972, geologist Michel Siffre, one of the early pioneers of experiments on human circadian rhythms, spent six months in Midnight Cave in southern Texas. Siffre suffered both acute and lasting effects, only partially recovering from the isolation physically, mentally, and emotionally. His internal clock shifted to 48-hours, and he completely lost track of hours, days, weeks, and months. He stayed awake for 36-hours straight and slept for 12-hours at a stretch. His Day 63 inside Midnight Cave was really Day 77 above ground.

Siffre later described the experience as: “A slow slide into madness.” He talked to insects for company. He found comfort in his own voice, but silence always returned, crushing and relentless. After 180 days, Siffre’s team removed him from the cave. To him, only 151 days had passed. 29 days were unaccounted for in his daily diary. Time literally slowed down, stretched out, and slipped away from him.

So, from Siffre’s experiments we can conclude that our circadian rhythm is nothing to trifle with or you just might risk losing your mind a little bit. Duly noted. It’s still May, right?

I have one more week to go. I hope I make it. But if you see me talking to insects, you’ll understand why.

Instagram: @m.snarky

Blog: https://msnarky.com

©2025. All rights reserved.

The TAIL Tax

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Story 36 of 52

By M. Snarky

BANG-BANG-BANG! – down came the gavel with an overly enthusiastic force during the last legislative session of the year. “H. R. 11,776 2050, the TAIL (Taxing Animal’s Innate Look) Tax has passed with a supermajority vote; this session is adjourned.” And just like that, another expensive, intrusive new tax was imposed upon the people virtually out of thin air, and the formerly considered untouchable direct taxation upon people’s pets was quickly – even eagerly – signed into law by the president. These legislators have zero restraint and are perpetually scheming for new taxes needed to continue funding the ever-expanding Government Industrial Complex, which, by 2050, knows no boundaries. And so, the giant sucking maw of government greed, power, and corruption continued unabated.

As the dissenting nay voters stormed out of the chamber, the minority leader by the name of O’Keefe verbally warned his colleagues, “The citizens of this country will not tolerate this egregious, pernicious, and arbitrary tax on their beloved pets. We should be voting to repeal taxes like this instead of creating new ones! This TAIL tax will be the final straw, and the people will not tolerate it – mark my words!”

The TAIL tax law went into effect on January 1, 2051, and was retroactive for the 2050 tax year.

Unfortunately, this new TAIL tax did not really surprise anyone, after all, by 2049 everything else had already been levied a tax. People were now paying taxes on everything consumable (the list of which is too long and tedious to put down here, but believe me when I say everything), plus other ridiculous taxes like a personal carbon footprint tax as assessed by how much CO2 gas a person emits while breathing, how much rainwater and sunlight falls on their property, how many miles they drive, a per square toilet paper tax (that always spikes during cold and flu season), a keyboard keystroke tax (which always spikes during a breaking news story), a per-email tax, social media account taxes, a bodyweight tax (which is always up and down), a carbohydrate tax, condom tax, per brick tax, phone minute use tax, ice cube tax, firewood tax, a plant and garden tax, grass clipping tax, yard trimming tax, a per tooth tax (rumored to have triggered a massive spike in tooth extractions), fingernail and toenail trimmings taxes, earwax tax, haircut tax, dog poop tax, cat poop tax, human poop tax, toilet tax, fork, spoon, and knife taxes, a sleep tax, a snore tax, flatulence tax (which always spikes on Cinco de Mayo), a per-page book tax, a sporting goods tax, a facial hair tax (both men and women – because equality!) the full list of absurd taxes just goes on and on – let your imagination run wild and you’ll be right! The tax rate was already approaching 80% and rising, mostly to pay for the ever-expanding $100 trillion-dollar federal debt.

In essence, the politicians were perpetually scheming and engaging in financially punishing people simply for being human in order to fund the out-of-control government spending. Absolutely nothing was sacred anymore (not that anything ever actually was sacred to begin with, in the literal term anyway). The government even forced people to install cameras and toilet seat sensors and all manner of environmental sensors in and around their homes and yards and in their cars and trucks to track all of this stuff, all at the taxpayers’ expense, of course.

Naturally, many of the tax revenue estimates made by the bureaucracy in Washington DC were entirely wrong, hence the ongoing assault on the taxpayer for more and more of their money, after all, someone has to pay for all of the “free” stuff doled out by the government. Sadly, the people were complicit; they had capitulated because they would rather stay out of a dark, dank federal prison and enjoy what little liberty and freedom and money that they had left on the outside than to rebel against it and end up on the inside of one. All of the politicians knew this, and they used it to their maximum advantage.

Filing the tax returns for all of these new taxes not only costs far more money, it takes four times as much time – proving once again that the government doesn’t care about using up your time as they see fit – but also the punitive punishment administered by the government for getting it wrong will directly result in the seizing of all assets plus jail time, so people are always in fear of an audit. Nowadays, there are more heart attacks during tax season than there are during daylight savings time changes in the spring and the fall, the previous recordholders. “Death by a thousand taxes,” was no longer just a metaphor.

When Mark Armstrong heard the news about this new TAIL tax, he dropped his cup of coffee onto the floor, which made all of his half-dozen or so rescue dogs and cats temporarily scatter from the kitchen where he was standing. As Mark was cleaning up the mess, his pets slowly started returning to the kitchen to see what was going on, and his favorite Pomeranian, Zea, started licking up the whiskey-tinged coffee from the floor. “Don’t’ worry guys,” Mark said to his beloved pets, “I’ll figure out a way to come up with the extra TAIL Tax money.”

