Yeah, stupid Lucy. The departmental psycho, everybody's favorite fuckup, who nobody listens to. Easier to think that than to take the time and listen to the unhappy facts, which nobody else seems to care about. Did I know why I was getting the sledgehammer when I requisitioned it? Exactly why? No. How could I? But I did know that someday, we might really need to get in somewhere where people weren't eager to let us in, and that if I did my requisitioning then bad things were going to happen to the people we were supposed to serve and protect. I also knew that once I got the item, if I didn't use it, a certain somebody in the budgeting office was going to seriously get on my case about that. "He must love you, as much as he calls you ...", Jones said to me, in that creepy forced fake parental thing he does when he isn't yelling at me ... in a forced, fake parental kind of way. Got only one father, Patrick, and you aren't him. You aren't half the man he is.

So, yeah, I was bent out of shape. I used the hammer - once - so now it's in a report and on the radar screen, and I've got no second use to justify it to the geek with the green visor. This week's going to suck, I'm thinking. And it sure did. I get bounced from one office to another by one stiff after another, each of them wanting to know why the cost of the hammer shouldn't come out of my paycheck. "Have you seen my paycheck?", I keep asking. Finally, I have to track down the union ombudsman - who really likes to drink, by the way - fighting my way past a small army of guys older and creepier than Pat Jones, all of them thinking that I must have badly needed to do the horizontal polka with them, because I was within a thousand feet of them as they chugged their Budweisers. Some took "no" for an answer. Some didn't, because that's the kind of sewer our man likes to swim through. End result: I had to arrest a bunch of them, after beating them down, filling out attempted sexual assault reports on each and getting court dates scheduled, before I stumbled into the right cesspool, and found our hero gulping his swill.

So, yeah, Pat, I kind of fell behind schedule on that gate fixing thing, and thanks a heap for not going to bat for me. Ever. A real dad would have done that, you patronising pile of ... but a lady doesn't say that.