My secret shame...

When I worked at my last job, which was a suit-and-tie place that had really strict rules, I had an incident that I always refer to as 'My Secret Shame'.

When I got laid off from my dot com job, I basically had to take any job that I could get. The SATP (suit-and-tie place) was my only option. I went from a place where you could not only wear what you wanted, but you could pretty do much anything as long as your job was getting done. We would even play touch football in the courtyard every day.

At SATP, I had to deal with a litany of rules that would make any military academy proud. You were supposed to be at your desk by 8 am and you couldn't leave any time before 5 pm. You couldn't have food or drink at your desk. You had to keep chit chat to a minimum. You couldn't walk on the grass. You couldn't lean against any walls. There were no microwaves or refrigerators, so you had to either bring a cold lunch or leave for lunch.

My friend from the dot com place, let's call him Hank, also got a job at SATP.

Lunch was a problem for us. Eating your lunch at your desk was not doable at all. The closest I had ever gotten to eating lunch at my desk was casually reaching into my bag to pull a chip out of my ziplock bag full of chips. Then I would try to silently as possible munch on the chip.

Because we were bored and because we had nothing better to do during lunch, we started eating lunch at Hank's house. Hank lived fairly close by, so it was pretty convenient.

Sometimes we'd sit and eat and talk. Other times, we'd surf the Internet for something we both were interested in. We even had a short-lived attempt at playing a collectible card game of a famous cult television show. After several boring attempts at trying to play a game, we decided that it just wasn't our thing.

One day, Hank mentioned that he had a game that we could play. It was a game that he and his friends used to play years ago, but they all kind of stopped playing it and they gave him all of the cards. He said that he would divide the cards up into 'packs' and we could all start building decks to play.

The game was the collectible card game, Shadowfist. Just to brief you, collectible card games are games in which you have a basic deck of cards, but then you are encouraged to buy booster packs to fill you deck with better cards. Think of it was boosting up a regular deck of cards with super jokers and wild kings.

Now my only exposure to collectible card games was the game of Magic: The Gathering. During the summer when I was in college, I would hang out at some friend's house and him and his roommates would play it. I attempted to play a game with them with one of their decks, but all I knew was that I didn't understand it and I got my ass kicked.

Magic was played with an array of cards that allowed players to generate magic, or mana, and then attack their enemies with a variety of magic creatures.

Shadowfist is of a similar nature. Let me try to explain it simply. In Shadowfist, you lay out sites to generate power. Think of it as a power plant that generates a piece of power every turn. From there you bring out characters and attack your enemy's site to take control of it. After you take control of 5 sites you win the game.

That's basically it... Well, you can bring out many characters to attack other characters. Or you can defend your sites with your characters. Or you can join in attacks when someone else attacks. When a site is taken it is burned for victory... Or burned in general... Or burned for power... You can also put out non-character cards like Edges, which grant special powers. Or you can play events, which can perform a certain one-time action like removing a player from play. Or you can put weapons on characters.

So once a player starts attacking you can defend with your character, or someone else can defend you... or you can play an event card to stop the attack... or you can use your sites to send the attack to another target... Did I mention that sites do more than just generate power? Well, they can...

Sites can generate power, cause damage, absorb damage, cancel events, cancel characters... basically anything!

So the game was difficult to learn. The instruction booklet was over 100 pages long in and of itself.

We started collecting cards and playing the games at Hank's house from that day on. There in lay a problem: Hank's house.

Hank's house was not exactly a mess, but it was not immaculate. It looked like a house lived in by people that do a lot of activities. The whole family had a lot of activities which left them little time to clean. Because of this, it was Hank's job to make sure that the trash was taken out and the dining room/living room/kitchen area was clean. Seeing as how Hank was a guy who did not dress that neat (neither did I), the house was usually in a state of disarray.

When we'd come to play, we all took turns microwaving our dinners in Hank's kitchen. Usually, there were dirty dishes in the sink and on the counter. To combat cleaning a lot, Hank had resorted to buying a lot of bulk plastic silverware. The household seemed to have no formal silverware of any kind and if it did, it was hidden.

Also seeing as how the trash can was usually overflowing, us stuffing our dinners into it left an even larger heap that I'm sure didn't look too good when his wife came home.

So every day, we'd hang out at Hank's house playing Shadowfist. Most games took several days, so we resorted to putting our cards on pieces of cardboard so we could just pick them up and put them out of the way so we could start where we left off from the last game.

