Since Sweetie wants more FBI stories and I do everything the Riot Squad tells me, I'll discuss those fun-filled days a little more. I noticed that the majority of the comments mentioned wasting tax-payer money. If that REALLY bothered you, you might not want to read the rest of this.
Our unit was very young. The oldest person was the Unit Supervisor, EP. EP was a Louisiana Creole, who spoke with the slightest accent, especially evident when he was laughing or excited. EP was 36, and the rest of us were mid to early 20s. I started at the ripe old age of 21.
We had our own vernacular that we used on a daily basis. We didn't set out to make up stuff, it just happened through constant usage and our clever attempts to annoy each other. I'll go over the language, in case I use it telling FBI stories, and in most cases you have to use it because it is the only way to adequately describe situations.
Daddy Skaggs- Our division SAC, who's last name was Skaggs.
Ronnie- Our division ASAC's first name was Ronald. His underlings called him Mr., his peers called him Ronald, his bosses called him Ron, and we called him Ronnie or Ronnie Diamond, albeit behind his back. He was in his early-50s, which seems younger now than it seemed at the time. He knew my Dad and Mother from when they worked at the FBI. My Dad was a crime-scene fingerprint specialist. He was very well-respected, and in fact worked on the Senate Reinvestigation into the death of Dr. Martin Luther King. My mother was one of the clerical staff working in J. Edgar Hoover's Office till my brother was born in 1964. She had an autographed picture of Hoover congratulating her when I was born*. She has a stack of awards and commendations from Hoover. I on the other hand was a total blight upon the family's good name.
Ronnie was one of those divorced, dirty blond, tennis and racquetball playin', perpetually tanned, two-seat convertible BMW drivin' dudes, with a propensity for college-aged girls. He bought this enormous camera, and used to show his picture albums to EP, who had a photography business sorta on the side. EP said he had pictures of these young chicks that he dated at concerts, restaurants, ski trips, snorkeling, and the beach. Oddly enough, EP said he had no pictures of his two teen-aged kids, one boy and one girl. EP also said he apparently traveled around the country going to see Neil Diamond shows.
Bobby or Betty Bureau - Our little name for an FBI employee that followed all the rules and lived and breathed the FBI. When I first arrived, we had a Betty Bureau in our unit. She tattled about every irregularity, and used to get into shouting matches with EP. Her fiance was an assistant supervisor in the main mail room, he was a real Bobby Bureau. He was one of those leaders that would accidentally get shot by his own men in war time.
That shit don't flush - Anytime anybody made a mistake of any degree of size or importance they could expect to hear, "Come on Man, that shit don't flush!" It could be used jokingly or in all seriousness, which in retrospect is funny.
Handle it - EP would say this after assigning us a task. If you were passing along directions from EP to another unit member, you would follow it with "Handle it!" All shit jobs were by seniority. If you were new, you got all the shit jobs. Whenever someone noticed a shit job that needed to be done, they directed it at the newbie, followed by "Handle It". For example, "Keith, those burn bags need to go to security, Handle It!" It came from a TV show called Carter Country. The Mayor would say "handle it" to the sheriff every time he came upon a job that he felt was beneath his station.
Doggie-style - When you did anything in a manner other than the FBI prescribed guidelines.
Carl - the robot that delivered mail on the first floor. Carl didn't look like a robot; he looked like a bookcase on wheels. He followed a tape line through the halls, and at prescribed spots, usually outside of the door to each office, he would stop and beep loudly. You had 30 seconds to come out and get your mail, or Carl would move on. Each floor had a robot except the ninth floor, where all the big wigs worked. The mail room of each floor decorated their robot, within the bounds of good taste. Carl had pockets on the back, and eyes in front to give him personality. We used to stick empty soda cans on top of Carl, and let him ride around the first floor till someone took them off. Occasionally we would stick each other's personal property (lunches, winter hats and gloves, car keys) on top of Carl, which always lead to great arguments. Usually you could get everything back but the lunches, either someone ate them or they got thrown away.
