McNamyver: Chemical Burn Notice

My name is Máirtín McNamara. I used to be an undergraduate until...

"We've got a graduation for you. Your postgraded."

When you are postgraded, you've got nothing. No cash, no credit and no job history.¹ You're stuck in whatever lab they decide to dump you in.

You do what ever work comes your way...

"Someone needs your help, Máirtín."

Bottom line: Until you figure out your thesis, you're not going anywhere.

[Cue "glamorous" montage of rain covered UCD: People waiting for buses, campus security chasing skateboarders, nerds highfiving beside a chalkboard, people in lab coats and goggles slowly jumping away from an explosion or some genetic experiment gone wrong², guys with popped collars mispronouncing words with orange-skinned girls]

I was chilling in my lab doing scientificy stuff. My cell rings.

It's an ol' buddy of mine from back in my undergrad' days. He's in a bind. He locked his keys in his car.

My partner-in-problem-solving [and pale Bruce Campbell stand-in], and I coolly walked out to the parking lot, to assess the situation.

If you are going to break into a friend's car, it is important that you don't do any damage. A lot of people are inclined to go for a fast break and grab, but that is going to sour a friendship real fast.

Most cars have a design flaw that can be exploited; this late model blahblah happened to have a slightly flexible door frame. A mistake a lot of people make at this point is trying to get the door open; just because it is how you usually get in to a car doesn't mean that it is the only way to get into one. In many cases the trunk will do just as well...

I strode back inside to get some things. I strode out with a heavy-duty screwdriver, section of 1/6" steel pipe and a spool of electrical wiring.

It's important when you are doing something suspicious, which could draw the attention of security personnel, that you act like you are meant to be there.³ More operations fail because of someone's nerves than effective countermeasures.

I threaded some of the wire, a loop tied in the end, through the steel pipe. I casually used the screwdriver^3.5 to lever a gap between the car and the door frame. All I needed was space to stick the wire-in-pipe. With the pipe wedged in the door frame, the wire was free to move up, down and swing side-to-side.

My eye fixed on the target. Sweat beading on my brow, I smoothly handled the wire-in-pipe to catch the lever. We held back on the celebrations. Now the hard part began.

With infinite care, I pulled back on the wire until...

My ol' buddy dove through the open trunk and grabbed the keys just in time.⁴

_________________________

Stay tuned for the final installment of McNamyver: The Living Skylights.

***

¹Well, not much anyway.

²"Glow in the dark mucus!"

³I'm not saying we were cool as cucumbers, but in the car park, in broad daylight we were standing around and ultimately breaking into a car and campus security didn't come our way at all.

^3.5Ostensibly it was a screwdriver, but that foot-long lump of steel would only fit screws that grew up beside a nuclear power plant in the 1950s.

⁴The narrative laws governing Heists require certain phrases to be included. Continuity be damned.

***

Afterword: For those that aren't fans of Burn Notice, I hope there was still some amusement and basking-in-my-uncanny-skills-of-improvisation to be had. The incident did happen and the only liberties I took in its description were how coolly we went to the "parking lot," how much striding I did and I didn't break a sweat during the incident; that was purely for dramatic effect.

For anyone that is interested, I got the Eye on Springfield clip here and the "click" sound effect here. Of course Blogger does not host audio, so I had to sign-up for a place that did. I went here.

I cut out the Kent Brockman intro to EoS and put that up. And then the wav for "click" format was not playing, and I converted it to mp3. I could almost write a whole entry about the charade; well, I could, if there was any more to it.