Many years ago I was a volunteer counselor at a crisis intervention hotline. It was on Thanksgiving afternoon when the phone rang, and the caller, sounding very distressed, said that her relatives were already arriving for dinner, and her turkey, still frozen, wouldn’t fit in the microwave.
At the time I didn’t know about the Butterball Hotline, so I used the counseling skills I had been trained to use, and attempted to help the woman through her crisis. I reflected her feelings and empathized with her and explored how she felt about her options and reassured her that she wasn’t stupid (this took a great deal of effort). I was clearly getting nowhere with her, so I mentioned that among other things, we were a suicide hotline, and perhaps she could hand the phone to the turkey, so we could discuss its end-of-life situation. For a few seconds there was silence on the line, and then the woman stammered, “Oh . . . Oh, I don’t think that’s possible; it doesn’t have a head.”
I almost wet my pants.