Found It!

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I recently received a nice note from a former ZJX controller who I must have known (but can’t remember) who knew many of the people I knew, and who experienced many of the things I did. He reminded me of this Steve Parsons (celebrated in a couple of other Tales) story:

When we played golf with him he’d occasionally snap a drive into the cabbage. We would help him look for his ball for quite a while because (A: he was so cheap he didn’t want to give up on a $1.25 ball if he could avoid it, and 2: he wanted to avoid the penalty for the lost ball), and since he was going to look anyway, we might as well do something beside standing around on the fairway..

So, we would mount the expedition into the jungle. “What were you hitting?” someone would ask.

“Slazenger 5 (or some such),” Steve replied, wading into the gorse.

After hacking around for a while, he hollered, “found it!”—curiously, at just about the same time we had also found a Slazenger 5 several yards away. The only conclusion we could reach considering the astronomical odds of finding two Slazenger 5s in the same cabbage was that Steve had dropped one out of his pocket rather than have to be penalized for a lost ball.

Repeated here for two reasons: the statute of limitations has long run out on Steve’s perfidy, and I’m reliably informed that he has, unfortunately, departed the mortal coil.

Last updated: 14 April 2010