21 July 1994

I was working at Apple, which was housed in five cylindrical skyscrapers which were arranged in a V shape. They were numbered 1 to 5, 1 being the stuffy corporate MBAs and management assholes, at the point of the V. I worked in #3, at the right trailing edge. I stole a helicopter. I didn't have a pilot's license but nobody thought to stop me since I obviously knew how to handle the thing.

I had to pick up a fellow Apple employee who was on vacation; there was some kind of crisis he needed to help avoid. He and another guy and their sons were hiking in Yosemite. So I flew the copter out there to pick him up. The boys were on top of a plateau; the two dads were suspended out over the valley on wires. You see, there was a roof over Yosemite, but you could only see the roof if you looked straight up. Sometimes it appeared to be only 50-100 feet up, and other times it seemed to be 1000 feet or more up. The dads had crawled out along the I-beams that supported the roof and then lowered themselves out over the valley, hanging thousands of feet above the valley floor on their cables, rolled up in fetal balls, meditating, looking like spiders.

I couldn't just fly the copter out to where the guy was, way over the valley, because the rotors would have cut his cable and dropped him to his death. So I flew out and called to him over a PA/bullhorn. He awoke from his meditation and scrambled up his cable exactly like a spider building a web. I picked him up on the I-beam and we flew back to Apple.

However, on the way there, he had to go to the bathroom, so we landed at a Stuckeys on a sloping hill. But while he was in the bathroom, I decided to move the helicopter for a better view from the hilltop; it was sitting on wheels, so I rolled it forward. But it rolled too far and began plummeting down the hill, me behind the yoke, unable to get the engine started, stomping on a brake pedal that was suddenly there. But it wouldn't stop; I careened onto a twisty mountain road and had to steer for my life.

Then a cop car came after me and I knew I was fucked because I didn't have a license to pilot a copter, much less drive one on surface roads. And the copter was crashing into stuff and pieces were flying off. But somehow I lost the cop just before crashing into a heap right by the Apple buildings.

Somehow, the guy I had flown out to pick up was already there. We proceeded into the nearest building. We went into the elevator and got all the way to our floor before we realized with horror that we were not in building #3, we were in #1-- the yuppie MBA asshole building! Quickly we headed back down, but it was too late-- the lobby was filling up with visitors on some kind of major stockholder negotiating trip. Hundreds of men in dark clothing were pouring into the lobby, made up primarily of three groups-- Japanese businessmen, Hasidic Jews, and the ever-popular Men In Black/Secret Service types. We couldn't get out past them. We were doomed....