Chickens! Chickens! Everywhere!
The origins of this story go back to our Myrtle Beach Syndicate World Conference. At that conference, some years back, Wilki and Mr. Tact from the Ultima Online team at EA, were our guests. We rented a large beach pavillion and held a cookout on the beach for dinner one night. We bought so much food for the event, that a lady behind us in line at the store asked if we were shipping a truckload of food to New Orleans for Katrina relief. It must have seemed that way since we way over estimated what we needed. Since chicken takes longer to cook than burgers and hotdogs, we ended up with dozens of piece of chicken back in the refrigerators in our suites to munch on for the rest of the weekend.
Throughtout the remainder of the weekend, someone individually wrapped all the pieces to make it nice and easy to grab one and go. They also made it really easy to grab them and stuff them into Wilki's unattended luggage on the last day as he was inside the suites (and his luggage was outside in the hallway) saying goodbye. It is amazing how much chicken you can fit into someone's bags. Stories began to arrive later that day from members who went to the airport the same time Wilki did and saw him sitting by a trashcan pulling piece after piece of chicken from his bags.
There is, however, an important lesson in all this... and that lesson is that the developer always gets the last laugh. A couple of years passed since the conference. Wilki remained friends with us and his role at EA changed from the Community Team to the Development team. Long story short, in late 2007 he left the UO team to complete a degree he was working on in school. In the last patch he implemented before he left, he did get the last laugh. The Syndiate has an island city in game we call Arx Draconis. Wilki implemented a new spawn in the game... a spawn of chickens.. lots of chickens.. all over the island.. everywhere you go, there are chickens. The squawk.. they trip you up.. they are everywhere. So in the end, Wilki had the last laugh with his perpetual chicken spawn. Thanks buddy! :)
