A Really Long Satuday

For the past seven years I've taken part in an (unaffiliated) Georgia Tech Band tradition: Get A Clue.

What is Get A Clue (or GAC, as we in the know call it)? Well, it's a day filled with reckless driving, possible trespassing, and some intellectual pursuits thrown in for the hell of it. I believe the proper term is that it's a "Treasure Hunt" game: Get Clue, Solve, Find Location, Lather, Rinse, Repeat. The trick is that the locations can be anywhere within a 40 mile radius of Georgia Tech campus. Also, it starts at about 9 AM on a Saturday, and you'll be lucky to be done by midnight (this year, we didn't finish till 3 AM).

What do you win? First place gets...

*drumroll please*

To run the game next year!

Second place is "The Real Winners"; they're team smart enough to beat everyone else and also ensure they don't have to run next year's game! It's a coveted position, the running for which causes the accidental first place (no one wants to come in last, even if it is for nothing).

Why do it? It's just great fun. Spend a day with friends driving around the city solving clues. Sure, those friends rarely do it a second year in a row (and those who do forget how long of a Saturday it really is). But once you get going, you wonder why you don't do this everyday? And then once you pass around 11 PM, you remember just how tired you get when you've been solving clues all day and have who-knows-how-many left to go.

The other part of the fun are the yearly themes. I've played it with themes ranging from "Atlanta Zombie Apocalypse" to "Where in Atlanta is Carmen Sandiego?" to even "Corporate Espionage". I stole the image at the top of this post from this year's theme: "CSI: Atlanta", complete with tracking down the notorious "cereal killer". Yes, that's right, all victims were dressed up as cereal mascots, including the hooker ("When they're dead, they're just hookers") in Las Vegas dressed up as a bunny while turning tricks (get it?).

Was returning to Atlanta for a weekend to do this worth my time? Probably not, given how busy I was. Did I enjoy it anyways? Hell yes. And made sure I got to see all my friends and family while there as well. Good trip, will have to do it again next year.

P.S. Talk about Scheduler keeping me on my toes, it keeps reposting this even though I never wrote it...

Deja Vu

To: Atlanta Motorists

STOP HITTING THIS VAN

Georgia Tech, Home of the Socially Inept

Theft-Evangelism

On Feb. 13 at around 8 a.m., a Tech police officer was called to the Wingnuts restaurant on North Avenue regarding a theft. When the police arrived, the officer met with two complainants. The students then proceeded to tell the police their account of the previous night in relation to the theft. According to the two students, they were in the Starbucks in Tech Square, when an older white male began talking to them. The man started discussing religion and faith with the two students. A while later, when Starbucks closed, the three people walked to Wingnuts.

The students continued to talk about religious topics with the man for about five hours. During the conversation, the students said that the man asked them for their wallets, which they gave him. The man also asked them for their debit card, which they also gave him. Next, the man asked them for their pin numbers, which the students again gave to him. The man then gave them back their wallets, with the two students understanding the whole time that the man was in possession of their debit cards. After leaving Wingnuts early on Friday morning, the students checked their bank accounts later in the day and found that about $400 had been withdrawn from each account.

The police asked the students if they ever felt threatened or intimidated by the man. The students said that they felt intimidated mentally by the man since he played on the fact that they were religious people. The students gave physical descriptions of the male suspect, but no identity was determined.

- Technique, Feb. 20, 2009