For those of you who care, and those of you who don’t, I am headed to Gainesville, FL for a relaxing weekend with my good friend and former colleague Patrick Kindregan.  For those of you who do not know Patrick, he was the second employee of Better World Books Library Division, and he played an integral role in making the Discards & Donations Program the invaluable program that it is today.  I would like to take this opportunity to ask all of you readers to post your favorite story about Patrick so that I may share them with him and his wife this weekend.  Here’s mine:

It took place at the Charleston Acquisition Conference in 2006.  We departed for Charleston , SC the morning the Conference began.  We had given ourselves plenty of time to make the 6 hour drive, leaving time for a lunch break so that we didn’t eat all of the hors d’oeuvres during the Vendor Showcase.  We decided to stop at one of those local grocers to grab a fresh made sandwich and some water for the Conference.  Well, we all ordered our sandwiches, sat down to eat, and as Patrick bit into his sandwich…CRUNCH.  We looked at him as his facial expressions changed from confused to a painful grimace; he had bitten into a toothpick that was holding his sandwich together!  Once he collected himself, he looked at us, smiled, and to our surprise, he was missing half his front tooth!  We laughed hysterically at our colleague’s misfortune for a few minutes, and then continued laughing for the remainder of the afternoon as we realized that he would have to work the Vendor Showcase in this condition.  Needless to say, we made sure that every person that stopped to visit our table noticed Patrick’s dental disaster.  Fortunately (unfortunately), he was able to get his tooth fixed the next morning, but not without some goodhearted heckling throughout the evening.

Post your favorite story as a comment to this post and I will make sure that it is relived this weekend!

*Because Presidents Day is not the official name of the federal holiday, there is variation in how it is rendered.  Both Presidents Day and Presidents’ Day are today common, and both are considered correct by dictionaries and usage manuals.