April Fools II

April 1, 1990. My boss was on a skiing trip and I was taking a day to fish the Letort. It was raining, and I wasn’t catching a thing. But I was fishing.

Then I heard something. It sounded like someone yelling. Yelling my name. I looked up and standing in the rain was my first wife, just screaming at the top of her lungs trying to get my attention. What the hell did she want? How in the world did she find me? She doesn’t fish. She wasn’t supposed to even know where my fishing holes were. But there she was, standing in the rain, yelling to get my attention.

So I kept fishing.

No, I should have, but I didn’t. I reeled in, packed up and traversed the hill up to where she was to receive the important message. It has to be important…she was interrupting my fishing on my day off.

“Your secretary called, you need to get into work,” she claimed.

Nice try, my boss is away. There could absolutely be nothing I needed to do.

She insisted I had to get home, shower, put on a suit and get into work.

You must be kidding. Wait, it’s April 1st. I know what is going on. No way, I am going back to the stream. She insisted, over and over. So I gave in…knowing this had to be a joke.

I cleaned up, suited up, and got to the office. There was my secretary. She looked very frustrated. We had just changed from some crappy version of WordPerfect to the latest version of WordPerfect, and she couldn’t figure out how to format something.

Something, but it wasn’t work. It was for some organization she was in charge of and she was trying to do that work during the day (since the boss was away and there was nothing for her to do while he was gone).

She sent for me, via my first wife, when she knew I was fishing, to teach her how to justify text under this new version of WordPerfect.

I thought for sure this had to be a joke. It had all the elements of a joke. Even today, retelling the story, it sounds like a joke. Problem is, it wasn’t. She really wanted my help for this non-work stuff, and she could care less that I was off that day.

So, fair warning…when you are out fishing today, and someone summons you to come to work for some dire emergency, just keep fishing…even if it is not a joke, it can’t be that important to interrupt fly fishing your Letort.