December 4, 1999 - AndroidCat

800+ leaflets handed out.
Weather: Absolutely no rain, hahaha, it *never* rains on our pickets! And it was warm enough that I could have worn my shorts (although that might have looked strange with my trench coat!)

This time, I set my alarm clock to "gawdawful annoying buzz" rather than the rather mellow CBC Radio 1. That worked!

Up and at 'em! Did the three S's, called Alan, drove in search of Alan's building, found it, took signs onboard (and Alan), parked in the parking lot -- right beside a $cientologist pickup truck (which arrived later).

Alan did coffee, I did "food". (The place that The Macdonald of that ilk has problems with.)

When it got close to 10am, there were two of us, so we had a picket. A quick check with the Org provided off-duty police protection (*KA-CHING*), and we were off and picketing.

Very shortly thereafter we were joined by Mike. And then there were three.

This quickly presented a problem. I had my "Honey I shrank the Xenu" flyers with The Story of Xemu on one side, and the New York Times '97 story of Lisa on the other, and a bunch of "Insane Cult" flyers. (Tip of the hat to Roland!) I had planned to copy a bunch more the night before, but my usual copy place had closed earlier than I thought.

And as it turned out, those were all the flyers we had. This looked like a job for CAPTAIN COPY! (A place up the street and around the corner.) Replenished with flyers, we lasted until after lunch time.

Andy Hill and Toronto Dan were there, as were several others. But they mostly stood around and talked to each other and smoked.

We had visitation by two ex-members who fed us Sugar-Powered pastry. Mmm!

Later on, Andy tried the handle: "What would it take to get you go away?". Of course, when I told him, we didn't exactly have a meeting of minds.

Toronto Dan managed to get up the jism to play silly buggers by blocking Alan shortly before the lunch break. Calling attention to off-duty officer stopped that right away. I guess Dan had to keep his stats up. (He's never tried physical intimidation with me, I'm hurt.)

Lunch break at precisely 1:00 pm. Alan and I coached Mike about what he'd need for a computer to do MIDI composing.

After lunch, we were running low on flyers again, so I made another run to the copy shop. (Alan funded most of this run because I was short of cash on hand.)

Andy and Toronto Dan having put in their half-day shift had pissed off. The next shift arrived but didn't attempt much handling.

Velcro Kitty (I presume) made faces at me when I explained that we'd run out of flyers. Why on Earth (Teegeeak) would I lie about that?

Mike had a really good line for handing out flyers "Protect yourself against the cult of Scientology" (or such like). "Protect" gets their attention, "against" lets them know that we're not pushing Scientology. The staffers were visibly entrubulated by this.

The off-duty officer was bloody young (or I getting bloody old, nah!) and was extremely professional. However Mike talked to him for a while about music. It turns out he plays the guitar and recommended a make of strings to Mike. As we close the '99 picket season, I'd like to give a ARSCC (wdne) Toronto citation to the police officers that had to watch the circus. They were there, they were fair -- And that's all we ask.

At 4:30 we ran out again. Since it would take 15 minutes to get more copies, we called it a day and pissed off. In the time that it took us to walk to the parking lot, stow the signs, hit a bank machine, and return, the org had emptied completely.

And that was it.

This picket was dedicated to Lisa McPherson. May no others die as she did.

Ron of that ilk.