Then he stood up and looked out of the kitchen window across the expanse of his hilly, tree studded, hundred-acre property located somewhere east of Podunk where he had other rescue dogs and cats housed in his barn and outbuildings all living very comfortable lives. There were about twenty-five dogs and cats in all. This new TAIL Tax was going to cost him thousands of extra dollars per year – money that he simply didn’t have – which would ultimately bankrupt him. Unfortunately, Mark was a retiree on a pension that he was barely scraping by on, and any new expense – especially involuntary ones imposed by the government – were an absolute threat to his livelihood. He bristled at the thought of another new, unfair, idiotic tax.

Mark also felt deeply in his heart that the government had gone too far this time, and he simply was not going to take it sitting down – he was not going to go along with this death by ten-thousand taxes madness imposed upon the people by the faceless, heartless, mindless bureaucrats in DC. In fact, an intense feeling of rebellion began to swell up in him; one that he could not suppress – he determined at that moment that the time for a tax war had come. But before engaging in a battle with the federal government Leviathan, he wisely decided to check into the language of the new law so that he could better develop some rules for engagement.

Notably, “A $50 per inch annual TAIL tax will be assessed on any cat or dog living within the household, the length of which shall be measured from the anus to the tip of the tail, including the fur, rounding up to the next one-quarter of an inch. All farm animals will be excluded.”  He did some quick math in his head; this new TAIL tax was going to cost him approximately $30K per year, and there was no way he could pay it. Then he had a dark thought cross his mind that maybe this law was not really about a new tax, rather, it was a law designed to allow for more civil asset forfeitures because people won’t be able to pay their tax bills, giving the government more ownership and control over private property. This thought sent a chill down his spine, and he was not going to give up his ranch without a fight, even if it killed him.

From reading the entire text of the new law, Mark ascertained the following items which he could use in his TAIL Tax war:

  1. The government was clearly attempting to also get a headcount of the dogs and cats that were living amongst the population, most likely for another tax scheme. Mark reasoned to himself, “And this is why I never fill out the census: The government will use the information provided against me.”
  2. The term(s) of “within the household,” were not clarified, so there was a gray area for an indoor/outdoor pet, like a cat, for example, and whether there was an exemption for a pet that spent more time outdoors than indoors.
  3. Specific language for dogs and cats not living “within the household” was missing from the law entirely, either by design or possibly by mistake, leaving room for interpretation.
  4. There was no language included in the text of the law preventing tail docking or caudectomy, vis-à-vis, removal of the tail, and although this would be an extreme tax avoidance measure, certainly, some people would do it.
  5. There was also some darker text within the law that enraged Mark: “Any citizen that underreports the headcount of the pets living within the household will be fined $50,000 and sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 6–months in jail, and the pets intentionally excluded from the tax return will be taken into custody and a fine of $100 per day will be assessed. At 90-days, if the fine is not paid in full, the animal in question will be destroyed. Financing options are available.”

“Those greedy, immoral, power-hungry bastards! ‘Pay us, or the dog gets it?’  It is now painfully obvious that the government will never stop their assault on the taxpayers unless we force them to stop! Guys: We must be the tip of the spear!” Mark exclaimed to his audience of house pets.

Mark sent a letter to his congressman, eloquently explaining his financial situation and how the TAIL tax was going to bankrupt him. There was no reply.

Mark sent a letter to the President, eloquently explaining his financial situation and how the TAIL tax was going to force him to sell his property. There was no reply.

Mark emailed the local news station, eloquently explaining the financial implications and how the TAIL tax was going to bankrupt many people. There was no reply.

Fuming over being ignored by the politicians and the media and facing financial ruin, Mark decided to make a TikTok video using clips of his rescue animals and house pets and explaining the TAIL tax law and how it allowed for the government to seize and destroy peoples pets and levy heavy fines against them, and it must be stopped by any means. This, fortunately, got the people’s attention. On day 1, he got a hundred views. By day 3, there were 10,000 views. By the end of the week, the video had reached 1,000,000 views and followers. The word was getting out. Zea was the new darling of the Internet. The politicians were getting flooded with phone calls, letters, and emails demanding them to repeal the TAIL tax. They did not budge.

In one protest, a few dozen people dumped a truckload of fake animal tails in front of the White House while holding up a banner that said, “NO TAIL TAX!” The crude, ineloquent message hinted that the people would cut off their pets tails in rebellion to avoid the new tax. This only got national news coverage after the capitol police arrived in force in full riot gear and started bashing the heads of the peaceful protesters.

The TikTok video also got the unwanted attention of someone in power in DC who directed the IRS to audit the last 6-years of Mark’s tax returns and to scrutinize them, “Microscopically.” This was the sort of audit that everyone feared. The kind of audit that nobody could survive with the relentless requests for all manner of obscure receipts, bank records, cleared checks, savings and checking account activity, cryptocurrency accounts and activity, stock trading accounts and activity, non-profit donation receipts, gifts, inheritances, lottery winnings, medical expenses, home improvement expenses, ad infinitum. I was clear that Mark was being targeted by the government, and there was no doubt that they would surely find something. They always do.

Early one morning, just before dawn, the rescue dogs in the barn and outbuildings began barking fiercely, waking Mark up. He got out of bed, grabbed his 12-gauge pump shotgun, which, living on a ranch with bears in the vicinity, was per the usual, walked out into the living room, and peered out of the big front window. He did not notice anything unusual. On his way to the kitchen from the living room to make some coffee, he heard a strange buzzing sound coming from the outside of the house near the back door where the electrical panel was located. He thought there might be an electrical problem, so he opened the back door to go outside and check it out – and there he was met with a large, matte black drone hovering at eye-level, just beyond the wraparound porch, which not only startled him, but it also triggered a split-second defensive response that resulted in the immediate disassembly of said large, matte black drone via a 12-gauge 00 shotgun blast from the hip. After years of collecting and shooting firearms, Mark was an expert marksman and new a few trick shots.

