Tales of Dickery: "Our Best Boy"

“Our Best Boy”

Ah, PJ- mine and Chris’ good for nothing, good intentioned, and good natured, artard of a teammate and classmate. And let me go on record as saying: “Chris, he was your guy.”

PJ is the mayne, I mean man, responsible for coming up with some of the most asinine ideas for shooting our videos, failing to help out editing in anyway, totally screwing up everything he actually shot and edited, and totally hooking Chris and I on pronouncing the word “man” as “mayne” (as in Kenny Mayne from Sportscenter) or possibly “main”. I really don’t know how to spell it, as it’s developed its own sound over the years. Let’s just say if you’ve ever heard us say it, you know what I’m going for here.

But he was a sweetheart and also the butt of a collective dickeration on the part of Chris, myself and our other teammate, Matt. And I’ll never once apologize for it.

Our team was at the end of the semester of our Video 2 class, and we were working on our final project, a “how to” video for running the college radio station booth. We were in the editing stages, and were getting to the credits of the video, when PJ pretty much for the first time since the start of the project sticks his head in the booth and asks if we need his help.

“No, we’re good. You can get back to whatever it was that you were doing.”

“Ok, mayne.”

Chris and I had long ago decided that we didn’t need PJ and that cutting him out entirely from the whole process was no loss and just getting rid of excess parts from a well oiled machine. Any time Matt questioned the decision, we just reminded him of PJ’s awesome idea to get a shot in our very first video (“Hey, mayne. Why don’t we mount the camera to the ceiling so we can get the overhead shot that way?”) It never took more than that.

So there we were putting in the closing credits, thanking the lab tech who helped us, one of our other classmates with something, and then it came time to deal with PJ.

Matt: “Hey, we forgot to put PJ’s name with ours in the credits.”

Me: “No we didn’t.”

Matt: “Yeah we did. You put you, me and Chris but not PJ.”

Chris: “We didn’t forget him, because he’s not going in there with us. We can put him somewhere else.”

Matt: “Man, that’s wrong.”

Me: “Fuck him. What’d he do anyways? Even when he was here, he just stood around not doing anything or messing up what he did do.”

Matt: “But still…”

Chris: “Fine. He goes in, but not with us. He gets his own ‘special’ credit.”

Me: “How about ‘Our Best Boy’?”

Matt: “That’s messed up.”

Chris: “It’s perfect.”

Me: “It’s done.”

Matt: “Aw, man…”

Me: “You mean, ‘Aw, mayne..’ don’t you?”

A few days later and the class is watching the final videos. As per usual, ours is wiping the floor with everyone else’s’, minor audio glitch aside (that was so not our fault, and Reed agreed with us).

We get to the credits, PJ sees his, and I hear a little “Huh?” come from him. After the class is over, PJ comes to us and started the brief exchange:

PJ: “Mayne, what was with that ‘Best Boy’ stuff? I thought I was supposed to be with y’all on that.”

Chris: “You thought wrong.”

PJ: “But mayne, I helped you guys do all that stuff.”

Chris: “Bullshit. You helped yourself and your friends do whatever the hell it was that you were doing instead of helping us.”

PJ: “But I’m your teammate. I should get the same credit as you guys.”

Matt: “Not really.” (Way to go, Matt. Way to let him have it.)

Me (in a loud enough voice for the whole room to hear): “Look, if you don’t like it, you should have been there to stop us. We’re done here.”

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We did eventually tell our professor that we wanted PJ to get the same grade that we did (an A as usual) despite his efforts (or lack thereof). So everything worked out for everyone: we made another great video, we all got our standard issue A, and I got another Tale of Dickery.

Don’t you just love happy endings?

D