I can’t really participate because a number of my coworkers thought I was the weird guy in the office.
I think I’m becoming more prone to occasional comments/muttering to myself at work. My colleague next door asked me why I’d said something was “stupid shit” and I hadn’t realized I’d said that out loud, so maybe I’d better keep a better lid on vocalizing thoughts to avoid getting a reputation. :dubious:
Me neither, and what are you looking at? 
:mad::smack:
*Awhile back Mrs. J. and I were eating out at a fairly nice restaurant. We were talking about something and at one point (discreetly) laughing. After I had excused myself to use the restroom, our waiter approached Mrs. J. and asked if we were laughing at him (he was nowhere in the vicinity at the time). She assured him that no, that wasn’t the case at all. We found that a bit disturbing…:eek:
He’s not winning that easy.
I worked with a guy who was very odd in many ways. He claimed to be a “virtuoso soprano whistler”. He unconsciously would start whistling a tune he heard so we would amuse ourselves by humming some recognizable tune and see how fast he picked it up. It would rapidly progress from a simple melody to a impressive display of mouth and tongue work accompanied by conductor’s hand motions. All while doing what he was doing.
One time he was wiping something down with a dust-free cloth we often used and he sneezed. He must have blown the tissue to parts unknown. But he thought he had inhaled it! I mean, he was convinced. He claimed to have developed a breathing disorder. I’m pretty sure he visited a doctor, at least the one on call at work.
Another time he was using a Starrett angle scriber and it flipped into the air, never to be seen again. Later that day while changing his clothes he spotted a red mark on his back. He thought the scriber had pierced his skin and was lodged there. Here is the tool in question, you be the judge:
http://www.starrett.com/metrology/product-detail/67B
Years later we found the scriber on top of a beam. I wish I could recall more of his quirks.
Dennis
I will bare my soul and tell one of my own oddities. Long ago I realized that while you are sneezing you can actually vocalize with the outgoing air. I privately developed this. I eventually got good enough to exclaim this odd word while sneezing, “Mala hung gah”. I have no idea where it came from. Of course I would only do this when I was by myself, like working in the garage. No other human had ever heard that word.
Until the day I was preoccupied walking in a store and had to sneeze. OMFG. I surprised they still let me shop there.
Dennis
When my son was little we were at a nice restaurant and the waitress reached across the table for something and of course, said, “Excuse me.” After she left my son asked, “Why did she say excuse me?” I told him she had farted. The kid was fascinated with her from then on, I guess waiting for another performance.
Dennis
That sounds like a manifestation of Tourette’s Syndrome. I used to work with a woman who would do that every few minutes, and it sounded like someone was hacking up body parts. Nice woman, though, so we didn’t hold it against her and knew it was far more annoying to her than it was to us.
So tell us a little about yourself…
He could remember the '50s and the '70s, but had no recollection of the entire decade of the '60s. Once someone mentioned President Johnson, and he didn’t know who that was. He thought JFK had served two terms, then Nixon. He had never heard that JFK was assassinated.
We figured he must have been in some kind of institution for the decade. But even people in an institution received news of the outside world.
Once he had to take care of his neighbors’ cat over a weekend. He was freaking out, wondering how he could possibly be given that kind of enormous responsibility. His mother stayed with him all weekend, taking care of both him and the cat.
This makes me wonder if he had ECT or some kind of traumatic brain injury, which could include a brain tumor, and this wiped out a whole section of his memory and possibly the ability to form new memories for that period of time.
I volunteered with 2 guys painting a mural. They were obviously into each other. I was quite comfortable with their flirting and teasing. It meant I could just get on with the painting and not have to socialize. One day one of them was not there. I asked him if he was sad his boyfriend wasn’t there. He got all uppity and told me in no uncertain terms he wasn’t gay and never had been with a guy. I apologised and spent the day being mortified. A week or 2 later they showed up holding hands and kissed several times during the day. No explanations. Never could figure that one out.
Was he mentally retarded, possibly, or just weird?
Either way I’d love to hear some stories about this guy.
Just got off a conf call with him and am reminded of his most annoying trait. While other people are speaking, he vocalizes affirmative “mnn hnn” to indicate his agreement repeatedly throughout their statements. It adds nothing, interrupts the flow, and draws attention away from the speaker. Imagine, after every clause in this post, you would hear a clear “mnn hnn” from him. DRIVES ME UP A WALL, it does.
mnn hnn
I once worked with a woman who claimed to have “Multiple Chemical Sensitives.” Basically, everything made her dizzy, nauseous, or gave her a headache. Ask her to pile a file? “Oh, the filing cabinet is so dusty. It’s making me sick.” I asked her to open a box of signs “Oh, the plastic is making me feel like throwing up.” I pointed out they were metal signs “Oh, the paint must be doing it.” I once brought a cup of tea with Sweet ‘n’ into the office. “The smell of your coffee is giving me a headache.” I pointed out it was tea with sweetner. "Oh, that sweetner must be doing it. I feel sick. I have to go home.:
She got fired when I caught her printing out photos of naked men from out computer. Odd she could do that and it didn’t affect her at all.
