Chapter 7

After breakfast the next morning, Bren and I used the conference call phone to call Paul.

“Morning, Paul, it’s Ken. I have a question for you. I was talking about business insurance with my insurance agent. Did you purchase any other businesses as investments?”

“No. The real estate agency was the only business I bought. I only bought that business because it was too good of an opportunity to not buy it. The owner was running it into the ground and decided to sell it, the area’s real estate turnover would support the business, and I was able to buy it at a fire-sale price.

“The agency is doing a good amount of business, Ken. Unfortunately, I only did a superficial investigation of the manager. It’s only been a day since I started the investigation, but early this morning, the investigator faxed me a very preliminary report. I want to finish the in-depth investigation, but the report shows that we need to replace him; although his tolerating molestation is enough of a reason for that. I’m waiting until we have documented everything we are learning about him and find a new manager before firing him. Do you need anything else?”

“Any idea when you are going to audit the books?”

“I’m hoping to start the audit toward the end of next week or some time the following week. The start time is dependent on completing the investigation and finding a new manager. I don’t want to start the audit, until we have those two things in place. Then we will fire him. Once he is gone, we can begin the audit of the books. That is likely to create a bit of confusion in the office.”

“Okay, Paul. Let me know when you are going to fire him. I want to be there to meet the new manager and tell my employees what I expect of them.

The rest of the week slipped by with nothing significant happening to us. But things changed early the next week. We were sitting at our usual table in the cafeteria when one of Frank’s football buddies approached us. As usual, I was sitting with my back to the wall, so he came around the table and stopped about three feet from me.

I was on my feet well before he came around the table. He said, “My team mates and I are tired of you hogging all of the good looking women. You need to give us a chance to date them.”

I recognized the possibility of a physical altercation as he approached, so I had stood up holding my walking stick and I adjusted my stance and balance to use it, if necessary. I said, “I’m not hogging these young ladies. They are free to date anyone they want to date.”

“That’s bullshit. We have asked several of them to go out with us and they refused us.”

“In case you aren’t aware of it, friend, women talk with other women about their relationships with their boyfriends. If you and your friends treated your former girlfriends poorly, then your ex-girlfriends have probably spread the word of how you treated them to most of the female students. The young ladies at this table have undoubtedly heard how you treated prior girlfriends and don’t want to be treated in that fashion. So, their decisions to refuse to date you are most likely the result of the way you gentlemen have treated your girlfriends in the past.”

I saw the guy tense in preparation of doing something, so I shifted my weight to defend myself. He probably did not like what I said and had decided to be aggressive. The young women at the table must have sensed that something was about to happen, so they started getting out of their chairs.

The guy didn’t know much about fighting. He telegraphed a wild haymaker to punch me in the face. I flipped the tip of my walking stick up, gripped it at its midpoint with my left hand, lowered the ball end of the stick, slid my right hand down the stick so it was clear of the ball, and drove the rubber tip into his abdomen. It hit just below his ribs with the tip higher than the brass ball. This angle resulted in the force of the blow being directed toward his solar plexus and into his chest. He immediately folded at the waist, let out an explosive blast of air, and started to fall to the floor.

I jerked the walking stick toward me and started to deliver my follow-up stroke to his head, but I pulled the stroke for I was too late. The ladies who had started standing up attacked him. I stepped well clear of the ladies because they were hitting, kicking, and stomping on anything near or close to them. I couldn’t get an accurate count of the number of ladies venting their anger on the young man, but I almost felt sorry for him ... almost.

Young women from nearby tables had heard and observed what happened and they headed for the melee to vent their anger at past boyfriends. A campus Security Officer appeared and broke up our small riot. A paramedic was called to attend to the young man, who needed a trip to the ER. The campus Security Officer looked around and recognized me from the time Frank assaulted me. It took a few moments before I recognized him. He was the officer who stepped between me and Frank in the paramedic vehicle and was punched in the thigh.

“Okay, Hawk, what happened?” I was surprised that he remembered my name.

