The dog didn't make it...

I was in Hong Kong on my way back from China in 1987, having dinner with a friend of my that owned three companies over there. They were in the clothing industry and I dropped him a call to tell him I was in town, so we had dinner overlooking Hong Kong Bay. We were generally catching up on several decades of non conversation as he was there and I was in Carthage. As the dinner progressed he told me of the plight of a photographer he had used with his company producing images for his advertising. It seemed as though this guy had an assignment to photograph a building in the downtown area and the only was he could get the shot was to photograph it from the building across the street. Inquiring about the possibilities of getting to the roof of the building and shooting, the owner of the building he wanted to shoot from told him that under NO circumstances could he get on the roof and complete the assignment.

Undaunted the photographer slipped through security and went to the roof to complete the shoot. The richest man in Hong Kong at that time owned a pink Rolls Royce, which, as luck would have it, the Rolls pulled up to the entrance of the building the photographer was shooting from. Looking down from the top of the roof the photographer saw the wife of the man step from the Rolls, reach in and grab her small dog and put on the ground. Leaning over to get a better look the photographer nudged the camera and tripod that was sitting on the edge of the roof and I think everything went suddenly into slow motion for him. The camera fell about twenty stories and scored a bullseye on the dog. I'm told he raced down the stairway, glanced to see that the dog expired and made a hasty retreat. My friend told me that he had heard that the photographer left Hong Kong for several months and was somewhat invisible for a time. He also noted that the wifes' husband was not happy that the dog didn't make it and had ordered a hit on the photographer.  Continuing, he also noted that he had heard that the photographer had returned to Hong Kong a week or so earlier and that if HE knew the photographer had returned, Mr. Big did also and that photographer was probably not among the living...

Moral.....be careful of tall buildings and small dogs...