Life Of Brian

2002

Twenty-seven years is a long time.  When you are that age, you don't see it as being that long.  At least I didn't.  This might be because of the fact that when you're young, time is irrelevant.  Young people don't think about how much time they have left.  Nor do they consider how much life is ahead of them in comparison to how much life they have lived already.  As you get older, this sort of thinking kicks in. Am I right?  At the age of 49, soon to be 50, my brain thinks about time differently.  Decades don't seem all that long anymore.  Heck, the last ten years have come and gone in what seems like half of that.  I am at the point in life where my kids are all adults, doing their own things, even living in different states.  I don't see them every day anymore and so, I'm thinking maybe time will slow back down a bit.  Is this wishful thinking?  In speaking with my father who is in his seventies, he claims life just keeps ticking by faster and faster the older you get.  If this is the case, now's the time to Carpe Diem.

   In the year 2002, I was going through the motions.  I had a young child to think about.  Sarah and I never talked about how many kids we'd like to have but we knew that number was more than one.  I worked for an employer that paid decently and more importantly, I really enjoyed my job.  Due to our little girl being born the need came about for me to work nights.  Lucky for me, Armored Transport had openings back on the night crew.  Night crew was not nearly as much fun as the day routes, but I was quickly learning the ways of a life that was not only about me.  I don't recall how long I worked the night trucks before a Night Supervisor position opened up.  I jumped on this opportunity and was promoted.  Knowing that I no longer had to ride in those loud bouncy tanks all the way to Los Angeles and back was comforting.  I was ready to man the office where I'd sit in a building while the crews went out and took care of transferring all that money to L.A. and back.  No more dealing with heavy cages full of money, or worse yet, working the coin truck! I also wasn't going to miss driving in L.A. traffic.  The thought of how much responsibility I had inherited didn't dawn on me.  In fact, it never seemed overwhelming.  I never considered that I was the one responsible for very large sums of money.  It was I who would make sure everything ran smoothly and that everything balanced at the end of the night.  This wasn't like balancing a register at Mc Donalds.  I was responsible for millions upon millions of dollars all making it to its correct destination.  I'd have safe combos and alarm codes to the building.  The crew that worked under me was very knowledgeable.  The night supervisor before me would work routinely until two in the morning on a Friday night.  With the help of my crew, which was pretty much the same crew he had working for him, I was able to reduce Friday night hours down significantly.  Instead of two or three a.m. we'd end the night around midnight, one a.m. at the latest.  When I saw that nightshift was working hard and we achieved much better hours on Friday nights, I would reward my crew with pizza.  This absolutely helped morale and made everyone a solid team working their best to get things done.  Not sitting on my butt in the office and actually working alongside them also helped.  Another area I excelled was with our mass amounts of paperwork involved with transferring so much money.  Actually, this is sort of my OCD.  I like things for the most part to be orderly and tidy.  Paperwork that was shuffled together made it hard to go back and access it for data needed in the event of any discrepancies.  Organizing that paperwork was actually fun in my mind and it helped pass the time while the crews were away.  The branch manager would commend me for this in the future as it made his job all that much easier when he needed to look for something.  My one regret would be leaving day shift and my partner Dave.  Night shifts were nowhere near as exciting or as fun as day shifts were.   

Day shifts were the land of mischief.  There were jokes abound being carried out, and possibly a little bit of rivalry between the ten different routes.  There were definitely some guys who were leadmen of their own routes that I did not necessarily get along with.  This was definitely not the case with Dave.  We used to love eating at this hole in the wall Chinese place in Fillmore.  New China Wok was the name, and they dished out some fine Chinese food for very cheap prices.  One of the chefs in there wore one of those big ol white cook hats.  The thing must have towered above his head a good two feet and most of the time, it remained on his head.  One particular day while I was purchasing food for us, Mr. chef took this beautiful hat off.  When he did so I could plainly see the very top of it and noticed that there was a big ol grease stain and a hole.  I relayed this info to Dave and Mr. chef instantly earned the nickname of "Ol Greazzy Hat".  We both agreed that this was the reason for the absolutely tasty food coming out of his kitchen.  New China Wok is still in business to this day.  If you're ever in Fillmore, you should give it a try. 

