What Berkeley Arrest?

I remember Uncle Ken telling us about the time he was arrested for writing on the sidewalk with chalk, but I don't remember anything about assault with a deadly weapon at Berkeley. Maybe it's none of my business, but that's never stopped me before.

I saw a show on PBS once about a lady scientist who trained an orangutan to use American sign language, the one that deaf people use. He got so that he could form simple phrases and sentences, but he never got past about the level of a two year old human. She raised him from infancy and he seemed to think that he was human. Although the lady and the orangutan formed a special bond, maybe too special, he was also friendly with other humans and everybody liked him. That was until he hit puberty and tried to become too friendly with some of the women around the university. They tried locking him up but, by that time, he had become quite an escape artist. It was finally decided that he had to go live in a zoo or park with others of his species. He never did adapt to that, even after the lady was told to stop visiting him because, whenever she did, he was devastated for days after she left. Meanwhile, the funding for the program was cut, and the university decided that they weren't going to support any more experiments like this because it wasn't fair to the animals. Last I heard, the lady was trying to find a way to adopt him on her own, but I never heard whether or not she was successful.

I briefly had a job with UPS in the Chicago suburbs. I could never do it to their satisfaction and finally gave up trying. I think my biggest problem was sorting my load in the morning. The packages came down a conveyor and each driver took off the ones for his route and loaded them in his truck in the order in which they would be delivered. We were supposed to complete this task and get out on the road in a certain amount of time, and I never could. The best I could do was toss the packages into the truck any old way and then stop by the side of the road to sort them afterwards. This used up some of the time that I was supposed to spend making my deliveries, so I couldn't complete that on time either. At one point they sent a supervisor out with me to see what I was doing wrong, but he wasn't much help. Well actually, he was too much help, sorting the load for me while I was driving the truck. We made record time that day but, of course, the next day without him along, it was back to business as usual. In a subsequent meeting with me and the big boss, this guy denied helping me and said that he couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. I finally decided that I just wasn't cut out for this line of work and quit to spare them the task of firing me. It turned out for the best, though, because, shortly after that, I moved to Cheboygan where I lived happily ever after.