Finally, a thread about luggage. I just got a new bag that looks like a regular duffle/suitcase, but has hidden straps so you can carry it as a backpack.
I got this backpack last year, and it's been great. I had a work backpack before this one, and I always felt slightly teenager about this, but somehow this one allows me to feel like a grown up. Also it holds a lot, and I like the wire frame opening at the top.
I don't find pre-processing potential trauma to be personally useful at all, but preparing for potential evacuation isn't doing that in my mind. It's the equivalent of making sure you have food in the house if a snowstorm is expected. Packing a go-bag is not super time consuming or expensive, and will make your life better if there is a natural disaster. It also allows aid to focus on the people who COULDN'T prepare instead of the ones who didn't bother. So I see it as a no-brainer, like having a flashlight in the house.
I still feel childish carrying a backpack unless I'm actually hiking. Because in 1989, it was illegal to wear a backpack with both straps.
Because in 1989, it was illegal to wear a backpack with both straps.
This is so true. Fortunately I was in 7th grade at peak one-strap, and by high school it became an edgy rejection of 80s norms to wear it on both straps again, which is really far more comfortable if it's heavy.
I'm mildly obsessive about bags as I'm always looking for the goldilocks bag that's just right, and everything is either too heavy or has uncomfortable straps. However, we have a couple of these in two sizes, which are perfect for holiday luggage and camping:
and a couple of packable (they fold up to near pocketable size) waterproof bags from Matador:
https://matadorequipment.uk/products/refraction-packable-duffle-1?variant=49828924784975
https://matadorequipment.uk/products/freerain22
In terms of Go bags, it's never occurred to me that I need one. Natural disasters are not common in London, and I live in a small apartment, I could grab a couple of changes of clothes, and passports/wallet in literally 2 minutes.
To 3, it's a fair point that there's a difference between the practicalities of a go-bag and pre-processing hypothetical trauma.
But it starts to get gray very quickly - do you stick to canned food and aluminum blankets, people and pets, or do you start to think about which family photos you'd grab? As soon as you get beyond the bounds of survival, it gets emotional.
I really can't think of a plausible disaster where a go bag would be helpful for me. If I need to leave home, I'm on foot or on the subway: circumstances where either of those are a useful means of flight, I've got ten minutes to grab a warm coat and a toothbrush.
Or, looking upthread, what ttaM said.
I feel like I'd need some things for pets, but it's hard to imagine needing canned goods and a flashlight and an aluminum blanket.
I guess meds. It'd be good to have everyone's medications.
To Ttam and LB then, do you think through which sentimental items you'd grab?
I guess that's the part I'm really stuck on: do I need to get less emotional about stuff? Yes, probably yes. But some of it is so damn sentimental!
One thing that COVID did bring home for me is the desirability of having some basic supplies at home so that we have enough dried or tinned food for a few days. When "lockdown" kicked off in the UK, I was at work in the UK National Archives, and when I got to the nearest supermarket, which was only 2 or 3 minutes walk away, it was literally emptied. Like it had been looted. We didn't have much in the house, as we just weren't in the habit of buying in large quantities as we don't have the space to keep it, or a big freezer.
So, there's probably no utility in having a go-bag, but it probably wouldn't hurt to keep more dried and tinned food in the house than we actually do.
I can also put my hands on a tent (sitting under my desk in the bedroom), sleeping bags, and basic tools, knives and flashlights, all within 5 minutes, too. So a go-bag would basically just be sticking things all in a slightly less convenient and more annoying place, for the sake of saving 5 minutes of packing time.
re: 14
My son has a stuffed dog I know he'd want. There's a single small photo album that I'd grab. Most of our photos are scanned and both "in the cloud" and on a convenient hard drive (and I know where that is).
Other than that, I can't think of anything that has deep sentimental value. Lots of things I'd miss but could buy again, but very few things that are genuinely irreplaceable. I've moved around the UK a fair bit, and my wife emigrated from the Czech Republic with a (literal) small backpack of belongings, so we don't have a lot of important stuff. Even when I think about baby things of my son's, most of those have been given to other people as hand-me-downs or donated.
There are different kinds of go-bags. Having meds, water, and practical clothes and shoes on hand is useful even if you are having to stay in a shelter down the block due to a widespread power outage which makes travel difficult and your dumbass neighbor made your building too smoky to stay in by setting their curtains on fire with a candle. A few days of food and water is good if you are evacuating by car and trapped in traffic. Camping supplies are useful for some disasters, but a smaller range of them.