Mark walked over to the wreckage to investigate. There, on what remained of the matte black carbon fiber fuselage that housed the NiCad batteries, hard drive, HD camera, and circuit boards, was the unmistakable logo of the FBI. He took a video clip of it with his phone. At that precise moment, Mark knew that it was going to be a very long day. With the phone video camera still rolling and the sun rising, he discharged a point-blank 00 shotgun blast into the heart of the electronics. Blown to smithereens was an understatement. He looked into his camera, shook his head, stopped the video, and went back inside the house to finish making his coffee and also to prepare for the imminent battle. He reviewed surveillance video from around the ranch and saw that there were a half-dozen black SUV’s plus an armored personnel vehicle at the front gate. “They must have found something really bad in my tax returns,” he said to Zea. He called a lawyer friend.

“Well, Mark, you certainly have them on failing to provide due process, but they are definitely not going to back down now. They will label you as an unpatriotic tax evader and claim that you started the hostilities, destroyed government property, falsified your tax returns, and they will find a way to escalate until you leave the house feet-first in a body bag. Remember what happed in Waco; your house may ‘accidentally’ catch on fire. Unfortunately, today may be your last one. I advise that you take to your TikTok followers and tell the story as it unfolds. I’ll call the media.”

The commanding FBI agent named Johnson who was watching the live HD video feed from the drone camera as it got blasted out of the sky was not amused. “Do you not understand what the meaning of ‘stealth’ is!” he snapped at the drone pilot, who quickly replied, “You saw what happened – that guy’s reflexes were unbelievable – I had zero time to respond!” “Well, now that the stealth surveillance tactic has been compromised, we’ll have to give Mr. Armstrong a courtesy call and allow him to surrender peacefully,” said Johnson to his colleagues.

Mark’s phone rang with “This is the FBI” displayed as the caller ID without a phone number. He started his live TikTok app and answered the phone in hands-free mode. “Hello FBI, this is Mark Armstrong, I’ve been expecting your call. Fair warning: you are being streamed live in front of a million plus TikTok followers.” There was an awkward moment of silence, and Mark thought that he heard a few muffled expletives before agent Johnson responded, in a calm voice, “Mr. Armstrong, it appears that we may have started off on the wrong foot this morning. You see, you’ve been indicted for tax evasion, and we have a federal warrant for your arrest, and we were simply using the drone to determine if it was safe to send up some agents to take you into custody. But now that you shot it down, not only have you committed another serious federal crime you have also escalated the situation with your hostility.” “Hostility? I’m no threat to anyone, Agent Johnson, and you could have just used the intercom button at the gate – I would have let you in. But now I am in fear for my life after seeing that drone spying on me.” “Mr. Armstrong, are you saying that you are not going to surrender to the FBI?” “Surrender to some trumped up charges brought on by some greedy, bloated, ham-fisted politicians in Washington because I informed the public about the ugly truth of the money grabbing TAIL tax? This is absolute tyranny and likely a death warrant based on the FBI’s infamous history of bungling these sorts of things. I’ll need to consider my options, Agent Johnson.” and with that, Mark hung up the phone. The TikTok live stream responses were blowing up.

Mark addressed his TikTok followers, “Friends; I really don’t want to die today, but the FBI is probably going to raid my house at some point and ‘accidentally’ kill me, so I’m going to leave this live stream on, and you can watch how the events unfold in real time.” He plugged his phone into the charger, set his phone on a stand, put the stand on a table, and aimed the camera with the front window and front door of the house in the field of view. That’s when the power went out. Mark got back in front of his phone and told his audience that the FBI had just cut his power, but he had several fully charged battery banks for his phone to keep the live stream going.

Although Mark was on high alert and flinching at every sound he heard outside of the house, the rest of the day was uneventful, perhaps indicating that the feds were planning for something after nightfall.

Sure enough, just after sunset, the dogs outside started barking again. Mark looked out of the front window to see a small tactical robot rolling up the driveway in the twilight. He grabbed his phone and showed his live stream audience what was happening – which had grown to over 3-million viewers – and said, “Looks like they sent up a robot TAIL tax collector! I don’t know what is going to happen next, but please pray for me and my pets!” And at that very moment, his phone displayed, “Lost Internet Connectivity.” Now the FBI was blocking his 5G signal. Mark found himself completely cut off from the grid. He sipped his cold, whiskey laden coffee in the dark.

As the dogs continued barking excitedly in the darkness, and as Mark continued to observe the tactical robot closing in on his front porch (he had already assumed that it had some sort of fatal explosive or incendiary payload, or other armament intended to kill him), suddenly, from the back of the house, there were headlights shining in through the back door window. Mark assumed that it was the FBI driving in with the armored personnel carrier, coming in from the old, mostly unused back gate that was overgrown with black walnut trees and was only accessible by an old unmapped dirt fire road that ran along the back of the property.

He picked up Zea, who was also barking, and went to the back door window to see what was happening, halfway expecting to take a bullet to the head. That’s when he saw the endless stream of cars and news vans and pickup trucks rolling in with huge American and Gadsden flags abundantly displayed. Then he heard the horns honking. Then he saw droves of people walking in with flashlights and their dogs. The cars and trucks and people began surrounding his house. Someone yelled out from a bullhorn, “MARK ARMSTRONG – YOUR CAVALRY IS HERE!”

