I'm compiling a List of Weird Experiences. Share.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1
  1. About a year ago. My mother takes me up to LensCrafters in the mall to get my new glasses perscription filled. Due to the fact that I have a v. strong perscription and needed the ultra-light lenses, and wanted the anti-reflective coating, it took more than an hour. So we return later that day, and I say to the woman, “Hi…I’m here to pick up my glasses,” and give my name.

She shuffles to the bin behind the counter and shuffles through it, then finds the properly-labelled case. She stops, turns back to me, and gives me an utterly confused look. “How many pairs?”

An odd question, but somewhat understandable, I suppose. “Just one,” I say.

She blinks at me. “Oh! Well, you said glasses.” Her emphasis was on the second syllable. That left me pondering if that was, in fact, the plural. Should I have said, “I’m here to pick up my glass?”

But the oddness continued. I tried them on, to make sure they fit properly and the lenses were right.

Whooo. No, they’re not, because the room should not quiver when you put on your glasses. The right lens was horribly wrong. I squinted, shutting my left and right eyes alternately, tyring to figure out if only one lens was bad, etc. “Uh, I don’t think this is the right perscription,” I said. “I can’t really…see out of it.” I’m still doing the squinty thing, because - well, it was a natural reaction.

Madam Slow says, to my mother, “Well, tell her to open her eyes!”

Turned out the tech in back had simply mis-read the perscription. When we finally got it sorted out and I recieved the correct lenses, they tried to charge us for two pairs. This was (to my surprise), not because of the “Well, you said glasses,” idealogy that LensCrafters apparently embraces. They had to make the lenses twice, so we should be billed twice. The whole experience was quite surreal.

Story time of the Surreal, anyone?

2

That woman sounds wrong in the head. Some serious mis-wiring of the brain.

The only thing I can remember…

My previous job as a produce-aisle employee at Safeway - A woman approaches me and says

“Have you got any breed?”

“Breed?” I say.

“Yes, Breed” I give her a blank stare, until a fellow employee whispers in my ear.

“She means bread”. He takes her to the bread.
It didn’t sound like the scotish or irish pronunciation of ‘bread’. If anything her accent sounded mild. Bit she said ‘breed’ so definately that It did not even begin to occur to me that she meant ‘bread’.

3

I met a girl one term at college who was … unique.

Now, normally unique is … well, not her. She was something else.

This girl had DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly called MPD). But as far as she, her doctors and family could figure out, it was triggered by no trauma whatsoever, it just happened. So she’d be in her body for most of the day … a British pagan lesbian who didn’t smoke.

And then Jordan would come along. Jordan was a slightly older farm boy from Iowa who did smoke and sounded midwestern. He was in the “straight but not narrow” camp and was distressed because he had an audition at UCLA (this is the east coast where I met her) the next day for Agamemnon.

His handshake was a good bit more firm than Amy’s (the girl). He smoked, sne couldn’t stand the smell or taste. Once he was smoking when she came back. I knew she was back because she started hacking and coughing and spitting and took about half an hour to right herself. It was about six kinds of bizarre.

I talked to him a few times and Amy a few more (he didn’t always show up when we were together). Utterly bizarre stuff.

One day, evidently, one of Jordan’s female friends showed up (Jordan had an active life online from what little I was able to find out). So Amy had to explain, I think, what was happening to a landlady who was not … well, completely receptive to the idea of someone showing up without being cleared first. That and apparently this female friend thought Jordan was physically male, and said landlady was very curious to know why anyone by that description would be living in the same place as Amy (landlady did not allow a male to live with her, I think).

When I last saw her, Amy was walking away from me with flowers in one hand, trying to explain everything to the girl and landlady.

That might be the weirdest experience I ever had. I really hope it is, anyway.

4

One of my first jobs after leaving home was as a P.C. tech for a dodgy computer outfit. This was the mid-eighties – I was 16.

