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bathroom bank vulnerability
Friday, July 2 2004
This morning I drove to Red Hook to service a Lexmark printer in a bank, an occasional gig I get because I am a member of a distributed service network. By the end of the visit I was covered in black cartridge toner, so I needed to clean myself up. It was interesting to see how easily I penetrated the bank's security system. It's worst vulnerability was the placement of its bathroom in the most secure part of the building, just outside the tender backside of the vault. There was a woman perfunctorily escorting me as I went to the bathroom, but once I closed the door I was alone to carry out my nefarious plot, which in this case consisted only of rinsing toner off my hands.
On the way home I stopped by Lowes to pick up a new spark plug and engine oil for our lawnmower, as well as some insulating material for my coffee pot, which is always on and probably contributes a big slice to the the pie chart representation of our electricity bill.
Once home, I tried out the new oil and sparkplug on the lawnmower and of course it didn't start. So I started taking it apart, a plastic piece here, a little screw there. I removed something that looked like an air filter and gave the string a pull and damned if it didn't come sputtering to life! So I did a Google search and found that a common problem with lawn mowers is that people turn them upside down to work on them and oil drains into the air filter and clogs it up. All I had to do was rinse it out with some gasoline and I had a lawnmower again. Inspired, I immediately mowed the lawn, even though it had been mowed only a week ago and was still fairly short. It only took me about twenty minutes.
This evening our neighborhood friends the so-called Meatlocker People came over bearing the wherewithal to make an vodka-containing beverage that Mr. Meatlocker called a "sea breeze." And then, while Mr. Meatlocker and Doug were bonding in the kitchen, Ms. Meatlocker revealed that she used to be a huge Tarot addict. So I went and got my Aleister Crowley THOTH tarot deck, still unopened since it was given to me by my erstwhile boss Linda as a going away present when I was leaving Los Angeles. Ms. Meatlocker claimed she always threw "the tower" when doing her own reading, and sure enough, it was the second card to "reveal itself." Something was defective about my deck because it only had one magician, not three, although the one that it had was revealed in Ms. Meatlocker's hand.
We got to talking about Fahrenheit 9/11, which only Sharon has yet seen. This gave Ms. Meatlocker the opportunity to rail against Michæl Moore, whose movie making style she finds exploitative. I agreed, but said that I didn't think any of that mattered, so long as people got to see those seven minutes of Bush reading My Pet Goat as New York burned instead of rising Clint Eastwoodlike to the occasion. No matter how that scene is spun, it just doesn't look good for a guy trying to project the image Bush is trying to project. What would Clint Eastwood have done had 9/11 happened when he was president? I wasn't sure, but I fell into character, rose to my feet, pulled out a huge imaginary pistol whose barrel was so long it scraped the ceiling, and quietly told the imaginary children around me to keep on reading, that I had some business to attend to.
[REDACTED]
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