I get a voicemail from a strange phone number last Friday afternoon, about 2 pm. "Hi....Jim? This is Deborah from the United States Geological Survey here in Lawrence, and, ummmm.....we've got a cooler here with your name on it. We're gonna be closing our offices early today, so hopefully you can get here in the next half hour to get your, um, cooler."
Wondering if this is some sort of a mistake (3% chance) or some prank that my asshole friends are playing on me (97%) I call Deborah back, and she explains that their organization does a lot of soil samples, etc. etc. and are constantly mailing coolers to each other with their findings, but rarely receive coolers on behalf of individuals such as myself. I quickly try to apologize, but she is laughing and totally cool with everything. She rattles my cooler around over the phone, and tells me that it sounds like its contents are "a little something for the football game tomorrow." She tells me she'll leave the cooler outside their front door, and to make sure and have fun.
I pick up the cooler after work, but don't open it. At this point, I'm figuring that it is the case of Michelob Golden Light that I requested Gangel bring down with him from Omaha (I know most of my friends still living up north don't take it for granted, but for the rest of you up there: treasure that beer as long as you live in one of the seven or so states that sell it. You have no idea how much you'll miss it when it's gone.) I wait to open it until Gangel arrives that evening, and it's not until we're standing in my kitchen and I'm literally cutting the duct tape off the cooler that it dawns on me: this is going to be a Smirnoff, and I'm about to be the victim of an overnight Fedex icing.
Sure enough, it was a single Smirnoff packed in about 8 pounds of ice. To top things off, Gangel taped a homemade message on the inside of the lid, referencing the end of the movie Seven where Brad Pitt's wife's head is in the box. (Also referencing a clip from this video, which continues to be hilarious to me. By my count, this is the third time I've linked to it, and don't bet that it will be the last.) It turns out that Gangel really mailed it to my address, but probably due to the return address (Gangel's company) being somewhat similar to the USGS, and the fact that they are regularly shipping and receiving coolers, it got mailed there by accident.
So as it turns out, my package at the USGS was both a mistake AND a prank from my asshole friends. The rare daily double. Pretty good ice, bro.
One other note from the weekend: Lane, Gangel and I wore some UND gear for the NDSU/KU football game. As Happy Gilmore would say: talk about your all-time backfires. The NDSU fans in attendance knew what we were trying to do (when some came by and trash-talked us, Lane dropped one of the best lines I've heard in a while: "What do you guys know about winning?" It's not particularly vicious, but it's still spectacular. What comeback can you use there?? Although that kid would've had a pretty good comeback approximately three hours later, but we don't need to rehash the worst loss in KU football history.)
However, out of the KU fans, I'd say 25% knew what our intentions were in wearing the shirts; 25% didn't understand/didn't ask; and 50% thought we were cheering for NDSU. At the bar after the game, after the 37th KU fan came up to us and either a) congratulated our program on a big win, or b) told us to go fuck ourselves, we finally just said fuck it and stopped correcting people. It's not that I expect everyone in the country to be well-versed in North Dakota college rivalries, but holy hell. My shirt didn't even say the words 'North Dakota' on it, it had a giant fucking Sioux logo on the front- but it was green, so apparently that means it's NDSU. One middle-aged guy, after being told that UND was different from NDSU, actually exclaimed, "You mean you guys have TWO universities up there?!?!?! Holy fuckin' shit!"
Maybe I gave KU football fans too much credit.
