According to AZ Family, a man accidentally shot himself in the leg while at a Wal-Mart store in Phoenix on Saturday.

My first reaction on reading this was, It serves the SOB right, but my second reaction was to remember a time when I carried a weapon (carry may not be the right word, the weapon was in my briefcase and I was carrying the briefcase, not the weapon). I was 33, married with a baby at home, and how I ended up carrying a weapon is one of my favorite stories.

We had sold a house to a guy named Bob Shimbari – I’ve changed the name a little for reasons that will become obvious – and Shimbari changed his mind and wanted his deposit back. The salesperson gave him the usual forms to fill out but he refused to do so. He just wanted his money. As I recall, it was 500 bucks on a, around, 40 thousand dollar home (we always called them homes, rather than houses). The salesperson bumped Shimbari to the Sales Manager who confirmed that he had to fill out the forms.

This was the early 70s and I was the Director of Operations for Shapell of Northern California, so the Sales Manager now bumped a pissed-off Shimbari to me. Shimbari said that he wanted his money back and I sweetly said Sure..long pause…just fill out the forms (I was a much bigger smart ass then, than I like to think I am now). Shimbari went nuts, telling me that he was going to kill me if I didn’t give him the $500. I told him that he had to fill out the form before I could give him the money and he hung up.

Maybe an hour later, he called back and told me he was going to wait in the parking lot, shoot you down, and then go to your house, I know where you live, and kill your wife and kids. The fact that he said kids, led me to believe that he really didn’t know where I lived or that I only had one kid, but still, it scared the hell out of me. I went to my boss, Sam Berland, and asked him what to do. Sam, who never panicked, who was always cool,  assured me that people make threats all the time and they don’t mean anything. If I didn’t believe him – Sam said – call the police and they will tell you the same thing.

I did call the police and they did tell me the same thing. With Sam’s calm assurance of my safety and now the police’s reassurance, I was starting to calm down. However, as I started to hang up, the cop told me I had to fill out a complaint form (hummm, what a pain in the neck and how ironic, fortunately I could fill out the form over the phone). The cop asked me the threatener’s name and I told him Shimbari. The cop then said – almost yelled – Shimbari!, Bob Shimbari? When I told him yes, the cop said I should be afraid, Very afraid.

It turned out Shimbari was the local bad boy, he owned several massage parlors and was known as a dangerous hothead. The cop said I should be very careful and, now, my panic reached a new level. I went back to Sam and, after some discussion – in which, among other things,  I stubbornly refused Sam’s suggestion that I give Shimbari back his money without the forms – Sam offered to loan me his Army issue Colt .45 automatic. I was pretty good with a .45 in the Army, so I said Yes.

The next day, I had Sam’s trusty .45 and, when Shimbari called to threaten me again, I dug in my heals. But, now that I had the gun, all kinds of real, practical questions came up. Did I load the gun? I don’t mean should I put a loaded clip in?, that was obviously Yes, but should I chamber a round?  Do I take the safety off if I have a chambered round? How do I carry the gun? I decided to put in a full clip, chamber a round, and half-cock the weapon (because I had heard stories of people dropping their fully cocked .45 and having it go off). I didn’t – and in California, I am glad to say – couldn’t carry the weapon around in my hand or in a holster, so I put it in my briefcase.

As I went out in the parking lot to get into my car, I realized the problem. The sun was bright, there were cars all over the parking lot, and anyone of them could hide a shooter. In my imagination, in the shimmering light, Shimbari is over by his car and he yells at me, Hey Asshole, I want my money! I put my briefcase down on the closest car hood, struggle it open – sweating in the heat, my hands almost slipping off of the shiny, brass, latches –   and take out the .45. The .45 is cool – it has been asleep in a briefcase in an air-conditioned office all morning – the safety is off, and it is easy to fully cock  the weapon. Now! I am ready to go.

But, if this whole thing were real, if it weren’t my imagination, if Shimbari had really been hiding behind that car, I am probably already dead.

Standing in the parking lot, looking at all those cars – I recognize that one, it’s Sam’s, that’s Dan’s, but where did that black Cadillac come from and is that somebody hiding behind it ? –  I could feel the sweat running down my sides from under my armpits, I could feel how exposed I was, how vulnerable. I began to realize that a gun in a briefcase is worthless and I thought about doing this for days (for weeks maybe, depending on how persistent Shimbari is). After, maybe 10 seconds, worth of thought, I went back into the office, filled out Shimbari’s forms for him and told the Salesperson to tell him the money was in the mail.