The sheer fly-by-nightism would have been weird enough – I lived on-site with another techy guy, and one of the common jobs was dangerously overclocking cheap MBs (which in those days meant replacing the oscillator which drove the clock chip,) so they could be sold at a premium. There was also a lot of smuggling and shady practices. Actual pay often failed to materialize and we were compensated with gear which had of course been gotten on credit.

What made it truly weird was that the place was run by a group of renegade Scientologists who were illegally in Canada. These folks are what Scientologists call “squirrels” – folks who take the Scientology “tech” and run with it, spreading it around without (gasp) paying for the course materials. So the job training involved important techniques such as “matching tone” or “emulating” customers. (Bringing people around to your way of thinking by imitating their attitude and beliefs long enough to get their confidence and affinity, and then walking them with little baby steps into whatever you’ve set out to convince them of from the outset. You know, basic con-man/brainwashing stuff.)

Probably the strangest duty I was ever assigned was to stay behind while everyone else was away in Washington state, in order to guard one of their residential properties against the persistent demonic attacks that had been troubling them. Oh yeah, and to feed the pets.

Alas, one morning I awoke to find a sheriff in my “bedroom,” who was there to sieze all the company’s assets in order to satisfy their creditors. Of course, that included all the nice gear that I had been “paid” with.

I got a less culty job pretty soon after that.

5

Just a minor surrealness.

My aunt lived in an old mansion which I loved to visit. I was, perhaps, ten years old at the time, and had spent the night. Late in the morning, I’m on the first floor in the library reading a book, and I heard my aunt calling me. I followed the voice and found her in another room, had a pleasant chat with her about the upcomming days events, then began to walk to another room and realized I was on the second floor. I swear with G-d as my witness I never walked up any stairs. The room my aunt was in was on the second floor, and I am -certain- I started on the first.

6

When Bluesman and I were living on base in Misawa, Japan, we were lounging in the bedroom watching one of the few channels provided to us by the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, or AFRTS. This particular channel was an AFRTS feed from the west coast that consisted mostly of news shows.

So we were there, watching Headline News, when suddenly the picture cuts to a close up shot of a room of a dollhouse. Hopping across the floor of this room was one of those little wind up hopping penises you see as gags in, say, Spencers. It lasted for about 3 seconds, and then was cut off, and one of those “We’re having technical difficulties, please stand by” messages came on.

Now mind you, this is right in the middle of a feed of CNN on a military network. Bluesman and I turned to each other and said “Please tell me you just saw that.” Thank fate we were both there, or one would have thought the other crazy when they tried to describe it.

7

I run into people.

When I was in college and studying in Jerusalem, I went to Italy on a break. Standing on a corner in Rome, I heard someone calling my name. A girl I was at school with in J’salem was standing on the other side of the street. And then I ran into her again, the next day, at the Vatican.

In J’salem, I ran into several people I knew from my home university in California - a girl I’d taken Hebrew with, the former director of my Hillel, and most bizarrely, a girl I’d taken an anthropology class with. It was most bizarre because I didn’t recognize her at ALL. She approached me and seriously freaked me out. Then I ran into her a few more times throughout the year, but once I knew her, it wasn’t surprising because the American expats all tend to congregate in the same areas.

There were two other American girls living on the floor of my dorm in J’salem. They were both called Julie and were both from Chicago. I wasn’t really close with either and didn’t keep in touch after returning to the US. Now, keep in mind, I was living in my home state of California at the time and had no plans to move to Chicago, but lo and behold, here I am. In the six months I’ve lived here, I’ve run into both Julies (and it’s not like Chicago is a small burg!). And neither one in a “Jewish” place where I might be keeping my eyes open for someone I know. One of the Julies was close with my roommate in Israel (whom I got along with, but the truth is we had nothing in common and after returning to the US, we didn’t stay in touch), and told me that she will be moving to Chicago from New Jersey soon, so I look forward to running into her soon as well.

