The other day I went to Subway. As I parked, I noticed that the guy getting out of the car next to me was holding a bag of Subway sandwiches. It occurred to me that it was somewhat strange for someone already in possession of a bag of Subway sandwiches to be going to Subway. I followed him into the store and stood behind him in line. He said something to the employees. All I caught was the word “blood.” Finally, unable to contain my curiosity, I asked him, “What happened with your sandwiches?” He explained that his girlfriend had gone over there to buy sandwiches, and while they were being made the employee had sliced a finger, bleeding all over the food preparation area. The girlfriend didn’t know what to say, but by the time she got home she’d decided that she didn’t want to eat the sandwiches. I said, “So she sent you to go return them?” And he said, “Yeah, she was too embarrassed to come back.”
Then walking around campus the other night, I noticed that one of the security vehicles had stopped and was shining its floodlight up into one of the enormous tropical trees outside the student center. Then I saw that a student had climbed WAY up into the tree, probably twenty feet off the pavement. A female friend of his was standing nearby, being suitably impressed and/or horrified by the guy’s climbing abilities. The security guys got out of their vehicle and told the student to come down, which he did. They looked over his ID, gave him a lecture, and drove off. I was reminded of a time when I was a freshman and got caught by campus security late at night after I had scaled a fence to get into a construction site to retrieve my frisbee. Ah, fun times. I was also pleasantly reminded of Roger Zelazny’s character Fred Cassidy, the rooftop-climbing perpetual undergrad from Doorways in the Sand.
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