A lot of people who lost their homes in the Eaton fire had no time to pack at all; they were woken up by the police ordering them on loudspeaker to get out immediately, and by then the fire was basically tearing down the street. A friend of mine who lost her home in the Palisades fire was out of town at the time, and was most torn up about losing her dog's cremains.
I don't have any kind of go bag ready -- the things we would most need to take with us (glasses, medications, M's asthma inhaler) are the things we use regularly in every day life, so it makes no sense to pack them up. Do I have sentimental items I would absolutely need to save? It would be too hard to decide which ones.
I just had an awful thought while I was writing this. When I was over at my parents' house last Sunday I saw that my mom had packed up all of our childhood photo albums. I didn't think much of it at the time, but she couldn't have been preparing to throw them out? Surely not, right?
Are we talking about something politically-based to run away from? Or natural disasters?
Having been through a catastrophic divorce in which I lost so many things, and a move overseas in which I had to cull so many things I find it easy to walk away with very little and start again. There's certainly stuff I miss: a largish and growing DVD/Blu Ray collection, my movie posters that I started collecting just to decorate the place (I'm not buying it if I can't put it on a wall and my walls, at least in the living room, hallway and kitchen are full), and some that have additional sentimental value: some photographs, my uncle's late 19th century roll top desk that was willed to me, my 1965 (or is it 1968) Gibson SG, but I could walk away from those if I had to, other than the photos and desk they are replaceable.
I have an earthquake emergency bag. Flashlight, radio, canned food, water, etc. I bought it online fully packed & stuck it in the closet nearest the door.
Being in the Bay, one knows intellectually the Big One could come at any moment, but that fear peters out quickly because the risk is so constant, nothing making it much more or less salient. (It's all we need for it to happen this presidential term, of course.)
When I was over at my parents' house last Sunday I saw that my mom had packed up all of our childhood photo albums. I didn't think much of it at the time, but she couldn't have been preparing to throw them out? Surely not, right?
I mean, most people's mothers: of course not!! But your specific mom? eek.
I wouldn't be able to find the go bag in an emergency, so what's the point.
I do keep a go bag here in case I have to leave in a jiffy do to the geopolitical situation, basically a change of clothes, some cash in various denominations, an inhaler, and the like, I'd just grab my passport and go.
21. That won't start an earthquake.
I wouldn't be able to find the go bag in an emergency, so what's the point.
oh god, this is the truest thing in this whole thread.
As we like to say, "And that's ADD culture!"
20.last s/b other than the photos, the desk , and the SG, they are irreplaceable. (Shout out to lk)
When people ask maybe-thought-provoking-or-maybe-just-fun hypotheticals like "what would you do in the event of a nuclear war or zombie apocalypse?" I have the luxury of ignoring the question if I want to because of where I live, like LB and ttaM. There are some imaginable disasters where I'd be dead literally before I realized it, and others where I'd survive the initial crisis but "just" be stuck in a war zone or worse with no warning. I can't escape due to gridlock and can't store more than a few days of supplies due to a small living space. Therefore there's no point in worrying about it. It's liberating.
However, I realize recent events mean we should be more concerned about different kids of disasters. We've had some discussion in recent weeks about what to do if it gets bad quickly and it's all contingent on details. As in, does Cassandane still have her job? Do I still have mine? Is Atossa's school open, since it has a high risk of ICE raids?
For a literal "go bag," packing bags would be the easy part. Changes of clothes for everyone, toiletry bags are mostly already packed because it's easier to have separate stuff for travel and for daily use, etc. The computers are the most essential things to have some semblance of daily life in another place and they're all laptops or tablets. As a bonus, a lot of our hobbies and mementos are digital anyway. As for a destination, if the roads are clear, my parent's house in Vermont is a relatively easy day's drive away. We really have no plan if we need to physically leave and the roads aren't clear, though.
My house has bars on the windows because 20 years ago the neighborhood was not so great, so in the event of a zombie apocalypse or other slowish societal breakdown, I do have one or two advantages.
The thing about finding things is you have to re-derive it from scratch. So what I could find is a Google Sheets spreadsheet on what to pack in an emergency, because I'd be able to follow this exact reasoning in an emergency, and I'd name it something obvious to me. So then the question is: would I get around to creating the carefully named go-bag spreadsheet? It's highly likely I'd at least create the document, and leave it blank for me to find in a crisis!