In that moment, FBI Agent Johnson realized that he missed seeing the back gate of the property during his earlier recon using satellite images, and this error might cost him his job. He also couldn’t believe what he was witnessing through the HD camera on the tactical robot: The people surrounded it and started chanting, “USA-USA-USA!” while pumping their fists in the air. Johnson lamented to his team, “Dammit! We’re done, boys. Pack it up!” And with that order, the tactical robot operator began backing it down the driveway, slowly, all the while the growing crowd of people escorted it to the gate.

The lights on the property suddenly came back on. Mark’s phone rang with the same, “This is the FBI” caller ID with no phone number. “Armstrong; this is Agent Johnson. It appears that you have a lot of friends supporting you. We’re going to disengage and leave now, and best of luck to you.” Mark replied, “Agent Johnson, why don’t you come up to the house for a dram of whiskey, you know, as a peace offering?” “Thanks, Mark, but I’m on duty. Besides, I don’t like big, potentially hostile, anti-law enforcement crowds. By the way, I was on your side the entire time, but I have orders to follow.” And with that, Agent Johnson ended the call, and the convoy of FBI vehicles drove off into the inky black night.

It became known as the “Wag-the-Tax Revolution.” The media reports said that 5,000 people came to stand with Mark. The FBI said that it was only 500. There was a subsequent anti TAIL tax march on Washington where it was estimated that 5-million people showed up with their beloved, well behaved pets. Mark and Zea became folk heroes and made the usual media appearances. Mark wrote a bestselling book about it. Zea became a well-paid spokesdog for a national dogfood brand.

The pushback against the TAIL tax was so intense across the nation, that every single legislator who voted for it got voted out of office. Thousands of arcane tax laws and anti-liberty and anti-freedom laws were repealed. The size and scope and power and expense of the government was reduced to a point where nobody really noticed it anymore, as it should have been all along.

The people flourished with the additional freedom and liberty, and with the heavy tax burden lifted off of their backs, they had more money in their pockets to put to use for their own personal version of the pursuit of happiness.

And they lived happily ever-after.

Instagram: @m.snarky

Blog: https://msnarky.com

©2025. All rights reserved.

Odd Jobs

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Story 32 of 52

By M. Snarky

I was recently reflecting on how many jobs that I’ve had over the years and decided to write them all down for posterity, you know, in case anyone was wondering. Also, the electrical trade had its ups and downs and in between the slowdowns, I worked odd jobs. As you’ll see in 1979-1981, I jumped around quite a bit between a bunch of jobs because I was:

  1. Between electrical jobs due to economic slowdowns.
  2. Chasing better paying jobs
  3. I simply got bored with them.

In 1978 I had moved in with my dad in Sacramento after getting released from Fire Camp #7 – Camp William V. Mendenhall, a juvenile detention facility in Lake Hughes, CA. Yes, I was a juvenile delinquent at one point in my life and I absolutely paid my dues for it. It’s a long story. I recently wrote a memoir about my juvenile delinquency and am currently seeking a literary agent – stay tuned. Anyway, after working in the kitchen at Mendenhall, I decided that the culinary arts was going to be my career path and that is how I ended up working as a prep cook in a Japanese restaurant.

1975-1976 – Gopher at Errol Sign Company, North Hollywood, CA. The summer of ‘75 was the first part-time job that I had. My best friend Mark Flaata got me the job, and the pay was a whopping $2.10 per hour – big bucks for a 14-year-old. With In-n-Out just down the street on Lankershim Blvd, this is where much of my money was spent. The owner Errol Biggs was a mustachioed character that drove around in a 1969 Chevy El Camino. He had dirt bikes that he let Mark and I borrow and eventually destroy.

1977 – Part-time machinist apprentice at Jack Drees Grinding, North Hollywood, CA for $3 per hour. Another job that Mark landed for me. Precision grinding for all sorts of military parts. Surface grinders, double-disk grinders, Blanchard grinders. I was pretty good at learning this and was running my own Blanchard grinder within a few months. Not bad for a 16-year-old.

1978 – Part-time prep cook at a Japanese restaurant in Sacramento, CA, $3.25 per hour. Among other duties like chopping, cutting, slicing, julienne, etc., all sorts of foods, this is where I learned how to break down and debone a whole chicken lickety-split.

1979 – Pumping gas at the Union 76 gas station at the corner of Whitsett Ave. and Vanowen Blvd., North Hollywood, CA, $3.50 per hour. My brother Scott got this job for me. For the Vietnam veteran owner George Christie, the gas station was a side hustle as he was a full-time engineer for the Southern Pacific Railroad. I quit after a few months.

1979 – Floyd Floor Mats, North Hollywood, CA,  $3.75 per hour. This job consisted of cutting out carpet shapes and sewing on edges and silk-screening logos on floor mats. I didn’t particularly care for this filler job, and it lasted only a couple of months before I left for a better paying gig.

1979 – Part-time machinist apprentice at a machine shop on Hinds St., North Hollywood, CA, $4 per hour. I forgot the name of this company, but this is where I learned to run an analog Bridgeport milling machine. I left this job to go back to Drees grinding for more money.

1979 – Machinist at Jack Drees Grinding, North Hollywood, CA, working the swing shift as assistant foreman for $4.50 per hour at 18-years-old. Mark Flaata was working the same shift at Lockheed, so we would meet when our shifts were over and go off-roading and drink beer and smoke weed and listen to music, sometimes until sunrise.