This system seemed to work out just fine until someone, that person being me, ruined it all.

One day, Hank's wife was home during lunch. One of the guys said something like, "Don't mind us. We won't make a mess."

Then I said something that was meant as a slam on Hank, but it didn't come out that way.

"Yeah, if we really wanted to shock you, we'd clean up the place."

As soon as I said it, I knew it was the wrong thing to say.

"Whoa!" someone piped up.

"I'm sorry," I said quickly. "I meant it as a slam on Hank, who is supposed to clean. Sorry."

The damage was done. The next day, Hank informed us that we could not play at his house anymore. So we resorted to playing in the break room at SATP, which wasn't ideal, but it was better than nothing.

Things were going along fine until I got busted for playing the game by Laura.

Now Laura is certainly prone to geek tendencies. She loved the X-Files and even watches Heroes and Fringe, but she also seems to think that she's above geeky things.

After the incident below happened, Laura said almost sadly, "I didn't know you were such a geek. What happened?"

When I got busted for playing Shadowfist, there was no talking my way out of it. I was busted worse than the VCR Bill and I bought in junior high for an ungodly $330 back in the mid-80s. We had just bought this VCR and was fiddling with it on the shelf when it flipped over and smashed to the ground. Oh sure, the VCR still worked, but the front was now cracked and the auto-eject window didn't flip up when a tape tried to eject. You'd have to put your finger into the slot, flip the window up and grab the tape in one sweeping motion. It still played, but you never looked at it the same way again.

That must be how my wife saw me that day...

This incident occurred when Julia was just a toddler. Like most toddlers, Julia was into everything. She'd pull stuff off of tables, counters, couches, you name it. It was annoying, but you just got used to putting everything away. I guess I didn't realize that my work bag would be a target to incriminate me, but it did.

Julia was playing on the floor and was pulling things out of the side pockets. She had reached into one of them and had pulled out a metal Band-aid container. Julia opened the lid and pulled a card out of the container.

My wife strolled over and asked, "What do you have here, Julia?"

Laura took a look at it and her eyes got wide. She screamed at me, "OH MY GOD! ARE YOU PLAYING MAGIC!?"

I was busted, but it wasn't Magic the Gathering card game that I was playing. Just as geeky, but not Magic.

So as if I was having to explain to my wife that I was living a secret life as a con artist. I tried to explain why we played the game, but apparently, 'We were bored' wasn't a convincing argument.

I also tried to explain that I've always had these geeky tendencies, but when she started dating me, I was full on into my trying to be cool phase. I was trying to grow my hair out, trying to work out and just in general trying to be a cooler guy than I actually am. I also pointed out to her that when I first met her, she loved alternative music. I thought I was starting to date a full on alterna-chick. Of course, now she listens to country music a lot, a music for which I have a huge disdain for.

She couldn't let it go.

"This is really worrying me. I mean, you really are freaking me out right now," Laura calmly said.

"Would it help if I started to put up pictures of women in bikinis on my wall and computer desktop?" I retorted.

"It might," Laura said.

In the end, we compromised. Laura demanded that I get rid of the Shadowfist cards, and I agreed to keep them out of her sight and pretend that I had gotten rid of them. I put them all in a box that was hidden in our crawl space, which she'd find if she only would open the crawl space, which she never did, and reached for a box just to the side of the door, which I knew she wouldn't.

That night my secret was discovered, however, we had company coming over. My friend, Jeff, and his wife were coming over.

"You're not going to tell Jeff about this are you?" I asked.

"Hell, yes I'm going to tell him about this," Laura exclaimed.

"You better not! I'll never hear the end of it!"

"Oh, all right. I won't tell him," Laura said.

Cut to later that night when Jeff and his wife were over. Barely 30 minutes went by when Laura said, "Oh. Wait until you hear what I caught Bob doing?!"

"You promised!" I exclaimed.

She proceeded to tell them the whole sordid story. I guess promises aren't easily kept.

So to end this story, I promised Laura that I would give the cards back to my friend, which I didn't, and stop playing the game, which I didn't.

What's funny is that I may end up playing another collectible card game because now Julia is into Pokemon cards, which baffled me at first because I couldn't believe they were still around. Julia and her friends don't play the game, though. They just look at them. Weird...