I don’t know about you, but the world seems to be getting pretty (insert your favorite colorful word here) intense. While I like to stay informed, I also like to laugh to deal with stress. And, I need some chuckles these days.

Today, the wonderful Anne Hagan is here to help us laugh with an embarrassing story. Also, Anne is giving away 1 ecopy of Steel City Confidential. Below the guest post, you’ll find more details about the giveaway.

Take it away, Anne.

Pranking the Prankster

Many people don’t know that I had a twenty-one-year military career in the Army and the Army National Guard. Military business is a serious business, but soldiers are notorious for finding ways to find humor in everything or to create funny moments in otherwise dull and staid times. In times of peace, admittedly less and less often these days, pranks abound.

One poor soldier I served with was often a target for me. I borrowed a ‘spare’ badge from a security forces friend at the agency we worked for and ‘arrested’ him for being an international spy. Our who section was in on it in our mixed service environment, including the Air Force Master Sergeant in charge. Another time I found (swiped) a roll of ‘Police Line – Do Not Cross’ tape in the agency cafeteria. They were using it to mark off an area where they were replacing ceiling tiles. I used it to wrap his car. He spent two hours with the post MP’s trying to convince them to dust his car for fingerprints.

My favorite soldier to tease convinced several people in our section, including the same Master Sergeant, and in the section where his barracks roommate worked to help him get me back. They sent me around to everyone in both sections with some very official-looking survey paperwork to ask each person, more than fifty in all, a couple of questions. The principal question in our communications environment was, “Is your primary equipment up or down today?”

If you read a certain sexual connotation into that, you’re exactly right. At barely nineteen and having come from a fairly sheltered environment, I was naive enough that I didn’t pick up on it. I was beyond embarrassed when I went back to my own section and gave the tallies to the shift chief, the Master Sergeant, and he relayed them for all to hear – mostly males, of course – in both sections to roars of laughter. It was a couple of months before something more ridiculous happened to someone and I lived that down.

I’d be lying to say that was my one and only military embarrassment. One moment in my very early National Guard career stands out as well, but that’s a story for another time.

GIVEAWAY

STEEL CITY CONFIDENTIAL
Steel City Series: Book 1

by Anne Hagan
Available in Kindle Unlimited

Clients hide things from their lawyers all the time. Pam Wilson makes it an art form.

Pam’s been on the run from the law for years and she was getting away with it. The statute of limitations ran out on most of her crimes. For her spouse Charlotte? Not so much. Though they were aging, they looked forward to enjoying their golden years and, hopefully, forgetting about the past.

Life got complicated when Charlotte became gravely ill, their daughter got pregnant with the child of a married man…a married man someone took shots at from a rare motorcycle Pam happens to own. When the man was shot again and killed in his office at Pitt a couple of weeks later, the police found all signs pointing to Pam.

Rochelle ‘Ro’ Rabinowitz, a second-generation Pittsburgh lawyer, and her little firm take on Pam’s case pro-bono. Ro thinks it’s a slam dunk for the defense and hands the case off to her new associate and – she hopes – her future partner in the firm, Dominique, to get her feet wet in a courtroom. Clients are never completely honest with their lawyers and Ro and Dominque soon learn this one is no exception.

Slam dunk? More like a pipe dream…

MEET THE AUTHOR

Anne Hagan is part-time employee and full-time author. She and her wife live in a tiny town that’s even smaller than the Morelville of her mystery fiction novels. Anne’s wife grew up there and has always considered it home. Though it’s an ultra-conservative rural community, they’re surrounded there by family, longtime friends and many other wonderful people with open hearts and minds. They enjoy spending time with Anne’s son, with their nieces and nephews and doing many of the things you’ve read about in her books.

CONNECT WITH ANNE HAGAN

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Thanks so much for stopping by today.