The Halftime Heist
The control booth above a sold-out college basketball arena, 37 seconds before the halftime buzzer, where someone has left a master key in the T-shirt cannon.
Double and Bust are running the halftime promotions for the NCAA regional semifinal in Tulsa. The sponsor, a regional mattress chain called SleepKing, has pre-loaded the T-shirt cannon with 200 rolled shirts — but Double just discovered that the intern accidentally stuffed envelope #77, containing a $14,000 grand prize voucher, into a shirt that's already in the barrel. The cannon is aimed at Section 114, but the SleepKing CEO is sitting in Section 202 and has been texting furious emojis about 'brand visibility in the upper deck.' Double wants to crank the PSI to max and arc the entire payload into the nosebleeds. Bust is pointing at the pressure gauge, which is already in the yellow.
“We hit the upper deck, the CEO stops texting, and whoever catches envelope 77 remembers SleepKing forever. It's a cannon, Bust — it's SUPPOSED to be loud.”
“The gauge has a yellow zone and a red zone, and you want to discover what's past red by firing 200 projectiles into a crowd eating nachos.”
Double cranked the PSI past yellow into uncharted territory and the cannon launched 200 rolled shirts in a magnificent arc that cleared Section 114 entirely, rained across the upper concourse, and deposited envelope #77 directly into the lap of the SleepKing CEO's nine-year-old nephew in Section 202, Row F, Seat 3 — who burst into tears of joy on the jumbotron while 14,000 fans chanted 'SLEEP KING' in unison. The pressure gauge needle bent past red into a zone the manufacturer apparently labeled 'warranty void.'
That kid is going to sleep like a KING tonight, and the gauge was just being conservative — gauges are the Busts of instruments.
We are alive only because the T-shirt cannon industry apparently over-engineers for exactly this type of person.