The ink in her printer at home made her sick. The office printer has different ink, and it’s fine. 
No clothes to trigger an allergic reaction!
You meet a lot of odd ducks in the Foreign Service. At times, it seemed like it was some sort of haven for Misunderstood Humans. There was one man in Africa who made seemingly uncontrollable noises like a hornbill. Sort of a drawn out and very nasal “hawwww”.
Then there was the woman who was in charge of the supply warehouse at an African post, who was also a hoarder. I found all kinds of weird and obsolete crap in there, and the admin officer was constantly on her ass about getting rid of all that shit; things like boxes full of 18-columnar pads, which were the workhorse for accounting types right up until the invention of the computer; wrench sets for earth-moving equipment (of which we had none); piles of bits and pieces of suspended ceilings, none of it compatible with anything in the offices. On top of all that, she was unapologetically passive-aggressive and could spin me up into a homicidal rage in about two minutes.
^^Now I know why I was never in the foreign service. I would never be able to throw that stuff away. I would try not to wind you up, though.
I worked for the leading publisher of English language magazines in Egypt in the mid-2000s. Everybody was a journalist and/or editor of some flavor or another, or a graphic designer or photographer. And our hours were by necessity pretty crazy - before deadline we’d work until 2 in the morning. It was an environment that attracted a highly original, kinda crazy, group. Mostly it was great fun! I learned a lot of weird stuff, like the definition of “Cleveland steamers.”
One time they hired an editor, an Australian citizen, who was more than just “original.” (Probably out of desperation - it was hard to fill slots because the pay sucked.) She was completely lacking in social skills in a terrifying way. She was tall, big-boned, and athletic, and would power-walk to work with a furious stride that suggested she was just one neuron-fire away from beating the shit out of someone. Her attire was quite upsetting to all the Egyptians in the office. She typically dressed in cheap, gaudy clothes marketed to tourists - low-cut shirts with hieroglyphics, mini skirts with pyramid motifs, that sort of thing. Egypt has a pretty conservative culture, and revealing, tight-fitting clothes are not appreciated - they are tolerated on dumb tourists who bring in cash, but people who live there are supposed to know better.
Her behavior was textbook Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). She argued constantly, refused any request made of her, blamed everyone else for everything, and was generally exhaustingly unpleasant. Her behavior meant that none of the other editors could stand her, so they kicked her over to my department; I was chief of the copyeditors.
Needless to say, I did not welcome becoming her boss. She was FURIOUS at having been moved from an assistant editor job to a copyeditor position, seeing it as a huge demotion. It kind of was, but her constant belittling of the role of copyeditors - in front of all the other copyeditors - didn’t exactly endear her to us.
Our chairs (in fact all our stuff - tables, computers, file cabinets, etc.) were in terrible condition. One copyeditor was an older woman who had a bad hip. Ms. ODD decided that Bad Hip Lady had stolen her chair, and yanked it away while Bad Hip was sitting in it. Luckily there were no injuries but it was a frightening sign that Ms. ODD was capable of physical violence, not just verbal abuse.
Things eventually got bad enough that TPTB decided she had to be fired, which I had been pressing for practically from the day I became her supervisor (I had carefully reported all her nasty phone conversations, in which she represented us to outsiders in a strikingly bad fashion, in hopes they would let her go).
I was given the impression, in our conference, that I would have to tell her she was fired. In the event, they had security hustle her out (Egyptian security with guns, so even she couldn’t argue much).
Before things got out of hand, I’d felt sorry for her and had her over to dinner with my young son, so I’d have been terrified of reprisals, but luckily I moved houses at exactly the moment she was fired, so she didn’t know where I (or my pets or son) lived.
Interestingly, she had lived in the Middle East for a long time doing journalism, and was an ardent supporter of Palestine. Nothing wrong with that, but she was whacko extremist about it. She said she had been beaten badly by Israeli police before she moved to Egypt, and I have always wondered if she suffered a head injury then that accounted for her unrelentingly hostile affect.
She’s still out there. Her name is unusual so I can easily Google her from time to time. She writes pro-Palestinian screeds for extreme websites now. I have no idea how she makes enough money to live. Extortion would suit her skill set well.
Somehow I attract the Aspies in my office. They ignore me for 7 hours out of the day and then fit all that conversation into 40 minutes of firehose conversation. They don’t shower, they don’t use the Oxford comma, I’ve given up trying to manage it. I’m starting to think this is what I was put on earth to do.