I got mine when a friend named Scott, trying to decide whether the bill of his hat should go straight back or a bit to the side, asked me, "You want to get a fake ID today, Danny boy?" He asked me this with the same tone that you'd use to ask someone if they wanted to go to a cook-out, and his penchant for calling me "Danny boy" is the reason that we eventually stopped talking to each other. I nodded, and expected the next few hours of my life to be like a Q scene from a James Bond movie, except the British lab geniuses would be replaced by that one silent, headphone-clad roommate who won't acknowledge you when you walk in. And the air of sophistication would be substituted with the faint smell of sweat, weed, and incense.
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And M is just the mom who comes over and does the laundry.
Movies portray the procurement of the fake ID as something you visit your resident nerd for. You make a trip to the lanky guy that no one hangs out with until they need a way to illegally get booze. That guy who "knows computers," because, for years, the only people to be good with technology were those that were radically good with it. You were either banging on a keyboard with a club and grunting or hacking into the government mainframe. And, thanks to '90s movies, I'm still not sure what a mainframe is. Is it a machine? Is it a system? All I know is that hacking into one looks like the star gate sequence from 2001, only with wires, scattered numbers, and guys who try to impress girls with an uncouth X-Men reference and a boner joke.
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