Maxwell’s Fingerprint

Maxwell Parmaham was a short Scottish man with a very bad temper. He loathed people and often found himself hitting them repeatedly. When he was not flying off the handle, he was flying on an aeroplane. Although he wasn’t a people person, he was a damn fine pilot. He knew it and so did everybody else. His co-pilot, Geoff Dinghy, was a highly regarded flyer himself, but was only really brought on board to make the announcements. Geoff had won many awards for his voiceover work, most notably the Golden Molar for his role as narrator in an unsuccessful Wind In The Willows sequel, More Wind Just Outside The Willows.

One particular morning in November, Maxwell arrived at the airport and ordered his usual coffee. As ever, he drunk the coffee, complained about the coffee, bought a newspaper and headed over to his plane for his first flight, which on this particular day was to Moscow. Before he got to his plane though, he was stopped by security. This had never happened before, so Maxwell was quite vocal about his irritated reaction. The security guard – whose name badge said Kevin Munch, although this was not his name – informed Maxwell that there had been an incident involving another pilot the night before and for the next few days the security team would be making routine checks on all pilots.

Although disgruntled by this disruption, Maxwell conceded that it was necessary and allowed them to search and question him. It was when they asked for Maxwell’s fingerprint that he thought they were taking it a bit far. He refused to give it to them, but they were very insistent that they needed it and would not let him leave without giving it to them. What they didn’t know was that Maxwell Parmaham was a man of his word, so they had to keep him in the room for 5 hours before accepting that they would not get a fingerprint off of Maxwell’s digits. By this time, Maxwell had missed the Moscow flight, which was taken over by Geoff as the captain and the teenage girl from the coffee shop as the co-pilot. The flight went as well as could be expected and at least half the passengers made it out alive.