I took a DEC VR14 monitor over to the museum to help with the PDP-1 restoration project. It disappeared and I was rather upset. After quite a bit of searching, I found that a different restoration project had noticed that there was something wrong with it and decided to fix it for me, so they took it to their lab.
Also in their lab was a strange disk drive that was a hybrid of an RK05 and an RL02; it had one slot for each kind of pack. It wasn’t working, and Al noticed that someone had defeated an interlock and shoved in both kinds of pack simultaneously. After we pried one of the packs out of it, it worked.
Next door to the museum was a surplus store, and I found that they had just torn apart an HP 9831 calculator, and had one more that they were about to dismantle. I’ve been looking for one of those for a long time, so I bought both of them. I was surprised that rather than looking like a 9825 as I expected, they were packaged in a case like a 46, 81, or 9805, only with a lot more buttons.
I purchased a boat in Oregon, sight unseen. Strange since I’ve never really wanted to own a boat. A friend and I were going to pick it up. He got one of his friends whom I’d never previously met to drive. He asked why, if I wanted a boat, hadn’t I purchased one from him, and claimed that he’d have given me a better deal. But when he looked at the invoice, he decided that I’d actually gotten a very good deal.
The guy had an amphibious car, so the first plan was to “drive” down the coast a little bit offshore. But the car started taking on water, and I had a hard time holding the invoice and other paperwork out of the water, so we ended up driving back onto land and taking the freeway.
It turned out that the seller was a witch, and the boat was haunted.