We Got The Colonel

OK, here's the story-

In the fall of 2000, my company, Pogo.com, occupied three floors of an office building in downtown San Francisco. The 7th and 8th floors were completely filled but my floor, the 5th, had only about ten people, all in the Network Services (help desk and NT servers) and Network Operations (unix servers) groups. There was constant low-level grumbling about the fact that we were often neglected when refrigerators were restocked (these were the heady tech-bubble days of free soda for all). It wasn't like anyone was upset, but we did tend to make ha-ha-only-serious jokes about it.

One day my supervisor, Jose, suggested that we do something to attract attention to our cause. In the great tradition of liberation movements everywhere, we decided to take a hostage. The life-size Colonel was the prize decoration of the Design group and the obvious target. As we toyed with the idea, time passed and the annual Christmas charity fundraiser was announced. The company was divided up into teams of about ten each and whichever team raised the most money would get a free pizza lunch. As fate would have it our entire floor was exactly one team, so the kidnapping plot quickly evolved into a fundraiser.

After a couple of whole-floor planning meetings (we were the NS and Operations groups, so of course we were organized), my boss Jeff and I volunteered for the job of actually getting the colonel. He's done some nasty stuff and I have plenty of experience sneaking around, so we seemed the best choices for the job. Others arranged for a Yahoo mail account and we all made plans for how to collect the ransom (all for charity now, remember).

So around 11 on Friday night Jeff picked me up and we took his van to the office. We signed in with false names (even signed in as working for a different company in the building, which turned out to be a mistake) and headed up to the 7th floor, where we got the Colonel with no trouble. When we came back down to the lobby, though, the security guard stopped us. Just our luck to get the one guard who actually paid attention. He confronted us with the fact that we signed in as working for XYZ company but that he knew for a fact that the Colonel was from Pogo. Damn. Eventually we had to come clean with him and tell him it was a prank. He wrote down our names but, surprisingly, let us go.

From there it was a night on the town with the Colonel, as chronicled below. Come Monday there was much mystery and chaos, but we never did get the money. There is a happy ending, though- despite not getting the ransom our group still managed to raise more than twice as much as any other group so the pizza lunch was ours and the Colonel was eventually returned to a nice little closet on 7th.

Being beaten into submission.