 At some point we started carrying handheld radios.  This was helpful and we loved having them, but it also created the potential for embarrassment and shenanigans!  While walking into K-Mart one afternoon with a heavy bag of coin and money on my left shoulder, my partner Dave decided he'd have some fun at my expense.  It was necessary to have the volume up pretty loud on the two-way radios.  Our radios had a hand mic attached in which we'd run the cord behind our back and clip it on to a strap at the top of our uniform shirts.  This way, with our gun hand we could reach up and depress the mic switch and communicate very easily.  On this day the front of K-Mart was fairly busy.  As soon as I cleared the front doors, I heard the radio key up.  What came out of the speaker of my radio at almost full volume was an extremely loud fart sound.  I scrambled to key up my mic to end this obvious sound as quickly as I could, but the damage had been done. Heads turned; customers chuckled.  All I could do was speed up my walk and accept it.  A quick glance back at the truck out front I saw Dave, with a huge grin on his face.  He was very happy with himself.  There was no way I'd let this go without sweet revenge.  In a separate instance, another crew decided it would be funny to take a ring of our keys out of our truck and let us drive off without them.  As my partner and I drove off, this other crew decided it was maybe a little too cruel of a joke and radioed us to check our keys.  They knew we'd be pissed if we'd gotten all the way up to Santa Barbara without those keys and it would have cost the company extra pay.  We were still a bit perturbed and so I found a way to key up their mic for their intercom that was attached to a very loud speaker outside of the truck.  I cranked the volume up to max and we could hear them talking inside of their truck while still parked inside the bay of our building.  These speakers were used to talk to people outside of our vehicles in case they were blocking us or whatever else we could think of.   They too could hear themselves and began fiddling with their intercom trying to figure out why the heck it was keying up on its own.  All I had done was shove a little piece of a paper tag into the mic switch to make it stick open.  I had hopes that this would go unnoticed, and they'd go the entire day emitting their conversations out to the public.  After a good fifteen minutes the lead man finally found the paper and removed it.  At least I had slowed them down a bit.  A fair retaliation for taking our keys and a lesson that if they messed with us, there'd be consequences!

Many of my stories at Armored Transport relate to K-Mart I am now noticing.  Kinda strange.  One of the best is as follows.  K-Mart was a mid-day pick up on our route.  On this particular day I happened to be the hopper.  As we pulled up to the K-Mart there was a van parked directly in front of the store with its hazard lights flashing.  This was not normal.  Not only had we never seen a vehicle parked there, but there appeared to be someone sitting in the driver's seat. As I got out of the hopper door and was leaning back to pull the heavy bag of coin and money onto my back, Dave began shouting out "Gun, Gun, Gun!"  My brain was hearing him say this, but it did not immediately register.  In what was probably only seconds, I realized the severity of his words and very quickly jumped back into the truck to see what the heck was going on!  Dave told me that the guy sitting in front of the van was handling a pistol of some sort and he saw him pointing it toward the front of the store as I was about to walk in with K-Marts deposit.  HOLY CRAP!  This was serious!  With both of us safely in the truck we pulled up next to this van and sure enough there was a male Hispanic in the driver's seat holding a black semi-automatic handgun and he was pulling back the slide like he was racking a round into the chamber.  His back was to us, and he was facing the front of the store.  We immediately backed the truck away and called our main office.  After describing what we saw, our manager called Santa Paula P.D.  Our manager told us to keep an eye on the van from a safe distance.  We did just that.  Within five or six minutes we could hear, from inside our truck, the sound of car motors revving like they were on a racetrack.  This sound was the sound of Santa Paula P.D.'s finest responding to our location at what sounded like 150 miles per hour!  Three units screamed into the parking lot.  They triangulated the parked van.  Officers flung their doors open and pointed their shotguns and AR-15's towards the van.  One officer got on his intercom and began barking orders at the male inside the van.  Very slowly the driver's side door of the van opened up.  Following instructions to the T by the officers, a young-looking Hispanic male exited the van with his hands high up in the air.  The police ordered him to lay on his stomach, he did just that.  Two officers approached the subject, one keeping his rifle pointed at the van, the other reaching down to put the suspect in cuffs.  The officers picked up the male suspect and placed him in one of the squad cars.  Another officer pulled the handgun out of the van and was inspecting it.  Once the scene was under control, the officer that had cleared the handgun from the van came up to us and showed us that it was in fact a toy gun.  On the very tip of this fake gun was a little orange ring painted on the end of the barrel.  We never saw that end of the gun.  The officer commended us for calling it the way we did because this fake gun did indeed have a working slide and without seeing the orange tip of the barrel, it totally passed as a working real gun.  The male who was playing with it in the front seat turned out to be thirteen years of age.  Boy did he end up having an exciting day.  His mother was inside K-Mart returning something and she and everybody else inside K-Mart was ushered to the back of the store just in case a shootout occurred with this subject inside the van.  She did not know that her poor son was being prone out on the hot pavement with very large guns pointed at him!  We felt a tad bit of remorse for this, but you cannot take any chances when it's your safety on the line.  Hopefully this kid also learned a very valuable lesson that day.  He also probably needed a new pair of skivvies when he got home.  Santa Paula P.D. was awesome with their response, they did not mess around.  This would be the most stressful situation I ever encountered, even though really it was not that stressful for us.  We knew our truck would stop any type of handgun rounds and we were never in danger once we were both back inside.  At that time in my life, I was not one to think about the 'what if's' should I have continued walking into the K-Mart and had this guy start shooting at me.  There were many times where I definitely felt uneasy and could have very easily been shot during my nine years with Armored Transport.  Carrying money into Walmart in Oxnard after everyone had gotten out of church was always a blast.    Walking through a crowd of people with lots of money on your shoulder was never fun.  I'd more often than not have my gun out so that if needed, I could just start shooting, no hesitation.