We did have to flee for a flood, back in 2015. Our street had about 4 ft of water, and our house was 4' off the ground, and so all the stuff we left behind was ok. For a few years, I fretted about leaving stuff on the floor. Then we lifted the house another 4' and now I don't fret about it, and all the intense feelings fade with time anyway.
14: I'm not sentimental about stuff at all -- in a real emergency, there's nothing I'd think twice about abandoning. Also, I'd open a couple of cans of cat food, but in the kind of emergency where I was fleeing home on foot, I would not be carrying two ten-pound cats in carriers. But I don't actually like my cats, they're jerks.
That's the thing that's so tricky about acquiring cats: a good cat is so great, and a bad cat is so irritating.
I would use AI to find my AlphaGo bag, full of masculinity.
I think maybe this is my new year's resolution: to get introspective about my relationship to my stuff.
I'm midway through trying to brainwash myself about decluttering by listening to decluttering podcasts. It's kind of working? At first I found them very stressful to listen to, and now I'm kind of getting used to the language and ways of thinking. I think it is making me think more detachedly about my belongings.
Anyway, getting less sentimental about belongings in general goes hand-in-hand with the decluttering thing. And maybe even makes it easier to find the go-bag in the actual crisis!
I don't actually have go-bags ready. The stuff I'd need is the stuff I want handy on a daily basis, and my kid is still growing so his stuff would take regular maintenance. But contra you guys, I can think of several disasters that are likely that I would need one for.
Earthquake: Ten seconds warning if we're not at the epicenter. But I wouldn't get that time since I don't have that kind of phone.
Flood: 40 minutes warning if Folsom breaks. My plan is to try to get to the top of a parking garage but not try to bring anything. If Oroville breaks, we've got two days before the water reaches us. I did pack up and select a destination when Oroville was threatened, but that was before I knew it'd take two days for the water to get here. (Marysville and Yuba City, on the other hand would be obliterated shortly after the dam breaks.)
Fire: Variable warning but I'm not at a wildland interface. Maybe go to the new ADU, since it has sprinklers?
In all cases, we're evacuating by bike, not car.
Like Bluefish says, the point of a go bag is partially to save important things but more to be less of a burden on emergency services afterwards.
Disasters (esp. ones FEMA deliberately slow-walks aid on) are one thing, but I don't think people without non-citizens in their immediate family have much reason to worry about personal raids, if that was ever the implication. Even then, fleeing on the short notice implied by a go-bag wouldn't boot one much. (Fleeing in advance of raids, maybe)
Like, in the Spanish Civil War there were town-by-town massacres of people rounded up based on as little as the contemporary equivalent of posting "socialism good maybe?" online, but I don't think we're close to that, as bad as things are.
I wondered in Trump I if there would be raids to find marijuana in the homes of political enemies - don't think that ever happened.
My best suggestion for "where did I put that thing?" is stolen from a summer program I used to work for, and it's to have a drawer labelled "someplace safe." Whenever you find yourself thinking "I need to put this someplace safe" you put it in that drawer. But it only works if that's something you don't think too often.
A go bag is obviously too big for that drawer, in principal you could put a note saying where to find the bag someplace safe, but that's starting to go too far in the direction of the drawer getting full and useless.
The actual solution here, now that I've thought about it while writing this comment, is to put an airtag in the "go bag" named "go bag." Then at least you can make it beep.
37
Like, in the Spanish Civil War there were town-by-town massacres of people rounded up based on as little as the contemporary equivalent of posting "socialism good maybe?" online, but I don't think we're close to that, as bad as things are.
I'd agree that that's not likely in the next, say, year. But I think it's more likely than it used to be, and I wouldn't make any predictions further out than a year.
Actual raids aside, it's worth worrying about disasters caused/exacerbated by mismanagement, like 37.1 alluded to, or another pandemic. I'm sure we as a society will be even less prepared for the next one rather than more, now that vaccination is a partisan issue. As much as I'd ignore literal go bags because of the living situation, this thread is making me plan to keep more bottled water and nonperishable food around.
Yeah. We're prepared to spend a couple of weeks at home with no power. Or at least one week.
When cleaning the environment, remember to wet mop instead of dry sweep.
