Sunday, October 20, 2013

A Waste of Big

Yesterday, we had a little situation on the job which ended up with me escorting a ConEd worker through part of our site while our major fall fundraiser was going on. One of the local police was in the immediate vicinity, a 27 year old guy who makes me look like a junior petite. The guy is a gym rat who owned a small nutritional supplement store as a sideline (because he was unable to run the store full-time, he ended up selling it for a small profit after a few years of breaking even). This guy started off his career as a police officer in the City of Mount Vernon, a municipality in which I lived before moving slightly west to the City of Y______. Needless to say, Mount Vernon is a much rougher community than the community in which we both work. Having a shared connection in our past, we hit it off at once. In our conversation, the cop pointed over our fence and said, "We don't have a lot of calls in your vicinity, what's up with that?" I told him that we handled things in-house, and that I had a couple of incidents in which I warned people not to jump the fence (I think it was guys who wanted to take a leak on our property). I then proceeded to tell the guy about the new hire who didn't last the night. The cop compared the guy to a portion of the female anatomy (knowing the rigors of childbirth, comparison to this anatomical feature should never connote weakness). Ignoring the low-grade sexism of the response (90% of speakers of American vernacular English seem to use this term inappropriately), I mentioned that I heard that the guy was 6'3" and weighed about 400 lbs. The cop did a double-take and told me, "What a waste of big!"

First time I've ever heard the term... I hope it's never applied to moi.

3 comments:

mikey said...

"Big" can certainly provide a nice...edge. Particularly in a deterrent role, helping belligerents decide against escalation, discretion being the better part of, well, discretion.

But my experience has always been the most dangerous people I've known, both as friend and adversary, have been the smaller guys. Part because everybody's bigger than them, part because they often believe they have to act first and decisively, and, of course, part because they often have an emotional complex that makes them feel they need to prove they're the tough guy.

By a very large margin, the most dangerous hand-to-hand practitioner I ever knew was a little bitty Mestizo from Central Mexico named David Villareal. David was maybe five four and probably weighed 145 or so. We were friends during my time in Fort Worth, and, somewhat problematically, David HATED "peckawood cowboys". He was utterly fearless, starting and finishing wild barroom melees with uncounted numbers of said cowboys. David fought with a gleeful abandon, doing things that they wouldn't do in a staged fight in a teevee series because it wouldn't be believable. On one occasion he wiped out an entire bar-full of Texas cowboys, swaggered out the door and stopped in the parking lot to pee on somebody's pickup truck.

Size is a variable, heart is another...

Substance McGravitas said...

Waste of big is very funny. I know someone with relationship complaints who will be amused.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

But my experience has always been the most dangerous people I've known, both as friend and adversary, have been the smaller guys.

I've always preferred watching the smaller guys fight, regardless of the sport.

By a very large margin, the most dangerous hand-to-hand practitioner I ever knew was a little bitty Mestizo from Central Mexico named David Villareal. David was maybe five four and probably weighed 145 or so.

I used to to falls for a 6'6", 280lb Serbian guy who won a bronze medal in judo in the 1980 Olympics. He's the taller guy in this video. I imagine he could have beaten up a bar full of cowboys too.

Waste of big is very funny. I know someone with relationship complaints who will be amused.

Oh, snap!