  

Two thousand and two would be my last year with Upper Ojai's Search and Rescue team.  Most call outs were during night hours and I of course now worked nights.  One of the last call outs I would participate in was for lost hikers on Mt. Pinos.  This was in the winter months and there was about two feet of snow up on the mountain.  A man and a woman had gone hiking and did not return when they said they would, so a search began.  Hwy 33 must have been closed, or maybe our Sheriff liaison thought taking I-5 was faster.   Leaving from Ojai in our personal vehicle's, the deputy told us to follow him and to make sure not to trail back too far.  He would vouch for us if anyone got pulled over for speeding.  Boy did we drive fast too!  I think we flew through the city of Fillmore on the 126 at seventy miles an hour.  With the deputy in his black and white leading us, we pushed the petal to the metal and did our best to keep up.  In the back of my mind, I was thinking the last guy in line, there were six of us, would probably be the one to get nailed by local LE.  If our deputy escort was so far ahead, I imagined the speeding ticket would have to be sorted out later.  Luckily, I was number three in line, and it was an absolute blast flying out to Mt. Pinos with our get out of jail free deputy leading the way.   Nobody ended up getting pulled over.  As for the call out, it was a miserable one.  The temps were in the thirties, it was foggy up on the mountain, and as I mentioned, about two feet of snow was on the ground at the parking lot of the trailhead.  We were all wearing blue jeans, these were standard uniform for us along with our Sheriffs SAR long sleaved collared shirts.  We headed out from the trailhead splitting up into five-man teams.  We very quicky discovered that we'd be post holing our way through the snow looking for these hikers.  After two hours of searching, another team found them in a ravine.  They had decided to hike off trail and were hunkered down in this ravine to try and stay warm.  Luckily, we found them before severe hypothermia set in.  They could have died up on that mountain very easily that night.  Good reason to ALWAYS let someone know where you are going, and when you are expecting to return. With news of their rescue, all we had to do was walk out back to our vehicles.  I was absolutely freezing by this point in my wet jeans.  Lucky for us there was a snowcat being used and it came to us and gave us a ride.  We crammed in the back like sardines, and we were very thankful.