Avoid inhaling dust or contact with rodent excrement🐭
Stay away from Hantavirus and welcome the New Year with peace of mind~🧨
I don't have a go bag but I have packed a go bag before. It's not hard to find because it's the bag lying on the floor that I just packed, and after the high-risk period passes it will function as a closet or dresser until it's empty again. And then maybe stay on the floor a few more days.
In other words, I'm not really prepared for an earthquake but I do prepare for the types of disasters where you might have some time to pack a go bag. But I didn't pack one for the current fire danger period because I don't think my neighborhood is at risk.
My parents, on the other hand, really should at least have important documents in one place but those have kind of drifted and I need to get them together again. We're not worried about raids but we are going to make sure that we know where to find my mom's naturalization papers.
Go bags etc really have to be situationally dependent. Is it something you grab because you have five minutes to get out of the house, but you're moving to an established shelter for a few days - basically the LA fires scenario? In that case it's valuable documents, medication, and washing/shaving kit. Or is it something that you can put in your car and live out of for 48 hours? In which case it's sleeping bags, food, water etc. Is it something you grab because you have a day to get out of your protofascist home country? In that case it's going to be more about moving your assets overseas and so on.
We aren't immune to natural disasters - flooding, notoriously - but "shelter in place" is pretty much always going to be my preferred option. We have stored food and water. We have multiply redundant lighting with plenty of spare batteries. We have multiply redundant heating and cooking (oil, gas, electric, several camping stoves, multifuel/wood stove) so we can survive losing every utility for several days. Wildfires are not really a risk, nor are earthquakes or volcanoes, and a flood high enough to intrude on our living space rather than the flood-resilient cellar is hydrologically extremely unlikely (it would be approximately twice as high and eight times the flow rate of the highest flood in history).
A great cat is both twice as high *and* eight times the flow rate of the highest flood in history.
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in the midst of all this horrendousness, i just took a moment to do something that felt even better than calling my senators' offices. i bought mariann adgar budde's book. i'm not a christian, but she seems like someone who may have something interesting or even useful to say about courage. you too can give yourself this moment of positive action, & all together could just maybe turn her into a bestselling author. a ling shot i know, but there is at least one person who would very much not like that (petty of me, i know).
& there's always your local library, if you can't afford to buy her book - you can request they buy it if they don't already have it in their collection.
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Because I'm bad with names and had to google, Budde is the bishop who made Trump angry by exhorting him to mercy from the pulpit.
thanks lb!
47 was me with my typical poor phone typing.
title of her book is how we learn to be brave, decisive moments in life & faith.
We could be evacuated for wildfire. I'd load up a car, not just take a bag. Guess I'd do the same if it suddenly seemed necessary to be in Canada.
I don't think people without non-citizens in their immediate family have much reason to worry about personal raids, if that was ever the implication
I'm not worried about raids from the government, per se. Local second amendment enthusiasts, on the other hand....
I've never done a go-bag; my daily use backpack (which is mostly for shuttling my work laptop back and forth to the office) has a few things and would be a good start in most situations.
I have, however, started to get paranoid about making sure the car has enough gas to Get Away, in an amorphous sense, and I refill it whenever I notice it below about 3/4 full.
On the home front I have invested more in being able to shelter in place, and just picked up what amounts to Emotional Support Supplies last weekend: a 25lb rice sack and a couple of gallons of cooking oil. (There is already quite a bit of stored food and water)
I stocked up on toilet paper right before the pandemic hit and that was a Good Call (TM).
I spend a few minutes every day preparing myself mentally for the possiblity that something horrible will happen that will destroy me and/or all the people and things I love. I don't make any tangible preparations, because I assume the calamity will be something I'm not expecting.
Someone once told me that if your gas tank is too empty, in really cold weather, moisture can condense out of the air in the tank and freeze in the fuel line. It seems plausible, so I usually keep the tank full in winter.
21: My recurring thoughts about the earthquake:
- I have shoes under the bed for protection against broken glass
- A big earthquake seems like it would cause so much noise: things in your house hitting the floor, other things beyond the house falling apart
- I got a tip that water supplies will seriously lag: expect to need extra supplies for 3 weeks while the utility recovers
- Garage door damage > trapped car > oh well
- Another tip: wheeled garbage bins can be filled with supplies and rolled. This led to me buying a wheeled bin and filling it with camping supplies. Contractors who visited the house asked if they could maybe have one or two of the nice camping supplies we were apparently throwing out? Finally someone unknown to me liberated a sleeping bag and took it up the hill to sleep behind the church for a while, and I moved the bin to a safer (but more annoyingly upstairs) location. I just couldn't bring myself to take the sleeping bag back and wash it. I guess that's where my purity complex kicks in.
