Ever tell you about the time we went to Chicago?

Round trip from Pittsburgh to Chicago then back in under sixteen hours.  We'd tell people we did this and they'd say, "That's impossible."  We'd just shrug.

The reason for the quick turn-around was because we were in Chicago for only an hour and a half.  There was a specific place we wanted to visit, the closed for the evening offices of a board gaming company.

See, Smiler also manufactured board games.  One was this economic railroad game, the game's playing surface a laminated mil-spec map showing where the mines are in Western regions of the United States. 

You could draw on the laminate surface with a crayon and using your play money to pay you could draw your rail line, stretch by stretch, to the various mine.  Once you reached a mine you could turn a profit.  In the summer of 2002 I was thinking about that board game and had a nasty question pop into my head: who else, besides board gamers, could use mil-spec maps of American mines that you could draw on with a crayon?

Anyway at the back of the board game company's building I watched Smiler do a little dumpster diving to retrieve some critical date from this company he considered a competitor.  He also said one time he hacked into their computer system.  I asked him how he did it and he said, "I told their computer I was its daddy."

Smiler drove out to Chicago, I drove back.  I was The Wheelman from Hell that night.  The last hour home I drove in my sleep.  

So I got my start in industrial espionage and it's been a quick climb up the ladder of success ever since.