Alcohol makes bad things happen.

Last March I was in Germany for a tradeshow called CeBIT, which is like no North American tradeshow I've ever seen. It lasts six days and the days are long. Beer flows like water: good German beer. There are over twenty halls with massive booths and there are extravagant parties every night with booth babes all over the place. At the end of each day my colleagues and I would wander back towards the giant beer hall, making our way through the various tradeshow halls to crash parties, drink free beer and mooch free food. By the time we reached the beer hall we'd be pretty tuned up. Then factor in a couple thigh-sized pints and you are good and blasted.

One of the things we learned from previous years of attending this show is that Hannover, Germany is a pretty wet place in March, and we needed to trudge through a muddy field each night to get back to the house where we were staying. We didn't want our dress shoes getting mucky, but we didn't want to look like dorks with suits and running shoes either, so we came up with the perfect western compromise: we took our cowboy boots to Germany. It is a natural fact that just about everyone in my city owns a pair of cowboy boots even if most of us hate Country and Western music. It's a cultural thing that I'd rather not get in to.

Anyway, the boots look pretty good with a suit, stand up well to the muddy field, and draw a bit of female attention to boot (lame-ass pun intended). I tell you all this because the boots sort of factor into the whole fence jumping debacle that should have killed my boss.

Moving right along, after a couple of mega pints it was closing time and we staggered out of the beer hall and wandered through the now very dark fair grounds and missed the exit. We ended up in the corner faced with a staggering backtrack to get out of the fair when I spotted a utility box next to the six-foot-high fence. The fence was covered with spiky things about a foot long. The spiky things were about every three inches sticking straight up from the top of the fence. The spiky things were supposed to stop stupid people from trying to climb the fence. Most of the time, I think the spiky things do a good job of that.

Most of the time. This was not one such time.

The utility box (Was it a power box? I don't remember. I was wasted) was about four feet high. I took one look and knew that I could easily hop over the fence because I'm good shape and quite agile. So, this is pretty much verbatim what I said to my colleagues: "I'm not sure if you guys should do this, but I know I can jump that fence no problem." Then I climbed up on the box, carefully put one hand on the top of the fence (avoiding the spiky things) and easily hopped over, doing a clean landing on the other side. Now if I had a brain, I would have realized that I had just thrown down the gauntlet. Instead of getting the message that my colleagues should walk around, I essentially said I bet you drunken fuckers can't do that!

So, accepting the challenge to his drunken manhood, my younger colleague went next. He cleared the fence and landed on his feet, but then promptly fell on his expensively suited ass into the mud. In walks random drunk guy. Random drunk guy appears from nowhere and seems to think we've got a great thing going here. Random drunk guy goes over the fence too, except the first thing to hit the ground for random drunk guy isn't his feet, it's his ass. I bet that hurt the next day. Random drunk guy takes off. Goodbye, random drunk guy. Your part in this tale is over.

Then my boss climbs up. My boss is eight years older than me and not the most athletic of people. Not only that, but he doesn't have the right idea of how to "vault" or "hop" this fence. He decides to climb over it. Climbing over something covered with spiky things is what we call a bad idea, boys and girls. I run up and grab the bottom of his boot and start to push him back as soon as I see him straddling the fence. "No, no, no!" I protested. "Not that way!"

"Just hold my foot," came the drunken reply. So I did. Then his boot that was still on the other side slipped on the utility box.

In hindsight, thinking about the way he was positioned, one of them spiky things could easily have gone right through his inner thigh. There is a thing in your inner thigh called a femoral artery. This is something you don't want spiky things to go through. If they do, well, bad things happen. Things like tremendous blood loss that causes death inside of five minutes, which probably would have put a damper on my drinking and partying for the rest of the tradeshow. I would imagine that the police report would include words like "Death by misadventure." The general public would just vote him a Darwin Award.

Fortunately, that didn't happen. What did happen was he flailed his leg over, just barely missing the spiky things, and planted his ass squarely in my face. It even left a butt print on my glasses. We both went down into the mud, but at least no one was hurt.

I've tried to manage my career by not being a kiss-ass to the boss, but that night I failed miserably.