- The earthquake could hit in the middle of the night, in the middle of an atmospheric river storm. Every month or so, I renew my commitment to dealing with that shit if it happens, but boy I'm going to hate it.
I have bunches of camping supplies. I just bought a used MSR Windburner because I'm thinking of switching to canister stoves.
When we actually had to evacuate at a few minutes' notice with the fire brigade banging on the door, we filled a rucksack with a lever arch file containing documents, passports, 2 laptops, various battery chargers, notebooks, a roll-up wash kit, change of undies for both parties.
55: The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears, and swords. Being carried away by surging waves. Being thrown into the midst of a great fire. Being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake. Falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease, or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day, without fail, one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai.
59 last: We had to evacuate once and nobody even told us about the parties.
When we fled to avoid an invading Russian army, we had a night's notice, so we filled the car with the important documents, clothes and some toys. Fortunately, most of our stuff had not arrived in Georgia at that point, but still, it was pack as if you might not ever come back. Again fortunately, the Russians decided that ruling Georgia was more trouble than it was worth. This is the historically correct position, but relatively few potential conquerors have come to that conclusion.
Anyway, we should have had go bags when we lived in Tbilisi because it's earthquake country but we didn't. I only noticed two earthquakes in the 3.5 years we lived there, but man that is some weird stuff. I don't know how Californaians get used to them. A hurricane is more my style of natural disaster.
I've never had to avoid an invading Russian army, but I did once get into a shouting match with a Russia guy who didn't like where I parked my car.
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A Complete Unknown is about two orders of magnitude better than I was expecting.
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How can you expect anything about a complete unknown?
When we fled to avoid an invading Russian army, we had a night's notice, so we filled the car with the important documents, clothes and some toys.
Whoa. When was this?!
67: Invasion of Georgia, 2008. There's probably comments from me in the Unfogged archives. We had arrived from Munich two weeks previous. The kids were four, two and six months; we told them we were going on vacation.
Escalation started on a Friday, got really serious on Saturday, we left for Armenia early Sunday morning. That took us in exactly the opposite direction from the Russians. The border crossing was busy but not panicked.
We got to Yerevan early enough to snag a room in a hotel with a swimming pool, so maybe it did seem like vacation to the kids. Still, would not recommend.
65: Who is this? It doesn't sound like me, but it's more or less how I felt about it. I guess I was just surprised that I really enjoyed it I expected to be cringing the whole time, and getting all stupidly indignant, "That's wrong! Bob Dylan wrote Song to Woody after he met him!" The movie wasn't particularly historically accurate, but it didn't bother me much.
There's probably comments from me in the Unfogged archives.
Nope. Apparently I was busy when the one Unfogged post on the subject came up.
Anyway, the two weeks in the archives featured a post from LizardBreath calling for federal mandates about voting machine security to stave off accusations of electoral fraud, and a post about Obama naming Biden as his running mate that drew more than 200 comments.
The past isn't even past.
Whoa, that's a wild story! I'm sure you've mentioned it, but at some point my memory became swiss cheese.
So the Sunday we were going to flee, my better half was up very early (like 5am or even earlier) hears some loud booms and thinks, hmm, that's early for construction to start, even in Georgia. But no, that was Tbilisi's military airport getting bombed.
Anyway, we get to the border and I talk to a friend from the US embassy about how it looks there. Only later do I realize that I'm probably the only American at that particular location and for a brief moment was the eyes and ears of the US government.
My better half was leading a German foundation in the Caucasus, so we took the organization's car. We were in a caravan with another German-American diplomatic family with small kids; the German mom stayed at the embassy in Tbilisi. Our group also included the head of another German foundation and his friend who had come to visit him as vacation. At the border, we were met by a representative of the German embassy in Armenia, which was a very nice gesture.
Anyway, after a good lunch at a hotel on the Armenian side (built by diaspora Armenians and pretty posh), our car wouldn't start. We try a bunch of stuff but no dice. So the embassy German works his contacts to get a mechanic to drive to where we are. That's going to take a good long while, so I decide to stay with the car and we put our other people plus our stuff into the embassy car and everyone else can continue on to Yerevan. Mechanic turns up, no dice; checks all kinds of stuff, like even taking up carpet to get to wires, no luck at all. The only thing to be done is to tow our vehicle to his workshop in Vanadzor, an hour or so away over the mountains.
