to live so long and not have gotten into The Smiths?
I had been meaning to pickup a best of for a good while now after much mention on the V and V types LJ around here. A few weeks ago I did. But I only got around to listening to it a couple of days ago.
Man I’ve been missing out. Completely amazed by how many of their songs I know but never knew it was them.
I’ve just spent 10 minutes looking through my archive for a post I was reminded of by the cheating poll on the V. I don’t see it anywhere which I’m sure is wrong. I’m fairly damn certain I’ve written it up before. Nevertheless, it’s a quiet morning in work so I’ll write it up anyway.
May 2002, I’m in Reston VA, working for a week. It was with my then boss and another guy on the team and we were doing some Macintosh stuff. It was a good week. Met up with quite a few people who have since become good friends and had already been long-term colleagues. There was much much drinking for the whole week. If any of you have been to Dulles or Reston or around there, you’ll know why. The place isn’t quite a desert but it’s close enough. Everytime you turn around, you really do expect to see tumbleweed.
Anyway Spider-Man was opening on the Friday in the US. It didn’t open in the UK for another few weeks. My boss and I being giant nerds were going to see it before we left. It just had to be done. So we booked tickets for midnight showing, that is 12.00am on whatever the date was. We had a few drinks beforehand… in fact we were completely trashed. It was our last night and we sat in various bars drinking ourselves silly. Then we went to the cinema, all very excited.
To find it was closing. There was a single guy locking up. Apparently 12.00am on a specific date means midday. Despite our objections and that, we got our money back but no apology or anything else. Not impressed at all. So disappointed, with no chance of seeing it the next day as we had a 10am flight we wandered back to the hotel. On the way we ran into a guy from the office there we knew. He was off to a party just around the corner…would we like to join him. Of course we did. Come 6 am we were still in the bar drinking. It was really really messy.
Anyway got back to the hotel and got about two hours sleep before dragging ourselves to the airport. When we got there (it’s no more than 20 miles down the road), we found a rather large queue for our check-in. A few minutes after that, we found out that a tornado had swept through the area and all the flights were fucked. There was pretty much a matching grin on my bosses face and mine when they told us that we would not be flying out until 7 that night now. They sorted a hotel room and taxis and that which was fine by us 🙂
So off to the hotel room, we dropped all of our stuff off and got straight into a taxi with instructions to take us to the nearest cinema. So at midday we saw one of the first showings of Spider-Man and it was most excellent. The other guy on the team was so fucked from the night before that by the time the opening the credits were done, he was leaning on the seat in front asleep.
I remember the whole move, I loved it. I remember cracking up when they played the old cartoon theme tune at the very end of the final credits, laughing so much it hurt. I don’t remember the rest of the afternoon. I have no idea what we did…oh wait yes I do. We went for food. We went to a McDonald’s right next to the petrol station a block away from the cinema. Then after that is a blank.
When we got back to the airport at whatever time it was, they told us we could get a slightly earlier flight. This was all good. What was even better was the fact that there was only 27 and I’m not making any of this up, 27 passengers going on a 747. We were travelling business of course so the flight was never going to be a bad thing…except they moved us all to first class. So the only time I’ve ever got to fly in such luxury and I was asleep within minutes. I remember getting a blanket placed over me by a rather cute stewardess and then I remember getting picked up at the airport the next morning.
It was a damn good trip.
I broke up with my girlfriend a few days later. I wonder how much of an influence the trip really had on that. I met a really nice girl at the party that Friday night. Her name was Kate. Nothing at all happened, but had I been single it would have.
I love this second panel here. It never fails to amuse me.