“This man approached us and accused me of hogging all the women. I told him they could date anyone they wanted. He said he and his friends had tried and they refused. I then told him why they had probably refused to date them. He didn’t like what I said. I saw his shift his weight as if he was going to attack me, so I prepared to defend myself. When he started to throw a punch at me, I hit him in the gut with the rubber foot on the end of my walking stick and he collapsed. Then — and I am not sure why — a large number of women attacked him. That’s all I know, officer.”

The officer looked around and saw one of the women he had seen in the riot. He pointed to her, and said, “I saw you stomping on him. Why did you attack him?”

She said, “He attacked Ken for no reason. We all know Ken is still recovering from Frank attacking him. I decided Ken needed some help, so I joined the other young women in stopping him from getting up and continuing his attack on Ken.”

The other women must have liked that answer for they were nodding their heads in agreement. The officer must have decided to just accept the reason without asking further questions.

The officer just shook his head. Other campus Security Officers were on the scene, so the officer who questioned us left with the young man for the trip to the ER. Before he left, he told us to remain here until the other officers took our statements. I was glad that the guy who tried to punch me was the one on the way to the emergency room and I was also glad I had still been carrying my walking stick.

Considering that idiot’s attitude and the attitude his fellow athletes seemed to have, it may be a good idea to continue to carry my walking stick until my wives graduated from UMB. But I doubt that I can sell the explanation of needing the walking stick because of a chronic twinge. I’ll have to think of a good reason to carry it. Maybe something like, I had become accustomed to having it with me and decided to carry it from now on.

Two weeks later, Bren and I signed the paperwork at the Title Insurance Company for buying the house. Since we were paying cash, they didn’t insist on insurance coverage, but Russ had already set us up with a policy. That evening, my wives and I talked and agreed that we needed to start moving our belongings to our new home. We didn’t plan to kill ourselves in completing this move. We decided to hire a moving company to move everything during a single weekend, but it may require three days. We doubted we would be able to arrange for the move over this weekend, so we tentatively scheduled the move on our new family calendar for the following weekend. I now needed to arrange for a moving company to move us.

During the two-week period before we signed the escrow papers, we received and discussed the prospectuses that Russ had mailed to us. We liked what we read about the group plans. So we had Nancy and Karen join us for dinner the next night. We gave them the prospectuses to read, and the next evening they told us they decided to enroll in the plans as part of our group. We would have to consult with Russ about the cost of the plans.

My wives agreed that before we moved, we would pack any private items we did not want the movers to pack and move for us. My wives said they would pack those items and we would move them ourselves. I understood that to mean they didn’t want the movers handling our collection of toys that we used when we had sex.

I said, “In addition to packing and moving our toys, there are other things that need to be done before the movers arrive. I am thinking of backing up all of our computers to our backup drive and moving the disks ourselves.”

When it came to computer equipment, I believed in buying quality and adequate capacity. So we had purchased an Enterprise RAID data storage system that used multiple 3.5-inch 8-TB hot-swappable HDD drives for a total of close to two hundred terabytes of storage capacity. We believed that would be an adequate amount of storage space for all of our data. Our sales person thought it was overkill. If necessary, we could upgrade to the higher capacity HDDs that will soon be on the market. After backing up our computers, we would remove the disks, pack them, and move them ourselves. The movers can move the system’s chassis.

I checked the internet and found that United Van Lines provided in-town moving services. They had a crew available to move us over the next weekend, so I hired them to move us.

The day before our move, we backed up our computers and packed the hard drives and our sex toys. We moved them to our new home. The next day the movers arrived to move us and they finished late on Sunday.

Paul finally found a manager to replace the current manager of the real estate agency and during the week after we moved, Paul fired the current manager. I was there and after the manager left I told the agents what I had observed as a client while in the office. I made it clear that I expected my company’s staff to present a good image to customers and to not harass their female coworkers. I would explain the actions of the handsy agents and let the new manager handle that situation if it reoccurred. One of the things I said was to take staggered breaks and not stand around the water cooler as a group ignoring customers. I also informed them that there would be a fifty-fifty split of the agency’s commission in the future, and I would be reviewing their benefit package with the new manager to ensure it met industry standards.