Well, the thing is there are no tow trucks in Armenia. So the solution was to get a big SUV to pull us. With a rope. Our car would stay in neutral, the mechanic would steer and brake. Think West Virginia roads, twisty, not very well maintained, no guardrails, deep drops into mountain valleys. The tow rope made an unforgettable sound when it broke.
65 was me. I wasn't expecting to be cringing or nitpicking because I don't know enough to care. I expected to be basically indifferent, but instead actively enjoyed it. I think the movie loves music and its characters love music, and it just lets that shine.
74: Is the last sentence a literal cliffhanger?
Doug has plot armor, but I'm deeply invested in this mechanic character.
Armenian mechanics in Lebanon are legendary
75: Yes, of course, you were coming at it from the opposite perspective, but we wound up feeling more or less the same.
I, too, want to hear the end of this story!
Meanwhile, you all are making me feel less guilty for not having a go bag packed. I do have my emergency kit in the trunk of my SUV (I ended up getting a one-year-old Honda CRV hybrid), and it has starter cables + battery, an air compressor, various first aid supplies, toilet paper, a water filter straw, plastic ponchos, those weird foil heat-retaining blankets, hand warmers, extra hats and gloves, a whistle and flashlight, and a little bit of kitty litter. I should add some granola bars, a water bottle, hand sanitizer, a collapsible shovel, scissors, and duck tape, but I already feel like an unhinged survivalist given how little I drive and that the vast majority of it is either local or on I-95.
At home, we have our important papers in a fire safe we can easily grab and everything else is the kind of stuff we need day-to-day. I used to have a go bag packed for the cats, and that's honestly the one thing I really should replenish. I'll admit that it drives me nuts that Mr. Robot refuses to create an emergency plan with me, but at least he works from home, which would presumably make coordination easier if an emergency actually occurred.
Further to 81, a mentor once said I reminded him of the folk group Eddie from Ohio's song "Bleecker to Broadway":
"Some seem to think I'm neurotic and all--but I'm not--
I just like to think about things over and over and
Over and over again."
81: I'm similar in never having made a go bag. As others mentioned above, we're pretty well set to survive for a while with a shelter in place. We're pretty far from faults, not near the Wildland interface, etc., but it wouldn't be a bad idea. (Actually - I think my wife did pick up a premade survival bag when she got interested in survival tools, and we've got good hiking gear for water purification, etc., so grabbing that plus passports and laptops is 90% of what we'd need.)
You all are too kind. The r-r-r-r-rest of the story is more of a denouement.
I remember thinking somewhere in the mountains in the dark that this was going to be a really stupid way to die, but somehow we did not. The mechanic was also a very good driver of a dead-stick vehicle, there is no way I could have done that. After the second time the rope broke, the driver of the Lincoln Navigator that was towing us finally stopped talking on his phone while driving and eventually we coasted down onto the plains.
I remember nothing about the city except getting out at a garage and just leaving the car there, keys and all. What else could I do?
Later I heard that Vanadzor was a very mafia city, but apparently the Germans had good contacts and the folks at the garage did not strip the car (or indeed me) for parts. They found a taxi driver who would take me the additional 120km to Yerevan, where I arrived some time after midnight. I think I had two shots of vodka in rapid succession at the hotel bar, but it might have been three. Perhaps four.
Anyway, about ten days later -- the hot phase of the war was over by then -- the foundation's Georgian driver came down to Armenia to get the car. Apparently I had tripped some kind of security feature that was very stubborn. He was wise in the ways of that vehicle and managed to get it going again right quick.
All's well that ends well, but once was enough for pretty much all of it.
So the problem basically was they sent you a mechanic who wasn't mafia enough to disable the anti-mafia device.
My one sister was at the Iowa caucus that picked Obama.
She understood it, too, and probably didn't have to break a rope or have mafia connections.
90: Thanks! I'm glad to be here to be able to tell it.
As far as I could tell, it was all in a day's work for the mechanic.
Great story - and maybe a point in favor of the view that organized crime can sometimes be safer for those on the outside than disorganized crime because organizations might be less likely to target "civilians" if that would draw a lot of attention.
Doug's story has to the pilot for a projected Tales from the Mineshaft: The Go Bag Chronicles streaming series