I gave the weapon back to Sam.

As an aside, there is a postscript to this story. Several years later, Sam and I started our own company, bas homes,  and the first contract our salesperson brought in was to Bob Shimbari. When the salesperson brought in the contract, I told her that I wouldn’t sign it. An hour later, Shimbari called me screaming that he was going to sue me for discrimination and I told him that the last time, he said he was going to kill me. There was a long pause and Shimbari said See, I’ve matured. End aside.

I resaw Erin Brockovich – the movie, not the real person – the other day. I had forgotten how good the movie is and how bad it paints PG&E. I have alot of experience with PG&E and they are every bit as bad as the movie depicts. They are, by far, the worst organization I have ever worked with.

In my experience, PG&E is way more difficult to work with than any state organization, worse than any water department or city. It is much harder to do business with than the Federal Government.  Without going off to far on a Libertarian rant, I think that a huge number of laws and codes are just there to protect some vested interest; a rich vested interest. However, governments are – to a greater or lesser degree – accountable to the people. The less accountable they are, the worse they are. The United States – Federal – government is not as accountable as I would like, nonetheless, it is still accountable. But PG&E isn’t. It may pretend to be but, in almost every area, it isn’t.

The PG&E entrenched bureaucracy with its unknown – to the outside world – table of organization and power centers, does what it thinks is best for itself. The picture above is a scan of a mailer that PG&E sent out telling us what a good job they are doing. The mailer neglects to tell us that a 30″ gas pipeline blew up in September of 2010 because of neglect and eight people were killed and alot more were injured. They do tell us that they replaced nearly 15 miles of gas transmission lines in the Bay Area and pressure tested an additional 50 miles but they neglect to tell us that this is out of 48,579 miles of natural gas distribution and transportation pipelines in Northern and Central California.

The second worse organization was a railroad, Union Pacific (I think). We were building a soundwall next to their tracks and wanted to get permission to encroach on their right-of-way with our cranes. The request had to go to engineering and a right-of-way committee and I would call week after week for a schedule without getting one. Finally, I told our guys to just do the work and try to stay away from their right-of-way as much as they could. We had been finished with the work for about six months before the permission to do the work came through . When people say that the government should be run more like a business, I wonder what they are really talking about.

Aside from the obvious, a business is designed to make money and government is supposed to protect Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness, a business that has been around for a hundred years is probably run much worse than any government.

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We have a very expensive, heirloom, tablecloth that I wanted to get cleaned. There is a nearby cleaner in Menlo Park that I have gone to in the past, Peninou French Laundry and Cleaners, where I took it this time, figuring I would get a good job. What I hadn’t counted on was how much Menlo Park has changed since the last time I used them. This is at the northern end of Silicon Valley – if you don’t count San Francisco, which is becoming the hip bedroom community for the Valley – and Silicon Valley is becoming the richest place on earth. I heard the other day that Facebook going public created three billionaires and over a thousand millionaires.

Not everybody is in the 1% but alot are and the ones who aren’t, want to be, and consider themselves falling by the wayside if they barely get into the top 10%. Peninou, which is a local chain with a history going back to 1903, has changed with the times. They have really changed with the times, charging us $54.21.

The table-cloth came back folded – wrapped in a suitable, lightweight, cardboard wrapper – and then wrapped in the purple? tissue in the picture. It is lovely and, I suppose, it looks like it should cost more than the $54.21 they charged, but – still – $54.21 to clean a tablecloth?  Almost $55 big ones as Woody Allen used to say.

As an aside, there is no sales tax because a sales tax is only added to things rather than services. When the sales tax was introduced in California during the 30s, most people bought alot more things than services (except for the rich). Having to raise money, the Legislature passed a tax that looks fair at first glance – after all, the more you spend, the more tax you pay – and is really regressive because the rich pay a smaller percentage, so everybody was happy. End aside.

Since we were taking the table-cloth in any way, I added three sweaters. That cost $75! The really troublesome part is that they were sale sweaters and originally cost less than $25 each (without the required sales tax of course).