The Intelligence Estimate

I spent the day cleaning yesterday. I had the day off and I spent it cleaning. The only two times I left the apartment were to get lunch and to put laundry in the washer. I was a cleaning machine. And in the course of that cleaning I gave myself two paper cuts and pulled a muscle in my back. I was killed by cleanliness. But that's nowhere near as bad as what happened to Sully.

Sully is my supervisor at work for the Lobby Jack position. (This is the job that my friend Shelia calls my "pirate job.") One night when Sully was training me we were standing in the lobby and he was pointing to various things around the room. That was fine. The real problem came when he decided we need to be on the other side of the room to see something close up.

"Let's go back and shut the CD player's off," he said and then immediately followed that with, "Owwwww, son of a bitch." And then he moved.

The chronology there is VERY important. He said, "Let's go," then he screamed, and then he moved. That last part is actually the most important because he was stationary the whole time until after he screamed.

"What happened?" I asked.

"I rolled my ankle."

"Doing WHAT?"

"Thinking about moving."

That's right, the THOUGHT of moving was enough to make Sully's body revolt against manual labor. He didn't actually DO anything. When I came back two weeks later after I had officially accepted the job, Sully told me that he had actually sprained his ankle that night. He'd thought of making up some activity that he'd been involved in, but in the end his accident report was just three words long, "Thought about moving."