"Where'd he go?" ... "Where'd who go?"

The scene from Top Gun is well representative, metaphorically of course, of what played out today following lunch.

When we left for our mid-day grub, the conditions outside were ominous at best. Torrential rain had been threatening all morning, but only mist and fog made themselves apparent.

On the way to lunch, we experienced hints of the downpour to come as we passed in and out of spots of heavier rain. But when we entered our chosen grubbery, only the venerable mist remained.

We enjoyed our meal at the expectedly satiating Boomerang Grille, but by the time we departed, the clouds had finally lost their patience and began to let loose their liquid fury.

The journey back to the office was quite turbulent, and as we neared our building, a fundamental problem became apparent. There were four guys in the car... but only three umbrellas. And as already mentioned, the downpour was immense.

So as we approached our work facility, our kind driver (the umbrellaless one), was convinced by us cowards to pull up to the front of the building to drop us off, instead of first parking so that we could all walk in as he would normally do. Front seat passenger guy offered to leave his umbrella for kind driver guy, if rear and to the left passenger guy would share his large umbrella on the way in. Rear and to the right passenger guy (me) was just an innocent observer at this point.

Apparently, rear and to the left passenger guy was not aware of the water-protection pact that had been made. As soon as the car stopped, his door flung wildly open, and he was gone and in the building faster than anyone else in the car could fathom it, leaving us with our very adequate thoughts of Top Gun.

You might think at this point, no big deal, front seat passenger guy and rear and to the right passenger guy can share an umbrella, still leaving one for kind driver. But instead at this point, front seat passenger guy was in panic mode, having been completely abandoned by rear and to the left passenger guy. He unwisely chose to go it alone, to make his own blazing trail through the downpour without any sort of rain-shield.

The situation is falling appart, thought rear and to the right passenger guy. You see, it was discovered shortly before front passenger guy decided to afterburn to dry sanctity, that rear and to the right passenger guy's door had child safety locks engaged, something readily shared with front passenger guy to no apparent avail.

So there was rear and to the right passenger guy, stuck in the car with a jaw-dropped face of disbelief at the hastily transpired events, though luckily still with an umbrella. After a few moments of yelling profinities through the locked door at front passenger guy's trail of puddle-splatter, rear and to the right passenger guy crawled across that rear seat to exit out the left side and blaze his own trail of puddles.

In the building, a soaking wet front passenger guy and smug looking rear and to the left passenger guy stood waiting -- and laughing -- just inside the door. They revealed to the not-so-pleased rear and to the right passenger guy that they were eagerly hoping to see kind driver waddle through the downpour an eighth of a mile, where the remaining parking was. As we had all discovered, the flood waters cared very little that ones head was protected from soakage, because the rest of the body was free for plunder.

And so they waited to see kind driver muddle in, dry from the neck up, while they burst with gleeful laughter at his predicament. As rear and to the right passenger guy was heading up to his office (having chosen not to partake of further wet moments), he even overheard rear and to the left I'll blaze my own damn trail passenger guy say, "I just love to see a [non-skinny] guy run." Of course he didn't say non-skinny. That was editorial license.

I only wish I had my digital camera with me a short while later, when I observed the other three gentlemen using the exhaust hose from a server air-conditioning unit (which blows heated air) to dry themselves. That, I thought as I air-dryed, was pretty funny stuff.