The Curmudgeon - Revisited

There has been a huge groundswell among my followers for additional posts about the Curmudgeon. Although the Curmudgeon is light on his feet, you can tell the Curmudgeon is coming down the hallway (and quickly close your door) because of the spare change constantly jingling in his pockets. The Curmudgeon has been unusually quiet recently. He has been squirreled away in his office, no doubt plotting some skulduggery.

I know that the Curmudgeon has been surreptitiously reading the blog because every once in a while he will make an off-hand comment. He was disgusted with the Grand Ole Opry post telling me that I should stick with only one thing that I know nothing about, rather than going off-topic to another topic about which I know nothing! He also chuckles with Chad Feldheimer about the sad state of my golf game (even though the Curmudgeon has twenty-something age children, he is so out of touch with today's culture he does not get the Chad Feldheimer reference). The Curmudgeon has threatened to post a comment or retort on my blog but to my knowledge he has not done so yet. Maybe this post will bring him out of his shell!

The Curmudgeon is like E.F. Hutton (for those of you that remember E.F. Hutton), "when the Curmudgeon talks, people listen." When blackberries (the Kleenex of personal digital assistants) first came into vogue, one of my colleagues and I journeyed to the corner office to visit the Dalai Lama of Dirt and ask for his wise counsel. The Dalai Lama proclaimed that (for him) blackberries that use regular batteries are better than those that use rechargeable batteries because chargers are bulky to carry on airplanes and in hotel rooms. My colleague and I listened breathlessly to the great wisdom of the Curmudgeon and immediately purchased blackberries with regular batteries. Six months later, the manufacturers stopped making blackberries with regular batteries! I think that the Curmudgeon owns stock in Duracell!

One of the great Curmudgeon stories that he tells about himself is a family trip with his then young children. The children liked to play hand-held video games and the Curmudgeon carried batteries on the plane in his pockets. Unfortunately, the Curmudgeon was also carrying the requisite spare change in his pockets, including pennies. During the flight, the Curmudgeon began to smoke (from his pants pocket!) and caught fire. The copper in the batteries and the zinc in the pennies were rubbing against each other creating an oxidation reaction and sparking a fire. Could you imagine if that happened after 9/11! The airline security personnel would have immediately landed the plane in the nearest corn field, carried the Curmudgeon off of the plane to the closest jail cell (which would have been a feat in and of itself) and waterboarded him until he admitted that he was an Al Qaida sleeper terrorist!

I think that the Curmudgeon may be willing to pay for half of my St. Andrews golf trip just to get rid of me for a week! I am going to continue to work on that!