The Kevin Klammermann

I should tell everyone that I left The Tony Morgan in a closet in Lausanne, Switzerland, by mistake.  May he rest in peace.  May I add I also left two long-sleeved shirts and two short-sleeved shirts.  May they have long and prosperous lives in Switzerland.  

At one of our stays the apartment didn't have a assigned parking space so we had to use a public garage.  I purchased a week-long pass because it was heavily discounted and I'm all about saving a few bucks.  When we returned to the garage for the first time I absentmindedly took a second ticket instead of using the weekly pass.  I'm an idiot for sure but in my defense the instructions were in German.  The next time we tried to leave the machine wanted us to ante up for another couple of days.  We backed up because we couldn't get out, certainly annoying the people in the cars behind us, and tried to explain our situation over an intercom system to a parking garage dude - Kevin Klammermann - who spoke very little English.  He clearly was becoming more and more frustrated and eventually said: "I'm coming to you - five minutes" and hung up the phone.  Kevin shows up on a bike and after some Google Translate interactions we get everything sorted out - he gives us a one-time pass so we can get out and emphasizes what we should do when we return to avoid this situation in the future.  We thanked him profusely.  Being a Swiss German he'd didn't come off as warm and fuzzy.  Who knows?  Maybe we interrupted his lunch.  Maybe he's responsible for more than two garages and he's tired of dealing with clueless tourists.  We were as kind as we could be given the language barrier - effusive in our thanks - and off we went.

So a few days later we show up at the car and it is completely, totally, irrevocably dead.  Dead.  Dead dead.  I have to use one of those emergency half-keys to even get inside.  No lights, no nothing.  What is it about this cursed parking garage, anyway?  I'm really starting to get an attitude about this parking garage, this inanimate, random location with no consciousness to accommodate the errors of one client.  Luckily, I had rented from one of the major car agencies so they dispatched a service van quickly and jumped the battery and we were good to go.  As we were thanking the fluent-in-English kid who was helping us who should walk up but our old buddy Kevin Klammermann.  He gives the kid a pass so he can get out, too, and they speak in German for a minute.  "Left your lights on," the kid tells us, clearly relaying a Klammermann comment.  I'm sure I did.  It was a rental car that I was unfamiliar with and I bet that there was some kind of warning dinging as I left and I'm just as sure I figured it was not that important.  Why would I figure that a dinging car alarm was not important, you might ask?  This is a good question to which I offer no reply.  I choose not to answer.

Kevin Klammermann, of course, was as friendly and polite as he could be.  Very helpful in all regards, Kevin Klammermann was.  In tribute I bought a new vest in Switzerland which will be known now and forevermore as The Kevin Klammermann.