Schießen Sie Das Glas

While looking out the window at the office today, I noticed a thick rope swaying in the breeze – I’m 6 stories up in a 17-story building – and my first thought was not of window washers, but of John McClane. Which reminded me of a story…

Doodleoodledoodoodleoodledoodoodleoodledoo…
The year is 1990. I am a senior in high school. Hazel, one of my best friends, and I are hanging around after school, bored. We’ve already tried, for the umpteenth time, to break into the Tower (the clock tower in the red brick building at the top center of this page). Then we get a genius idea! We are going to take over a corporate office, a la Hans Gruber in Die Hard. We decide on the offices of James, who is in my homeroom, and who runs his own computer software business in a small office building a block away from the school.

But first, we need weapons. We go to the advisor to the literary magazine, for which we both work, and ask him if he has any “implements of destruction.” “What are you going to do with them?” he asks. “Why, take over some corporate offices,” we reply. “Ooo, fun!” he responds, in an enthusiastic tone only heard in the pre-Columbine era of secondary education. He rifles through his desk drawers and comes up with a pair of scissors, all steel. “These look pretty sharp,” he says, We grab them and head out.

I don’t remember what we did to disguise ourselves; most likely it was nothing, as Hansie came to the party all decked out in a suit and tie. James is our Joseph Yoshinobu Takagi. We knock first then bust open the door and yell “This is a takeover” and then, in our best German accents, but in English, “Shoot the glass!” and then we try to say it in actual German. We also say “Schnell!” a lot, and wave the pair of scissors menacingly. James just stares at us, but then (naturally) gets all excited when we, a long-haired buxom blonde and a long-haired catlike brunette, announce we are going to tie him to his desk.

And tie him up we do. After which we untie him and switch into psychiatrist mode, having him lay on the sofa while we sit behind his desk and ask him how all of this made him “feel.”