8

The weirdest thing that happened to me in recent memory was during last winter. This is the account I wrote of it when it was fresh in my memory:

My husband, our friend and I were walking through the public gardens downtown. Our friend and I were wearing our wool cloaks (warmth! comfort!) a guy started following us, really really close. I thought he was just trying to pass us, so I was trying to get out of the way, but he started talking to us, telling us we were snooty, and that he was going to keep following us. He also said something about having a nice open vein for us. The public garden was kind of empty so we lit out for the nearest street and planned to head into a starbucks across the street.

He was still following. We had to stop at a traffic light, and he actually pressed his entire body against my side. I nearly hit him, but really didn’t want to escalate the situation. SO we go into starbucks, he’s still following. We sort of wait to get the barrista’s attention and the guy is hanging with my friend and I and going on about how he’s going to follow us forever because we’re vampires.

I get the barrista to call the cops. Stalker guy is still standing about a half inch from me. The barrista gets the cops on the phone and they want to talk to me. The dispatcher is asking for a description and I’m giving her details, and she asks “wait, he’s right there?” and I say yes, he’s standing there… and that he said we were vampires. Which she had to double check with me. Apparently not many people have that problem.

The dispatcher tell us to wait right there and I repeat out loud, “OK, the cops are coming, I gave them a full description, they said to wait here.” He hung around for a few more minutes but eventually that scared him off.

The cops come, and want to know do we want to press charges if they can catch creepy stalker guy. We say no, just watch out for us as we get back somewhere safe and away from there (which they did, from their van, shadowed us) and then patrolman 2 says “So, are you what he said? Because I never met one.”

It was weird, and incredibly scary at the time. I felt physically angry the whole time it was going on, and also protective of my husband and friend. I have no fighting skills but I was really ready to snap if he tried anything. Ugh.

9

I once knew a guy who was into fruit… so to speak…

10

:eek: :eek: :eek: !!

11

This weekend while driving down I-94 we saw a guy (a lone driver) waving a toothbrush out his window. Still trying to figure that one out.

12

“Our group has got our thesis together.”
“Feces?”
“Thesis.”
“It’s pronounced “Feces”, dear. Why would you gather feces?”
“We’ve done our work!”
“Oh, why didn’t you say so?”

-Gadfly vs. Senile, Batty English Supply Teacher

13

In the spring of 1994, I dreamed about being in Sweden. In the dream I was about to board a large boat at night when I noticed that there were big signs in English which said Danger, Do Not Board, and Bad Boat. I boarded anyway. It was actually a ship rather than a boat. Large enough for a big crowd of people. I remember a wedding reception taking place once we were at sea.

At some point the ship capsized. I remember the bride’s veil making a large circle as she was tossed around. That’s all that I remembered.

I wrote about the dream in a dream diary that I was keeping and forgot about it. I quit keeping the diary a few weeks later.

It was another couple of years before I came across the dream that I had written down. This time when I read it I felt absolutely sick. In September of 1994 the Swedish ferry the Estonia went down off the coast of Finland at night. Over eight hundred lives were lost. About a thousand people were on the ship that night. It was on its way to Stockholm.

To make it even stranger, I had once been on a ferry that was like this one. If I understood correctly, four of them were put into service at about the same time in Scandanavia. They were the kind of ferries that would hold two or three hundred cars and part of a passenger train. The one I had taken sailed between the island where Copenhagen, Denmark is located (Zealand?) and the smaller island of Fyn (Funen).

But I had sailed on a larger vessel somewhat close to where the Estonia went down (within about 200 miles) when I went to an island (Bornholm) off the coast of Sweden and Poland. (Sorry that I can’t spell it the correct way, Scandanavians.)

But both the trip to Funen and Bornholm took place over 22 years before the sinking of the Estonia. I had not been back to Europe since.

I hope that I have hurt no one’s feelings by relating this. I think that almost every Swede and many Estonians and Finns lost family and friends that night. I don’t treat the dream lightly.