1980 – Electrician – apprentice, G.G. Electric, North Hollywood, CA. $5 per hour! I got this job  through my friend Jerry Podlevsky. I quickly learned the basics of reading blueprints, layout, and wiring. I was pretty good at this too and was a quick study.

1980 – European Motor Connection, North Hollywood, CA, $5 per hour. Low level mechanic and gopher for my brother-in-law, Armand Azran, a French Moroccan national. A shitty filler job. By 1993, Armand began engaging in criminal activity and had to leave the country before Guido and Tony caught up with him. He convinced my sister and mom to go, which was the dumbest thing for them to do. Armand eventually went to prison in Morocco.

1980 – Electrician – apprentice, Sheffield Electric, Reseda, CA, $6 per hour, through Jerry Podlevsky. This company had the notoriety of writing bad checks to its employees, so it was always a race to the bank on Friday.

1981 – Morris Richman Auto Sales, Studio City, CA, $5 per hour. Gopher, car washer, and porter. Another shitty filler job, but at least it was close to where I was living. This was the first time I took a reduction in my hourly wage.

1981-1984 – Electrician – apprentice to journeyman, J. J. Master Electric, Los Angeles, CA, $7 up to $12 per hour. Joe Masterson was the cigar chomping owner of this A-list electrical contractor. Landmark locations like Chasen’s and the Hotel Bel Aire plus various film, TV, radio and sports personalities and old L.A. money families like the Doheny’s and the Keck’s. Meeting and working with Vin Scully was a highlight.

1984-1990 – Electrician – journeyman, White Glove Electric, Santa Monica, CA, $13 up to $20 per hour. This company was started by Woody Miles and Rudy Martinez, two veteran electricians from J. J. Master who recruited me for more money. I left White Glove after a falling out with management. Promotional promises were made but not kept.

1990-1992 – Electrician – journeyman, Kamashian Electric, Van Nuys, CA, $21 up to $22 per hour. Joe Kamashian was great to work for and very professional. Lots of industrial control system work that I geeked out over, and I was really good at it There was a major slowdown and I got laid off.

1992-1994 – Electrician – journeyman, Shamma Electric, Granada Hills, CA, $22 up to $23 per hour. On December 26, 1994, I was electrocuted and almost killed on the job. It took me seven months to recover. This also set me up for a better career path 5-years later due to the California Vocational Rehabilitation law at the time. Long story.

1995-1998 – Electrician – journeyman, Kamashian Electric, Van Nuys, CA, $24 up to $26 per hour. It was good to work with Joe again. This was my last job working in the electrical trade.

1999 – obtained my Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certification. This was a major career game changer.

1999-2005 – Systems Engineer for Center Automotive Group, Sherman Oaks, CA. The timing couldn’t be more perfect. The owner David Farguson had decided to update their dealer management system (DMS) from the green screen terminal-based mainframe Reynolds and Reynolds system at BMW, and ADP system at Chrysler/Jeep to a centralized Windows based system called Carman. I was moonlighting for them doing some electrical work on the BMW parts department remodel. They had a meeting where Mr. Farguson announced the decision to move to Carman and asked if anyone knew someone that knew Windows systems. My brother Scott was at that meeting, and he knew that I was taking the MCSE certification courses going to night school and floated my name out. David invited me to a meeting and offered me a salaried position starting at $80K. I was only making about $60K in the trade at the time. You bet your ass that I took the job. I happened to be at the right place at the right time and it changed my life.

2005 –  Started my own IT consultancy, Business Technology Services & Management, LLC, Van Nuys, CA. Also certified on an IP based telephony system called Fonality. I had sold and installed a handful of these systems and got a call from the people that I knew at Fonality to help out one of their partners, Cbeyond Communications (a CLEC out of Atlanta), who was opening an office in Gardena, CA. The story was that Cbeyond had hired a cabling contractor to do a temporary cabling job on one of the floors of a building while another contractor was building out the suite a few floors above. The cabling contractor had disappeared, and Cbeyond was left in the lurch with plans to occupy the space within a week. I had been working with a cabling company named Streamline Communications which was owned by Sam Mazzola, one of my instructors for one of my MCSE certification courses. I got Sam and the Cbeyond team to together and Streamline delivered the project in five days! This set me up for something unexpected.

2007-2015 – Landed a major Field Services contract with Cbeyond Communications for the Los Angeles and San Diego markets. After helping Cbeyond with their cabling fiasco, their field services manager John Favors invited me to a meeting and asked if I was interested in doing field services for them as a preferred field services provider (FSP). Even though I was not fully prepared, I said yes because I knew I would figure it out as I went along. At the peak of the contract, I had ten employees in various positions working for my company. Total billing for this contract was $4.24 million over 8-years. After Birch Communications bought them out in 2014, they slowly bled out the FSP’s by bringing the field services in-house. I had to let go of everyone that was working for me.

2015-2018 – Field Nation platform for IT field services. Various tech related field service projects for hospitality, retail, food and beverage, and health care.

2018-2023 – Remote IT Systems and Network Consultant to TransformITive, Inc., Berkeley CA, $80k up to $90k.

2021 – Obtained my Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification. I had wanted to get this certification for years, and during COVID-19, I buckled down and did it. This certification is difficult – the global pass rate for the exam is under 50%, and the average pass rate is 2.5 attempts.

2023-present – Sr. Network Engineer consultant for a global retail network refresh project for a major shoe brand. Due to contractual restraints, I am not allowed to disclose the finances of this project. All I can say is that it pays well.

