McNamyver part 1

[Blogger's note: I had intended to write this series up before I left Dublin, but I forgot about it until I was taking pictures off of my phone.]

Every now and again I get a chance to shine.

Sometimes if a friend of mine (sometimes even a compadre) has a problem, if no one else can help and if they can find them me, maybe you he/she can hire me.^0,1

It all began waaaaay back in autumn 2003....

It was the first day of term, and fresh out of the day's last lecture I get a call from Ro-Ro. Due to circumstance more amusing not to mention, he locked himself out of the apartment with the oven on.² He had just moved in with his girlfriend and it was essentially his first day in the little flat on unsupervised. Even though herself had a key and was only a 10 minute walk away, Ro-Ro felt it best not to involve her.

The apartment is in the basement of a converted Georgian house, and there are two access points: the door and a narrow, narrow window overlooking by the backyard.^2.1 The keys were in a backpack on the bed at the opposite side of the flat (2.5 m from the window).^2.5 Being the strapping examples of human form that we were, neither him nor I could fit through the window.

On my way to his rescue, some friendly carpenters renovating a pub, gave me a discarded switch of timber, which Ro-Ro used as a fing-longer to turn off the oven. His most pressing concern solved, we stood in the garden for a while thinking on how to get to the keys. Eventually, Ro-Ro mentioned there was a roll of stiff tubing under the stairs; I felt that this should have been mentioned earlier.³

It being a dingy garden on the Northside, there was plenty of junk lying around: 5L paint drums, rusty nails, bricks, rusted wheelless bikes, etc. I hammered some nails into one end of the tubing to make a rudimentary hooking device and we fed it through the window.⁴ But it didn't pan out because the bag was too heavy and kept slipping off its perch.

Struck by inspiration,⁵ I jammed the sturdy steel handle of a foreshadowed paint drum down the end of the tube, holding it in place with those nails that were not good for much else. And thus, with my rudimentary hooking device somewhat less rudimentary, we were able to get the bag and our rightful ingress to the premises.

Stay tuned for the next installment of of McNamyver: Chemical Burn Notice.

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⁰Will work for food.

¹"Talk about poor production values, he references one 80s classic with his title and another in the introductory section; hack."

²If you like, imagine him with a too-small towel clasped around his waist, shampoo still in his hair and a back-scrubber in his free hand.

^2.1It makes sense if you tried looking out the window.

^2.5It does smack of an online game such as this, but that is how it happened to be.

³"Oh, what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak."

⁴More accurately: bricked. And on a related note: Real Men Don't Need Swiss Army Knives.

⁵Recently such moments of inspiration have been shown to be detectable by monitoring brain activity. Again, I am reminded how young neuro-psyhcology is in the grand schemes of things. By which I mean they are largely focussed on things filed away under "That's Obvious;"ⁱ you only have to look in someone's eyes to see that light bulb switch on. Or for that matter, one can feel the change in the mind when the solution to a problem crystallizes.

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ⁱOf course a number of things are incorrectly filed away under this heading so better off checking things thoroughly. As a whole that blog is worth a read [Thanks to Kevin for sending it on to me], if you can stand being told ad multiplicum how bad we are at thinking and remembering.