one of the things i know i’ve said repeatedly that make it more fun to be the biotch is that here my alter ego is relatively well hidden in the shroud of cyber-anonymity. so imagine my suprise when i recieved a call on my (of course) unpublished mobile phone from a man who claimed to be a man in black. that’s right, a secret-agent-man. here’s what happened…

about six weeks ago the boyfriend and i visited a nearby coastal region. we were in the same smallish town for the bulk of the day. he and i, we are tourists at heart. whenever we are out and about, we take pictures. of birds, of trees, of streets and walkways, of signs… it was apparently that last one that came back to haunt me. it seems that someone that feels a little too self-important, because they happen to have a government job, happened to have noticed he and i wandering about taking photos. we apparently took one or more somewhere or of something that made this person think we were up to no good. he was so concerned about it, he immediately went right home and forgot about it for two weeks before he remembered he should tell his supervisor. now, how do i know this? did i see the self-important little jerk watching us mind our own business? no.

but according to 007, they knew it was me that they wanted, because they first got the license plate of the rental car i was in (a distinctive car), then got the rental car company to tell them who had it at the time, which then gave them my name and number (and no doubt address, date of birth, blood type and favourite colour). the thing that they wanted my help with was confirming the identity of my boyfriend, whom, it was observed, was with me but at the time of the alleged infractions of government homeland security guidelines. so of course i was skeptical. how did 007 presume to think that i might know who it was that was allegedly with me at the time?

and now this is the part of the story which i have to really tweak, because the fact of the matter is, 007 knew of a very, very distinct characteristic my boyfriend posesses, one that undoubtedly (if one has ever met him) reveals his identity. and since it is so revealing, i won’t tell you what it is, instead i’ll lie and say he knew i was with someone with a beautifully ornate and intricate komodo dragon tatoo down his right arm. which, for the sake of the story, i’ll say that yes, he does in fact have.

so needless to say, there was little room to doubt that what this man was saying was true, he was in fact 007 and knew who i was, so now therefore who the boyfriend is, and well, in the end, it’s not that we did anything wrong, per se, it’s just that apparently somewhere in the midst of the 500+ photos we took that day we were apparently facing the direction of some mildly-secretive government stuff that we shouldn’t have been (who knew?) and they just wanted to know what our intentions were with the photos.

for about .00059 of a second, i thought of being little-miss-sarcasm and telling him our plans were to sell the photos to the highest terrorist bidder, then use the money to take over the world!!!!! mmmmmuuuuhhhhhhaahahahhahahahaaaaa….. but i thought better of it. decided the truth was a safer path. told him i had no idea that we’d even taken a photo that could even remotely be construed as a threat to national security, and that quite frankly i wasn’t even sure we still had all the photos we took.

they say the truth will set you free, and well, i haven’t heard back from the man and he never even contacted my boyfriend. so i guess we’re in the clear.

oh, and the reason the self-important little government employee finally decided maybe he should say something two weeks later? apparently we weren’t the only hapless tourist who happen to be facing the wrong direction when we took our pictures that day. so was another couple. only they were of middle-eastern descent. cause you know that a) they must surely be terrorists, because they’re not from here, and b) because we had a camera and were also at the same place at the same time doing the same thing, we must, therefore, be also.

WHATever.

still and all – how wierd is that, a call out of the blue from the man?