The last call out for SAR that I will write about happened during daylight hours.  The VCSO had info that a runaway female in her early twenties could have possibly been killed by a skin head gang.  The gang supposedly was bragging amongst others that they had killed this girl and dumped her body over the side of the road somewhere around Pine Mountain off of Hwy 33.  They didn't have exact locations, and this area is about ten miles in length.  This was the perfect job for Search and Rescue.  We'd break off in teams and take sections of the highway.  We'd pick a spot where something could have been tossed over the side and walked down each of these drainages.  Reports were that the gang had chopped this poor girl up, tossed her in a Rubbermaid trashcan, filled the trashcan with concrete, and then dumped the human filled can over the side of Hwy 33.  The team that I was in was lucky enough to find the Rubbermaid trashcan within ten minutes after descending a very steep ravine.  The skin heads hadn't used concrete, they used plaster of paris and it proved to be too weak for the job at hand.  It completely broke apart as the can tumbled down the ravine.  There were various body parts, all now skeletal remains, laying in the ravine somewhat around the trashcan.  One key body part was missing, however.  About 60 yards further down the drainage, we found this missing body part.  I've seen human skulls in museums before, those of course are behind glass and all the tissues are completely gone leaving no apparent smell I would imagine.  This was not the case in the Ravine Museum we were all now looking at.  The outside looked like a skeleton, but the inside was not completely decomposed.  Chock this search up as another one in the grim category.  I felt bad for the parents and at the same time was happy that we had found her.  One to provide closure for the family, and two to provide evidence to hopefully prosecute those that had committed this heinous crime.  Having found what we were looking for, we then had to wait for the Detectives to come down and bag up the evidence.  The inmates at the honor farm in Ojai had graciously provided us with a sack lunch for the day.  It consisted of a fruit drink, a cookie, and a ham and cheese sandwich.  It was now lunch time and so with no dis respect for the deceased, we all sat in the shade of the ravine with this skeleton, and we ate our ham and cheese sandwiches.  If you didn't have the ability to find humor in many things, or didn't have the stomach to witness very grim circumstances, you didn't belong on the SAR team.  It just was what it was.  After all the official business was taken care of, we'd continue hiking down this drainage and meet up on a trail at the bottom in which we'd follow back to Hwy 33 further down the mountain.  From here we were picked up in the county helicopter and flown back to Ojai.  That was the last helicopter ride I'd ever take with Search and Rescue. 

Home prices in the year 2002 averaged around $226,700.00.  This means that in 27 years, homes went up in cost by just under two hundred thousand dollars!  In 75 if you recall, home prices averaged $38,100.00!  Minimum wages in 02 were $6.75 per hour.  In 1975 those wages were at $2.10 an hour.  While home prices quadrupled, wages nearly tripled in those 27 years.  Now, in 2025, in southern California, homes average $800,000.00 and the minimum wage is at $16.50, I think.  Gasoline cost on average $1.45 a gallon in 02.  Still far better than the $4.50 and above per gallon we are paying now.  But that's just in Ca.  In states like Tennessee, gas prices aren't that far off of 2002 pricing.  Gas averages about $2.20 a gallon in most of the state of Tennessee. 

Movies in 2002 included We Were Soldiers with Mel Gibson, John Q, with Denzel Washington, and Insomnia with Al Pacino and Robin Williams.  

Songs at the top of the charts included "Still Fly" by Big Tymers, "Nothin" by N.O.R.E, "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne, and "Soak Up the Sun" by Sheryl Crow.  

The year 2002 was yet another good year.  Our daughter was healthy and happy.  My parents also healthy and happy.  My oldest sister was also the proud parent of a healthy little boy.  Vicki, where were you living at in 2002?  I cannot remember.  While some things were coming to an end in my life, others were just beginning.  Sarah was doing well at UCSB and working toward graduating.  My work was satisfying and allowed us to afford rent and food and all of those things.  We were not wealthy by any means unless you count happiness into that equation.  If so, we were rich.  Sarah's mom and dad were also doing well.  I think her dad may have left Interstate and began working for Walmart trucking.  He has a really good story about eating a knuckle sandwich somewhere along the Hwy out near Barstow.  We loved to spend a week camping in the summers at Sequoia Natl Park.  I forgot to mention in 2001 when our daughter was born, we took her camping with us up to Kings Canyon Natl. Park.  She was less than a year old and we went up there in September.  Yep, we were up there when the attacks happened on Sept. 11th.  We had no radio, nor T.V. so we had no idea what had happened.  The 11th was the day we were leaving to go back home, and we began hearing park employees talking about the Pentagon being bombed.  As soon as we were down the mountain a little way, the only thing on the radio was news of the attacks.  Sarah and I didn't know what to think.  All planes had been grounded, the skies were clear as could be.  We were worried about traffic and took all the back roads home from the Sequoia's.  We would not see video of those tragic airplane scenes until we got home that evening.  It was surreal for sure.

"Here's what I've learned:  that someone can change the course of history with a box cutter."

- Carrie Fisher 2002