I bought a desk on St. Kitts

White House Bay, St. Kitts, March 2010

This Gentleman Bounty Hunter reminds you to pay attention to the wayward members of your family.

I've just spent the better part of two days here on the island of St. Kitts, walking around, poking my nose into the shops, buying things I do not need, and looking for a young lady who left her mother and aunt high and dry with a few unpaid bills. It's the simplest thing in the world to find someone who is broke and has partied their ass off for a few months. You go to the Marriott, you ask about any new waitresses that aren't quite working out, and voila. You have a formerly rich young lady who can't wait tables to save her life shacked up in the overflow rooms on the end of the property, three to a room, of course, trying to scrape together a few hundred dollars in order to get off the island. It's one thing to be the wealthy person down here who can send back some Mahi-mahi if the vanilla creme sauce isn't up to snuff; it's another thing to be the wealthy person who has to wait on that individual. It tends to open the eyes a bit to the world.

Compelling her to return home and see to her affairs wasn't difficult. Her "family friend" was an old perv trying to set something up on the side. I've seen that a million times. Now, I'm certainly an old perv myself, but you don't see me going around using someone else's twentysomething kid as my kept fling in the Caribbean, now do you?

Getting her on the plane was easy. Babs Worthington can talk anyone onto a plane; you should see her at work. Babs has talked more people onto planes than an airborne Jumpmaster.

No, the problem was figuring out how to get this wonderful antique desk back onto the Admiral Hassenpfeffer. Eight drawers, three and a half feet deep, legs like something out of Harvard Law. It reminded me, actually, of the desks they had at Princeton back in the day when I was a student. I love desks that are flat, wide, and deep with wonderful wooden drawers. I covet them. They are pre-computer desks that computers will now work on.

You see, when computers came with big, heavy, ridiculously oversized monitors, desks that were designed for typewriters or basic ledger work no longer made sense, so people discarded them and went for cubicles and corner pieces and triangles specifically designed to accomodate the computers and their monitors. They designed those all-but-forgotten "articulating keyboards" that would rattle and warp and come apart with too much use. What junk. They featured ledges under the desk, extra places for whatever else could be thrown in there, and some desks even had specially notched surfaces where dot matrix printers could feed paper up onto the surface from below.

Times have changed. Monitors are all but small and narrow in their desktop footprint. The old desks everyone got rid of are now fantastic for these things. They really are.

We had to use the crane of course, but getting it below decks and into the state rooms took a vat of butter and some creative lifting and jockeying. Peej and I approached it as a science project; Miranda approached it as a case of greedy nonsense. I paid a lot of money for that desk. I was not to be denied.

The thing that solved our problem for us was the removal of all drawers and the hinges on the doors. Once we had removed those, and buttered up the walls, the thing slid down the rear stairwell as if on rails and then it was two pivots, a lift, and an end over end move to get it into what will now be the computer room. I shall be up all night removing butter from the thing; I am a dedicated man. I shall have my comfort and my antique desk. A little butter never hurt anyone. This stuff comes in big tubs. It's not half bad when you're hungry. Get it under your fingernails and it stings because of all the salt that's in it. Thank God we didn't go with our first instinct and use motor oil.