Ghetto Story

It was early one August morning in a part of town that is a little scary. The monsoon clouds were parting, the smog was thick, every other car that went by was blasting some sort of rap tune and there I am with one of the best eye men on earth doing an ALTA on a massive commercial building.
As the morning progressed we had gotten our control, I was running the GPS and he was drawing the building. Eventually it came time to measure the building. This thing was pretty big and we were using a 200' foot chain to do it.
We came to a covered part of a patio with a walk way and pulled a distance. I turned around saw a mound of blankets and cardboard on the concrete wedged oddly between 2 columns and at the far end of the mound appeared to be 2 feet sticking straight up in the air.
Needles to say this startled me a little. I approached the mound and heard nothing, my stomach sunk and I called to my eye man "I think we have a body here". Right when I uttered these words the mound instantly stood straight up and began to shed cloth and cardboard while blurting profanities.
This scared the ever loving crap out of me and I backed way off in a big ass hurry.
Out from the mound pops this little white guy that smelled like a vat of vodka, he looks at me all bleary eyed, realizes that I mean no harm and proceeds to tell me how he got totally wasted the night before and he had no idea where he was and this was not him, that his wife had left him and he went an a bender.
You should have seen the look on his face when I informed him that he was 30 miles +/- from home and even more when he figured out where he was. He was broke, had lost his wallet and apparently a good chunk of his dignity. Did I mention he was missing 1 shoe?
When he asked I promptly gave him 10 bucks and he went to the convenience store on the corner and got a big bottle of water and then got on the next bus out of there.
Normally I would have told the guy to pack sand but I felt bad for him and as I watched he did exactly what he said he would do with the cash.
Word of advise. Always approach a mound of blankets and cardboard that smell like piss with extreme caution.