Shooting Tourists

Life was slow at times when I was a sophomore in college.  My friend Dave and I broke up the monotony by driving to Tampa twice a month to enjoy ourselves at Busch Gardens.  Let me explain.  That year, Busch Gardens offered a special deal.  If you purchased one admission to the park, you could return as many times as you wanted absolutely free.  They handed out these little ID cards with your picture on it (I was able to convince the picture lady to let me pose for mine, I was able to get a butt slap action photo as my means of identification).  So we went once at the beginning of the year and several times more for only gas money.  We would drive down on Friday night and stay with Dave's family or some friends, go to the park on Saturday then again for a half day on Sunday before returning to Gainesville.  (I have another post coming regarding one of these trips)

Now most patrons of the park ride the roller coasters and partake in the other attractions.  Dave and I enjoyed those rides on our first trip.  But one can only ride the Kumba so many times.  Every trip to Busch Gardens (aside from first one) was solely for one purpose.  Dave and I would spend several hours (literally) enhancing the experience of the Congo River Rapids by pumping quarters into the huge squirt gun machines and drenching complete strangers.  Sure we would stop for lunch, and occasionally ride the Kumba, but we spent nearly the entire time manning the water cannons.  At the time, I was delivering pizzas a couple days a week.  I could accumulate hundreds of quarters in a few weeks at work from all the "keep the change" transactions.  Each one would translate into a few sopping wet tourists.

Dave and I acquired such skill in shooting tourists (as we liked to call it) that people started to take notice.  We could look upstream and determine exactly which person in the raft would be in direct alignment with the gun once they reached us.  We would taunt the people on the ride knowing full well that they would be soaked in a few seconds.  For example:  "Hey you in the Hawaiian shirt, get ready!"or "Hey beer mug necklace, you're about to get wet!"  Busch Gardens sold hats in the likeness of various zoo animals, so my personal favorite was "Hey elephant head, I'm coming for you buddy!"  Some of the people on the ride would yell back, some wouldn't, some would try to move out of the way, some thought we were bluffing, they all got wet.  

Our water projectile expertise and comedic antics drew quite a crowd.  We had strangers giving us quarters and pointing out when their family or friend's raft was coming.  Mostly we were receiving money from elderly people who could not go on the ride themselves but couldn't resist getting their grandkids wet.  Inexperienced shooters could not trust 25 cents to fate, so they depended on us for accurate timing.  Even staff members would come by for a laugh or two.  By the end of the day, we would be entertaining a large group of spectators.  Anheuser Busch should have been paying us.

My proudest moment came on our last visit.  It was the end of a successful day, the park was closing and Dave an I were waiting by the exit for a few friends who came with us (they wasted their time riding coasters all day).  As we sat there surveying the passing crowd for our friends, we witnessed several people staring at us either dripping excessively, carrying their socks over their shoulders to dry them out, or angry young females in need of a blow dryer.  One particular teenage girl leaned over to her mother and said "those are the two guys I was telling you about" as she walked past.  The mother gave me a menacing look, I was beaming with pride.  I just raised my hand, mimicked a gun with my fingers, took aim, winked at her and smiled.

GORG!

So on to my first year of college in the ol' Blog DeLorean. Sorry, this is a long post. But don't worry, it will be well worth the time.

When I was a freshman at UF -the best university God ever created- I lived in a dorm, Graham Hall. I was excited initially because dorms were assigned randomly and Spanky ended up only two doors down the hall, that however is not part of this post. All I knew was my roomie-to-be had a monarch type name, George W Addicott III, and he was from Wellington.

The next day I heard a rustling outside the door, I assumed it was him so I went to the door and opened it to introduce myself. There stood George, with all of his stuff surrounding him, apparently his parents had dropped him off, I could smell the rubber they burned as they screeched out of the parking lot. George was an interesting character. He looked to be balding and he was wearing an ensemble that he would enrobe every single day of the entire school year: blue and white high tops, tall white socks pulled up high enough to keep his lower calves warm, jean shorts, and a bluish green patterned polo shirt. He brought with him only clothing, bedding, toiletries, and his computer. I would come to find out that George was an impassioned obsessive compulsive, a germaphobe, a fanatical studier, and had never watched MTV before. These qualities and others made George a great subject for scientific research... Well, that is how I rationalized messing with him so much. The following is a list of some of the 'experiments' I did on George W Addicott III during my freshman year in the dorm. All of these actually happened, if George were here -he would never be because he hates me now- he could verify all of this.