Twenty-four jobs in total – wowzah – I never tallied it up before! Setting the odd jobs aside, I mostly worked in two major but vastly different careers: the electrical trade (18-years) and in IT (25-years).

And now I am attempting to be a writer too, so maybe the count is three major careers?

Blog: https://msnarky.com

Instagram: @m.snarky

©2025. All rights reserved.

The Ride

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Photo credit: Shutterstock

Story 31 of 52

By M. Snarky

At this precise moment, if you are reading this, you are a human being, and you are alive. You should celebrate this with every fiber of your being. Why? Because the odds of you being born are astronomically low – like 1 in 400 trillion – so you really need to consider yourself as more than extremely fortunate.

You are also on an ancient planet called Earth that is spinning at 1,000 miles per hour that is in a swirling galaxy named the Milky Way that is traveling through endless space at 1.3 million miles per hour. Is it not also wondrous that your body is made out of the same elements that are found in this galaxy? You are stardust.

By being alive, you have also found yourself on the ride of your life. There are many twists and turns and ups and downs on this ride that oftentimes leaves you feeling completely disoriented and out of control. This is actually good. Why? It is good because you feel something. You are alive.

This ride is both terrifying and exhilarating and will leave you breathless and bewildered and brokenhearted at times, but you can’t slow it down. In fact, it goes faster as you get older. Don’t fear it: hang on and embrace it. Enjoy it.

There is only one true way off of this ride and death will come soon enough, so don’t throw it away or rush it or force it or waste it or complain about it. Feel it. Fight for it. Live it. Feel the sunshine on your face. Watch a sunrise. Listen to the birds. Smell the flowers. Drink the wine. Eat the food. Immerse yourself in the wonder of it all. Love the living things. Love people. Love yourself. Amor fati.

Instagram: @m.snarky

© Copyright 2025. All rights reserved.

Anniversary of a Near-Death Experience

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Story 18 of 52

By M. Snarky

December 26, 2024. Yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of an industrial accident that almost killed me. According to the ER doctor at Providence Saint Joseph’s Medical Center in Burbank CA, it should have killed me.

I was working as a Journeyman in the electrical trade at the time, and the contractor I was working for landed a job for some tenant improvement (TI) work on the 6th floor of the DIC Enterprises building. It was a relatively simple job; relocate some 3-way light switches in the file room from one of the existing doorways that was going to be removed and closed off and move the switches to a new doorway location that was cut in on an adjacent wall. In the trade, this was typical, benign TI work that I had done hundreds of times before.

A 3-way switch means that there are two switch locations where the lights can be turned on or off as you enter or exit a room, generally, on opposite sides of a room.

Also typical was that this was a commercial office building with a 480-volt 3-phase wye alternating current power supply that utilized 277-volt A, B, and C phases for the lighting circuits. Yeah, that’s right kids: 277-volts from one leg (one wire) of the wye. This is common, industrial strength power here in the US and it must be handled with great respect, or it will unceremoniously kill you.

The 12-foot high suspended 2-by-2 acoustic t-bar ceiling of this room was also typical of a commercial office building. It’s one of those ceilings with 2-foot square drop-in tiles and a metal t-bar grid to hold them in place. The t-bar grid also holds the lighting fixtures in place. Everything is held and tied together with #10 or #12 tie wire where one end is tied off to the t-bar, and the other end is tied off to an eyebolt or a bracket that is fastened to the metal decking or concrete building structure above. Light fixtures have additional #8 or #10 self-tapping sheet metal screws that fasten them to the t-bar. All in the name of seismic safety.

I was working with an apprentice named Miguel. In trade parlance, he was “green,” meaning inexperienced – he only had a couple of years under his belt. But Miguel was a quick learner and we got along well.

I proceeded to do the investigative pre-work.  This consisted of identifying the line side conduit which is the conduit that contains the “feeder” wires – a.k.a., “hot side” – of the circuit, and then identifying the load side conduit which is the conduit that connects to the lighting.

I won’t bore you with the details, but both switch conduits connected to a common junction-box (j-box) above the ceiling, and the feeder side was at the switch that was not being relocated. Easy-peasy: remove both switches, open the wiring on the feeder side switch and cap it off, pull out some wiring, cut in a new switch box, drop in a new conduit, pull in new wiring, make appropriate splices and pigtails, reinstall switches. Done.

During a critical part of the work, I had instructed Miguel not to splice and pigtail either switch until I was done with working with the j-box in the ceiling, which was sandwiched between an air duct and the t-bar, and I only had about 6-inches of space to work with. Well, apparently the part about not splicing did not get through, and Miguel energized the circuit anyway…and me along with it.

I was standing on the 9th rung of a 10-foot ladder and was leaning heavily into one of the 2-by-2 openings to access the j-box, partially resting my arms on the metal t-bar. I am always careful when I’m doing make-up work, which is trade slang for stripping and splicing wiring, however, you handle the make-up work differently if you know you are working on a hot circuit. Well, I did not know I was working on a hot circuit until I was stripping a wire and the finger of my right hand was touching the exposed metal of my wire stripping tool. This now made me part of the circuit, and the 277-volts flowed through my body because my arms were grounded to the t-bar ceiling.

Being that your muscles work with small electrical currents that are controlled by your brain, when higher voltage goes through your body, your muscles contract violently. I was situated in such a way that when my muscles contracted, I lifted myself off of the ladder and suspended my body by my arms and the pain from this hyper-contraction of my muscles was unbelievable.

Oddly, even though I was aware that I was being electrocuted, I could still think clearly, and I was telling myself to let go, but I had no control over my body that was now vibrating with the 60hz of the electrical current flowing through me.