LZ - your work space. If someone was hovering over your desk, you might say, "Get the Hell out of my LZ." If they left something on your desk, you would tell them, "Keep your trash out of my LZ!" It is a military term for landing zone.
Get Crackin'- A term kind of like Handle It, only this was more crafty. If someone had a task that you had time and lack of work load to assist with, you would feign interest by asking questions about the task, hinting that you were going to assist your co-worker. However, you would quickly slam the door shut by saying, "Well, you better get crackin" usually shortened to "get crackin". It worked like this, "I just finished pulling all the South-East transfers. Michelle, how many of those West Coast transfers you got left? Fifty? Your bus comes in an hour doesn't it? Well, I guess you better get crackin!"
Chicken Liver Day- Tuesday. The cafeteria staff was overwhelmingly African-American. So, all the real, non-rabbit food, had a very country/soul food flair to it. Sauteed chicken livers, with gravy, over rice, with greens of your choice, and a soft yeast roll were one of the selections every Tuesday. This was my all-time favorite. I would eat two lunches on Tuesdays, one at 11:00 and again at 1:00. Because every one knew how much I loved chicken livers, they dubbed Tuesday, Chicken Liver Day. I tried to encourage my fellow co-workers to join me in my love of chicken livers, but only HC would occasionally bite. EP considered chicken livers as catfish bait, because that's what they used back home.
I Own You - We had contests for everything, with a shitload of trash talking. It didn't even matter if it wasn't a work-related contest. We would stand a chair on a desk, and put the trash can in the chair, and then play a weird office game of HORSEwith a rat chewed nerf basketball. Generally any time you bested anybody in any competition, you would strut around the office saying, " I own you! Better call your Momma and tell her you aren't coming home, because I own you." EP's Creole heritage was predominantly African American, so he would usually pretend to call Abraham Lincoln and report that he owned somebody, and if Lincoln wanted them freed he would have to come over and play him for them. His Lincoln phone calls were always well-acted and hilariously embellished with each performance, but EP always found them more humorous than the rest of us, as they were often at our expense. As I am exceedingly white, I never phoned Mr.Lincoln or made references to personally repealing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Sheena Easton- This amazingly hot dark-haired chick that worked in the undercover assignments office. We had to pull all the checks for agents working undercover. Remember, this was in the days just before direct deposit. An undercover agent couldn't very well show up to get his FBI pay check or advance. The undercover assignments office would convert the checks into whatever method they and the agent agreed upon to get them money. The woman who used to come down from the undercover assignments office to pick up the checks, had dual-Israeli/American citizenship, and a name that none of us could pronounce, but it began with Sh and a vowel of some variety and the rest was totally impossible. So we called her Sheena Easton, because that was the closest approximation.
Death Race 2000 - Death Race was a game I invented. We shared our office with a plethora of roaches. Whenever we caught a roach, we played Death Race with it. The game consisted of a clear plastic dish, about the size of a salad bowl, which was placed atop a game board I created. I had traced a circle around the upside-down dish on the game board. The bowl outline was quartered, so that it looked like the outline of a pie cut into four pieces. Each pie piece was shaded in with a different color of magic marker. The roach was placed under the plastic bowl. We would then go to the first floor supply room, and get a box of ammonia capsules for stocking first aid kits. We would bust the ammonia capsule and stick it under the bowl with the roach, and then bet on which color the roach would die in. You could also bet on how many capsules it would eventually take to kill the roach. We had more than one roach that took a full box of 16 capsules and wasn't near death. We would flush them down the toilet, and trust to their amazing constitutions.
I think that is most of them. None of this is really FBI stories, but those are coming. I wanted to lay down the vocabulary first.
*At some point not long after my brother was born, I went through a zoo keeper phase. Whenever I encountered a picture of any living creature, I drew a cage around them with a crayon. At some point, after I had outgrown that phase, Mom discovered that I had caged Mr. Hoover and all the people in her Business College Yearbook, when she removed a box from the bottom of the closet in their bedroom.