Did you hear that? Hmmmm…. no, neither did I, I guess. How about that? You too? No. No, I didn’t either. Okay, nevermind.
See, here’s the problem with trying something new – you just don’t know how the hell to do it. I keep telling my colleagues this all of the time, but do they listen? No. Oh no, Joe, they tell me, I know just what I’m doing. And besides, bungee jumping off the Eiger doesn’t seem all that challenging to me, at least from the comfort of my easy chair. You try to help a brother out, and that’s what you get – a load of attitude, special delivery. I am depressed.
I might have mentioned last week how, out of desperation, various members of the greater Big Green cohort have been ranging around this backwater town, looking for means of gainful employment, no matter how demeaning. Well, as you might expect, WAL*MART and Home Depot were not hiring our kind, so we’ve been forced to apply some creative thought to the problem. As it happens, some of us tend to be a bit overly creative. And so we encounter what might be described as distortions of normal reality, in which familiar actors become involved in highly unfamiliar undertakings. And, well, yes… I am talking about Marvin (my personal robot assistant); official bomb-sniffing robot of the Little Falls 
constabulary. Such an honor. NOT!
I don’t know why Mitch Macaphee programmed cluelessness into Marvin. Seems to me he could have done just as well without it. In any case, he made the simple calculation that a bomb-sniffing robot would have very little to do here in sleepy upstate New York. Under normal circumstances, that might be so. But we are at WAR, as you know, and any resources our local police organizations can bring to bear in support of that fight may be deployed without warning. That’s where Marvin comes in. We have a Homeland Security training center around here someplace, and they’ve roped Marvin into live-fire drills, climbing over concrete walls and pulling ticking bombs out of baby carriages. Not at all what he was expecting.
Hey, I warned him. What else can a mentor do? We try to direct our charges, but…. they have minds of their own. (Or at least half-minds of their own.)