I could smell my hair and flesh burning and sensed a metallic taste in my mouth.

Suddenly, I felt that I could float, and this is the moment when I saw the white light in front of me. I stopped feeling pain. It seemed that I could gravitate toward the white light without much effort, almost as if it was pulling me – beckoning me – to go to it. I could still think crystal clear. The last thought I remembered thinking in my semi-conscious state was, “I can’t go; my wife and kids need me…I can’t go!”

The next thing I knew was that I had hit the floor and landed hard on my right-hand side. I have no memory of falling. Hitting the floor either knocked the wind out of me or knocked the life back into me, but I was sucking really hard for air. Now that I was awake and conscious and could think clearly, the first thing I tried to do was stand up. I was extremely wobbly. I looked around and Miguel was standing there like a statue with his mouth agape and his eyes popping out, like he had just seen a ghost. I tried to yell, “Call 9-1-1!” but the voice that came out of my mouth was not mine; it sounded unintelligible, and strangely like someone that had a severe speech impediment.

It’s hard to pin this down, but I think the entire ordeal lasted about a minute. A minute that would forever change my life.

When I realized that my speech was compromised, I tried walking but ended up stumbling clumsily over to the wall and tried to write 9-1-1 on it. But I couldn’t write it out. My body was not fully responding to my brain. It was at this point that I remember thinking to myself, “God, thank you for letting me live,” and, in a moment of amor fati,  “Well, if this is my permanent state, I’ll just have to accept it.” Suddenly, about four people from the office rushed into the file room, evidentially after hearing my body hit the floor, took one look at me, told me to lie down and someone called 9-1-1. I couldn’t even figure out how to take off my tool belt – my brain was saying one thing, but my body was doing something else – and so I lied down on the floor with tools and parts spilling out all over.

I remember not saying another word while lying on the floor uncomfortably, writhing in pain, not knowing how bad I was injured, and staring at the 2-by-2 opening in the ceiling that tried to kill me and asking myself how did I survive this? Why, did I survive this?

The paramedics got to me pretty quickly. As they were taking my vitals and connecting electrodes for the EKG machine, one of them started asking questions and I was terrified about answering them because it might validate that I was perma-fried. “Can you tell me what happened?” I hesitated for a moment, then slowly replied, “I was electrocuted by a 277-volt lighting circuit.” My voice actually sounded better, but it was still far from normal. “Were you standing on that ladder when this happened?” “Yes.” “Do you know what day this is?” “Yes, it’s Monday, December 26, 1994, the day after Christmas.” “Do you know where you are?” “Yes, I’m at the DIC Enterprises building in Burbank.” The questioning was interrupted by one of the other paramedics; “The victim is in atrial fibrillation!” “Get him ready for transport,” said the other.

They lifted me to the gurney, strapped me in, and wheeled me to the elevator. On the way to the ground floor, one of the paramedics said, “You’re lucky you’re alive!” I was loaded into the ambulance and transported to “St. Joe’s,” as the locals call Saint Joseph’s Medical Center. This was the most swerving, jarring, bouncy, uncomfortable ride I ever experienced. I started to wonder if the ambulance had wandered onto a demolition derby track. To occupy my mind while en route, I performed a self-check to determine if I had lost control of any of my extremities, and to my delight, I had no problem moving anything. At least this part of me was not perma-fried.

During the ride, they asked more questions. They needed my full name, address, phone number, emergency contact, my current health status, and if I was taking any prescription medications, etc. It wasn’t long before we were pulling into the ambulance driveway at St. Joe’s where some hospital staff members were waiting for our arrival. They quickly exchanged information and wheeled me into the ICU where they moved me from the gurney to the bed, switched EKG connections, and started an IV drip. I was still in shock, the word of which now took on an entirely new meaning to me.

“Patients heart is still in A-Fib, there’s a 1st to 2nd degree burn line across the shoulders below the back of the neck, and a 3rd degree burn on the bottom of the right forearm about the size of a quarter. The patient lost consciousness during the electrocution, but he’s lucid now.”

All of this happened before noon.

As the attending physician was examining me, he said, “Hello Mr. Freeman, it appears that you’ve had quite the morning; can you tell me what happened?” I gave him the same story I gave to the paramedics. “I see,” he replied. “Where does it hurt?” I replied in a wavering voice, “My head is pounding. My right shoulder is throbbing. All of my upper body muscles are extremely sore. I feel like I got run over by a trash truck.” “Okay, I hear you, and here’s what we’re going to do; we’re going to put you on a morphine drip to ease the pain and give you some medication to get your heart back into normal sinus rhythm, then we’re going to treat that 3rd degree burn on you arm and send you over to x-ray to make sure that you didn’t fracture your arm or shoulder. You’re lucky to be alive.” I replied, “That’s the second time this morning that I’ve been told how lucky I am, how do you mean that, exactly?” The doctor replied with, “Well, Mr. Freeman, that 277-volt shock you received has a nasty reputation of being fatal. The ones that survive are usually in such bad shape that we’re just trying to find out what’s still working. You, on the other hand, not only survived the shock, but you are also apparently in pretty good shape, considering the circumstances, and we’re going to find out what, if anything, is not working for you.” Lucky me. Just another day in the life of an electrician.

Shortly thereafter, my wife Kim walked into the ICU which raised my spirits considerably. I was in the midst of telling her what happened when the doctor came into the room. Lots of Q&A ensued. This is when the doctor told me that if the medication did not bring my heart back into normal sinus rhythm…they were going to have to use the defibrillator. Yes, that’s right; they might have to shock me again. I was not keen on the possibility of this happening.

