Mr. Hanky's Revenge The tug, Summer Star, is haunted. I have this on the advice of Captain Pete, whom some would call eccentric but I just think he's loony as a goose. He has this obsession with the crappers on this boat. The Summer Star has a fairly small MSD and holding tank and when combined with a crew of divers and pile-drivers (everybody knows are full of shit) has to be taken off-shore and pumped over-board each day. This is not a pleasant smelling event and they have to go far enough out to insure Brown-trout can't swim back to our work area. He took it as a labor of love, to add a maze of valves and additional piping to the heads, in some kind of Rube Goldberg attempt at staunching a tiny leak in the through-hull fitting for the overboard discharge that works sort of like a fire-arm noise suppressor, as best I can tell, on the concept that every time the smell has to pass a valve, some of the stink will be stopped. Now there are two pages of written instructions on how to flush the toilet and it requires a trained poop-crew to take a crap. He has convinced himself that the fumes are toxic and only affect him. He is dying from toxic poop fumes and the boat is haunted. I am starting to see evidence that the boat may be haunting him. His primary task is to operate our small crew boat during the day to ferry crew and materials back and forth to the work-site. We use marine radio as the primary means of communication. He never gets the correct instructions. If I ask him to bring the boat into the BORCO dock to pick up some crew, a voice whispers something different into his ear and he will drive the boat around in circles until he is told by this voice to have a cup of coffee from the Lana Rose in a Styrofoam cup because the coffee cups on the Summer Star are made in China and everybody knows that the Chinese do not fire their porcelains in the kiln enough to prevent Chinese lead-poisoning. There is a new valve and another page of printed instructions on the Summer Star's shitter this morning and Captain Pete has been over-taken by Chinese coffee cups and toxic poop fumes and is being sent home today. I can't say that we will miss him or even that this will be the end of this tale because I am sure that the apparition he is communicating with is the ghost of Mr. Hanky, the South Park Turd. Mr. Hanky has probably advised Captain Pete to sue the company for exposing him to the smell of his own feces.
