The Colonel pounded his keyboard in livid rage, broken keys flying everywhere
as alien beeps and squawks emitted from the computer's speakers. DO NOT SHOOT
THE MONITOR! Do NOT shoot the monitor! O.K... O.K... o.k…. The cause of
the Colonel's rage had wafted up out of the ether just seconds ago. The stark
black letters on the screen mocked the Colonel's perseverance, mocked his concentration,
his intellect, mocked his very manhood:
AUCTION CLOSED
YOU WERE OUTBID
He'd had his eye on that Parker Vacumatic for six and a half days now, practically
ever since the moment it was posted. He'd been nurturing it along, checking up
on it every few hours to see if it had been "discovered", looking up
the other bidder's past histories, trying to deduce at just which price point
it might break right for him. The teaser was, it had been mislabeled as a plebian,
low-priced modern Parker Frontier in the heading and description, and the Colonel
had bet that most of the insolent little jerks who bid up the prices on his pens
had missed this one. The photograph was tiny and blurred, the description inept
at best, but he was almost certain that he had ID'd a blue-and-gray striped Vacumatic
Maxima, with a "nib that wobbles". Of course it wobbled! It must be
one of those super-rare, super-flex Vacumatic Maximas, the nibwork produced only
from mid-1936 to August of that year by a pair of Lithuanian immigrant midget
twins who were employed ever so briefly by Parker then mysteriously disappeared
in the dead of the night along with a treasure trove of rare pre-WWI iridium mined
from a meteorite crater in Outer Mongolia by indentured Cossack laborers who claimed
bloodline descent from the Russian crown. These pens were like hen's teeth, the
Holy Grail, Noah's Ark, King Tut's burial pen and the Queen Mother's purple knickers
all rolled into one - and the Colonel had been robbed at the very last second
by some Neanderthalic numbnut who had better sniping software than he. What was
the world coming to?
The wooded slope beneath the Colonel's second story study was littered with
the carcasses of computer monitors that the Colonel had either thrown out of the
window in a blind rage after being sniped out of a fountain pen he deserved, or
monitors he had shot first, karate-chopped to shreds and then thrown out the window.
Ruffled titmice, voles and shrews had found the shattered monitors to be ideal
places to make their nests and raise their families, but the Colonel was determined
to stop adding to their suburban sprawl.
Oh yes. This sniping crap was going to come to an end, one way or another.
There's only two kinds of people in the world, winners and everybody else, and
the Colonel was sick and tired of having his nose rubbed in it. After eleven tours
of duty in some of the world's most notorious hotspots, thirty years of government
service executing the jobs that were too hard, too dirty and too mean for any
ten ordinary men, the Colonel felt that he was at least entitled to spend his
golden years basking in the reflective glow of a few relaxing hobbies: competitive
combat target shooting, training Weimaraner attack dogs, raising carnivorous Venus
Flytraps, and fountain pen collecting. Boy! How wrong he'd been about that last
one.
TEN TIMES he'd been sniped in the last two weeks alone, the casualties were
piling up like logwood. There'd been that black-and-green marbled Mont Blanc 244
he thought he had nailed till the very last two minutes, when the price had steadily
and inexorably climbed to the stratosphere, that Sheaffer Jade flattop (PERFECT
color, NO browning) that had been snatched from his grasp by that unscrupulous
pen-monkey "0003pio", and now this latest ignominious defeat at the
hands of that vicious counter-bidder, "muffysmom".
Oh yes, he knew their bidding names and all, their devious bidding strategies,
their triumphs and treacheries on the playing field. Most importantly, he now
had the time and wherewithal to track 'em down and GET BACK HIS PENS.
Mind you, he did admit to a certain grudging admiration for anyone who had
the unmitigated gall and Bunyonesque temerity to try to stand up to him. Maybe
after he got his pens back, he'd rip their hearts out and eat 'em while they were
still beating to absorb the courage of his enemies, a trick he'd learned on his
last tour among the savage man-eating cannibals of Borneo. Or maybe he'd just
maim their mousing finger, so that THEY COULD NEVER JACK WITH HIM AGAIN.
Plugging another keyboard into his computer (he kept a few spares in the closet
in case of emergencies), the Colonel began to type.
"Dear *muffysmom*, I was heartbroken to see that you had won a pen at
auction that I think might belong to my kindly, infirm-yet-still-spunky aged grandmother.
You see, she lives in a nursing home because I can no longer care for her now
that I'm in a wheelchair. Her last and only pleasure left in the world is to write
letters to her Snailmail friends, and her last and favorite pen just came up missing.
It looked just like the one in the photo! At first, we thought that it might have
been eaten by her trusty, loyal-yet-somewhat-rambunctious Weimaraner seeing-eye
dog, but I now suspect that it was purloined from her room and put up for auction
by the sinister elderly Lithuanian midget twins who live down the hall from her
in the nursing home. Tell me - did the pen have any engraving on it? What might
it have said? My poor, elderly half-blind gran-mama's memory is failing, and she
can't remember if she'd had it engraved. I would be willing to pay almost anything
to get back my crippled almost-blind semi-senile grandmother's pen, at least triple
what you paid for it. If you just let me know your real name and address, I can
have a money order, cash, even gold bullion messengered over to you immediately.
Please, don't make me break my gran-mama's heart - signed, A Loving Grandson."
Ha! Even the most callous and hardened, bitterest bidder could hardly resist
a heartstring-twanging like that. The Colonel could almost feel the flex of that
nib already. Ha, ha, ha! He’d get that address. The Colonel was back into
full search/intercept/engage/destroy mode again, and it felt damn good. All of
the hereditary instincts honed by thousands of generations of mankind's evolution
were kicking into gear. Neural circuits last used to track and kill wildebeest
and rhinoceri on the verdant veldts and savannahs of darkest Africa were now locked
in on their new primary target: the Colonel's Parker.
The Colonel began to whistle a sprightly tune as he powered down his monitor
and went down to the basement to find his piano-wire garotte and his throwing
knives. Toodle-doo, toodle-dee, toodle-doo, toodle-dee. A man needs a mission,
after all.
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