Over the course of the next several hours, my voice went back to normal, and my body started responding to my brain.

The good news was that although the shoulder x-ray revealed some tissue damage and joint swelling, there wasn’t a fracture or break, and my body eventually responded to the heart medication and after 48-hours, my heart was back to normal sinus rhythm. After 72-hours, I was released to go home. The bad news was that the 3rd degree burn on my arm was going to need a skin graft which was performed at the Grossman Burn Center in Sherman Oaks, CA several days later.

Oddly, after only a couple of days of recovery at home, I received two visitors from my employers insurance company asking me if I was ready to go back to work. Go back to work? Seriously? This didn’t pass the smell test. I told them that my doctor hasn’t authorized me to go back to work yet, and they needed to check with him. This is when it occurred to me that the insurance company was overtly trying to rush me to go back to work. This is when I knew that I needed a professional to represent me, so I hired George Shulman, a workers comp attorney who took care of my case.

Due to the extensive muscle damage to my upper body, it took 7-months of twice weekly physical therapy sessions before I was allowed to return to work. The first couple of months of recovery were brutal. It hurt to raise my arms. It hurt to breathe deeply. It was a struggle to get dressed or take a shower. I was extremely weak. My muscles were so damaged that it limited my upper body range of motion. I had to stretch all of those muscles back out over the course of the PT sessions, which was a slow, painful process.

I’ll tell you right now that the economic reality at the time was that the workers compensation payments didn’t even come close to my normal income, and we found ourselves on the brink of bankruptcy during my recovery.

I don’t know if the law has changed since then, but at the time, I was eligible to take advantage of vocational rehabilitation training which would expire within a 5-year window. I took the required aptitude test and was told that they have never seen anyone score so highly and that I was eligible to take any of the training they had in their extensive catalog. The problem was that there was no new career that was going to put me in the same income level that I was already making, so I passed on retraining and went back into the trade.

I didn’t want to go back to work for the same electrical contractor that I was working for when I got hurt, so I called Joe Kamashian, one of my old bosses and after hearing my story he offered to rehire me for more money than I was making with the previous company. This was another lucky break.

In the meantime, my dad upgraded the old DOS computer that he bought the family a year earlier to Windows 95…and I was hooked. I learned as much as I could about PC’s, even considering computer programming. This set the wheels in motion for my interest in somehow making a living in the computer field.

By spring of 1999, I called Mr. Shulman and told him that I wanted to revisit the vocational retraining opportunity, and to my amazement, there were two new computer focused certification training paths. One was for Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) and the other was for Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) for Windows NT 4.0. At the time, Novell was the well-established 800lb gorilla in the network operating system (NOS) space, and Microsoft was a newcomer. I consulted with my dad about which one I should choose, and my dad quipped, “Go with Novell. Microsoft sucks.” Naturally, I went with Microsoft.

But this choice did not come without sacrifice or great effort.

To beat the 5-year sunset for retraining, I had to double-up on night classes at Mount Sierra College in Pasadena to finish certification in 9-months instead of the usual 1.5 years while also working full time, but I sucked it up. I had little time for any social activities. After 9-months of long days and longer nights, I pulled it off and obtained my MCSE certification on December 27, 1999, exactly 5-years and 1-day after the accident.

Incidentally, before I was fully certified, I was invited to a meeting with Dave Farguson, the GM of Center Automotive Group (BMW, and Chrysler/Jeep). I had already been moonlighting for him doing some electrical work at the dealership during a parts department remodel, so we already had a working relationship. What I didn’t know was that he was looking at a new Windows based Dealer Management System (DMS) named Carman to replace his mainframe-based Reynolds & Reynolds DMS at BMW, and ADP DMS at Chrysler/Jeep.

I was unaware that during a previous meeting with all of the departmental managers discussing the move to Carman, Dave asked the group if they knew anyone who he could hire to manage the new computers and network. My brother Scott was working as the BMW parts manager and Scott knew that I was attending night school and working toward my MSCE and threw my name into the conversation. Lucky once again.

At our meeting, Dave asked me some questions about my certification training status and when I would obtain it. I told him that I had a couple more classes to finish before taking the Pearson certification tests, but I should be done by the end of the year. This is when Dave offered me a job starting with an $80,000 salary. I was only making about $52,000 per year in the electrical trade, so this was a major bump in income for me and my family. Lucky yet again. Or was it providence?

1994 was a rough year for my family. It started with the Northridge earthquake in January and ended with a near electrocution in December. I’m lucky to be alive.

Looking back through the lens of time, this accident provided opportunities that I never would have had otherwise. It also changed my focus and my outlook on life in so many positive ways that it’s hard to define. I’ll put it this way; Being so close to death actually brought me closer to life, and something positive can come from an unfortunate circumstance.

The accident also made me more spiritual in that I now believe that there is an afterlife, but this is a complicated topic because this also validates that there must be a world of spirits. If there is a world of spirits, does this also mean that there is a heaven and a hell? If so, this also means that God and Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary and Satan are not fictional characters. If these biblical figures are not fictional characters, it means that the bible is true. If the bible is true, and God exists, I have questions. Questions like, “God; why did you create the mosquito and the tsetse fly? What purpose do they serve other than to spread blood borne diseases (that you also presumably created) that kill people in some of the most agonizing, horrific ways possible?” “Why did you take our son Travis away from us?” Questions like this flood my mind. This is my Pandora’s box.

I may be conflicted but I’m still the luckiest man on the planet.

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