He had graduated from university with a PhD in chemistry and had intended to get a job in a lab but instead decided to get a job at a bottle depot. You may ask why, but I will get to that later in the story. His name was Bert Nichols. To many around him they thought he had become unhinged and decided to give up on his life and his career and take the easy way out by getting a dead end job at a bottle depot. Something with no pressure and no expectations. But all of these rumors were nothing close to the truth. During his last year at university he had begun to experiment with designer street drugs that he could make at home with common items you could buy at a grocery store or pharmacy. After about six months he had developed a drug that was more powerful than meth but not powerful enough to kill someone. The key in the formula was to make the drug as addictive as possible but also as cheap as possible. 

​David Banks was at one point in his career one of the most distinguished engineers in North America. But as he got older the technology and times changed. He had relied on his past performance to carry him through until retirement. During his early forties (which was at the peak of his success) he was living life in the fast lane with cocaine, escorts, and barrels and barrels of alchohol. Only a few years earlier he was thin and attractive but now he was heavy and looking more and more slovenly as he let his appearance slide. In his mid forties he was arrested for solicitation and that ended his marriage. His wife took the house and the kids, but David Banks was not overly concerned as he was still making well over 200,000 dollars a year as chief engineer at a reputable firm. Now that his wife and kids had left him he had become lonely and sunk further into drinking and depression. At the age of 50 he had erectile dysfunction and couldn't even visit the massage parlors any more. But he still had his job which defined his identity. 

He looked like a fatter version of the singer Rod Stewart. His name was Tim Spouse and I had heard of him through the grocery store grapevine. At this time in my life I was in my mid twenties working a graveyard shift at a grocery store. I was working at a store on the south side of the city and Tim Spouse was working at one in the West end. I had always heard stories of Tim Spouse, some of them good and others bad. Apparently he was an exceptional worker but he irritated people beyond their endurance. He also known to stay beyond his scheduled shift and then signed out for overtime. I was once told that he had a big mouth because he was a shop steward for the grocery union and felt that it was his job to agitate and upset the management.

​Back when I was a youth and playing baseball I had teammate named Gordan Smith who was a decent baseball player but a total goofball and idiot. He was a guy who liked to play pranks on all of us, but his pranks were usually of the grotesque variety and when we went out on the road to play games and were lodging in a hotel nobody wanted to stay with him. I remember when I had first met him and had the unfortunate privilege of staying with him in a hotel.