- I used subtle name changes such as Gorg (my personal favorite), Garrrrg, Gorgus Gorg, Gorgoyle, NWA III, George W Apricot III, George H.W. Addicott, Smorgasgorg, and other variants. "My name is George, not ___" he would usually reply.

- I bunked the beds every time he left for class for an entire week. He refused to bunk the beds because a) he was afraid of heights and b) he was afraid I might pee on him at night. Yes, seriously. Supposedly (or, as Gorg, would say supposevly) there was an incident at camp when he was younger involving both bunk-beds and urine.

- I secretly marked his cloths with a dry-erase marker to tell if they had been washed. I did this after realizing that he had exactly 14 of each part of his wardrobe and he systematically rotated through them until laundry day every other Sunday.

- On separate occasions: I replaced one pencil in his pencil mug with a pen, changed his textbooks from alpha order by subject to alpha order by author, moved his hat (which he only wore on weekends) from the left bed post to the right one, moved his clock forward one minute, moved his clock back one minute, and turned his pillow around so that the open end of the pillowcase faced away from the wall rather than towards it. All of these experiments George discovered within a minute of entering the room. Yes, I timed him... he started to suspect something whenever he came home to me sitting on my bed with a stopwatch.

- I would leave the TV remote on his bed. Upon my departure, he would immediately tune to MTV or the E! Channel. I would spy on him from the window for a few minutes. When he heard my key entering the lock, he would turn it off and return to his side of the room in earnest. "Gorg... what were you doing?" I would ask.

- George would always drink Mountain Dew (one of the few things we had in common). He would suck on the plastic bottle so hard that he would produce a red ring around his lips. George didn't quite understand the procedure for drinking out of a 20 oz bottle. So when he was gone for a minute, I poked a hole in the side of the bottle to reduce pressure. I guess I should have made the hole bigger, afterwards he still looked like he had just made out with a shop vac.

- George went to bed at the exactly 10:30 every night, he had a nightly routine. He would travel to and from the shower always with his socks on (come to think of it, I never once saw his feet), come back to the room to drop off his toiletry basket, return to the bathroom to brush his teeth for an absurd amount of time (I'm sure he timed it by counting or singing a song), come back to the room to drop off his toothbrush, and leave the room one last time to get a drink from the water fountain down the hall, then he'd turn the light off (regardless of what I was doing) hop in bed and go to sleep. So naturally -since I was annoyed with my room being out of commission that early- I hid his socks, toiletries, toothpaste, and/or all of the above every once and a while to throw him off.

- I tried to convince him he could do better in school by avoiding studying at all costs. I proved this to him by acing every Calculus test without purchasing the book or even going to class once. I conveniently left out the fact that I got a 5 on the AP Calc test and was retaking the class to boost my GPA (I had an awesome teacher in High School). I would pretend to cram by flipping through his book as we walked to the test. He would always over-study and get a B or C. I would continually remind him of that.

- The straw that broke the George's back was when I told him I was really getting interested in interior design. When he came back from class one day, I had moved all of the furniture in our room into one corner to make room for a blow up couch I had purchased at Target (I bunked the beds again for good measure of course). The couch had a sign that read; Jon's Couch, DO NOT TOUCH! He started freaking out and nearly hyperventilated. "All of your stuff is touching my stuff!" he yelled. I toned it down a lot after that.

A few years later I bumped into George at Walgreen's, he is the Assistant to the Regional Manager there, I apologized. He seemed to take it well, he laughed at some of the stuff I did to him in the name of science. I like to think that I shook him out of his OCD bubble enough to make him into a real boy. Maybe without me he would be stuck working at CVS.