Lie Ability

After I posted yesterday's installment, it was recommended to me that I tread lightly when letting the bloggers out there in Blogland know about Mr. Serious Geek because of liability.
I took the advice, but I simply removed the idiot's real name and gave him the name of Serious Geek.
The world must know about this retard. :)

Back when I was in my early 20s, and I was working at a different motorcycle shop called Central Sports, a pretty young lady walked in and started asking questions about dirt bikes.
Naturally, all of the guys flocked around her because they wanted to chat it up with her, and since she was either directed over to or just walked over there on her own, she ended up in front of the Parts Dept. counter where I was.

She started asking me questions about dirt bikes, asking things having to do with how safe they were to ride and how many people they could carry.
Right there, I should have thrown a red flag up in my mind, but I was too young and naive for that.
Yes, all of you young people out there - listen up real good to this one:
There are lots of things you'll experience in life that will make you wiser.
Some good and some bad.
Wisdom is something you cannot buy - you must learn it, either the hard way or confiding in a trusted elder.
Wisdom is this priceless experience of having gone through difficult situations and coming out in the end having learned a lesson from it.
The typical mouthy young punk?
He's got no wisdom.
This is why he sounds like he has a wise-assed answer for everything - they put a lot of effort into trying to sound genuinely wise with their well-rehearsed comeback lines, but it's all based on nothing.
No real experience, just what they've heard on TV or from some stupid song.
They're in the process of paying their dues, but still have a way to go.

Anyway, to make a long story short, after the pretty lady asked me her 20 questions about dirt bikes, she left.
A month or so later, I got a letter in the mail telling me I had to appear down at the Norwich, CT. courthouse for a deposition, a pre-trial hearing where both sides of a legal case gather information.
In this case, the young lady was actually a lawyer's assistant, and she was basically looking for a sucker (me) to open his mouth too willingly and give some information that her side could distort.
Basically, the case had to do with a stupid punk carrying another stupid punk as a passenger on a Honda CR-125R motocross bike, and since that motorcycle is not meant to carry a passenger, the idiot's foot got tangled in the rear wheel spokes.
A lawyer got involved, sued American Honda, and there I was, involved myself.

The young lady knew she was being deceitful when she first met me and asked all of those questions because when I met her in front of the courthouse, she said, "I bet you'd like to kill me now, huh?"
This was spoken with a wise-assed smirk on her face.
She got a kick out of it.

Inside at the meeting, the American Honda lawyer told me that what was going to happen was the other side was going to ask a bunch of questions as they probed for information.
They hoped to get words out of me that they could use in their case, even if it meant trying to trip me up and make me say something that I didn't mean to say.
Yeah, people.
It simply boiled down to a legal jousting match of who knew how to speak the best.
I hear that the word "justice" is derived from "joust", by the way.
I believe it, too.

I never found out how the case turned out.
I can only wonder.
As for what happened to me at that meeting, I simply said as little as possible while the snaky lawyer assistant lady and her boss whispered back and forth to each other.
It all seemed very childish and devious to me.

These days, you can bet your ass that whenever a stranger comes up to me and starts asking suspicious questions, I do throw a red flag up in my mind.

Off to jerk,
-John