I think the gardner was Ricardo, though it is possible I got the gardner/lover and the invisible friends names mixed up.
Slee
D’OH :smack:
Not sure how I managed that double post…
Anyway, to answer the question from **Koxinga **, I talked to Mr. X a couple weeks before the murder. The murder made the national news. Freaked me out when I realized I had talked to Mr. X. The ‘friend’ Mr. X had me talk to was apparently part of his delusion. The guy was seriously nuts.
Slee
Indeed! In fact, whenever ‘burnt hotdog man’ came in to eat while I was working, he’d catch my eye, grin and give me a thumbs up even before he ordered. And I’d get started carbonizing a hotdog for him. Occasionally, I could pass it to the front, at the same moment I was getting the order from the front. (Both the customer and I considered that to be true fun.)
Jesus. And here I’d just assumed Fernando was a dinosaur.
That’s what I thought… Creepy as hell.
I will have to mark the calendar for next June. I’ll start planning for it now. (heh)
All in favour of celebrating Prehistoric Creatures Day from here on out say Aye.
Man that’s great, I wish I’d had customers like that when I worked at a restaurant. Unfortunately for my I had a lot of BAD customers, most of which I have thankfully blocked out.
One lady I remember sat down at a table (customers seated themselves when it was slow) by the window and freaked that it was dirty still. This restaurant never had more than 2 people on in the evenings, plus the cook, so I had been helping the customers that has JUST left (walked right past her as she was coming in) and the other was restocking the sauces in the back. So she walked past me as I finished with the register and sat down.
There was a whole restaurant of clean tables, and heck the next table over was still in the window (same size, everything) if she so desperately wanted a window seat but she had to have that table. So I immediately cleaned it, served her politely etc along with her friends when they arrived and never got a tip at all.
Yeah, had he been talking to the dead guy it would have been even more creepy. As it was it was creepy enough though.
I had one other call that was creepier. That one invloved child abuse. It was ugly. Short recap-A father called in because his 10 year old daughter had been having IM conversations with another 10 year old girl. The daughter went to Dad because her friend was saying gross stuff in the IMs.
Turns out that the second girls dad was abusing her sexually. The first girls Dad called AOL instead of the cops for some reason and got me. I bumped it to operations security (after having to read some of the IM conversation in question-the Dad have copied and pasted them into email). The story ends with the father of the second girl going to jail for a very long time for sexual abuse of a minor.
That call sucked though the story ends as best it could at that point. The abusive Dad went to jail for a long time and the girl got help. But it still disturbs me.
Slee
Oh man. Where do I start? Should I mention my job at a newspaper in Oregon several years ago? Once I had to talk to a guy who was obviously strung out and his skanky wife about how even though the police found a POUND of marijuana in his house, they were actually just out to get him. He left the building waving his arms in the air, yelling “Conspiracy! Conspiracy!” freaking out the classified ad girls by the front door.
Then there’s the gas station I worked at for several awful months a few years before that in Columbus, Ohio. I think all the weirdos came out on weekends or something. I had a guy threaten me because I ordered his dog out of the store (we sold food; it was a health code violation). I had an Asian guy come in and buy 26 cartons of Marlboros. I had two young guys come in and ask my advice about putting oil in their car. I walk out to take a look and notice they had been pouring oil into the break-fluid reservoir. :rolleyes:
I also had two different women claim they didn’t know how to pump gas, and could I please show them? One was a middle-aged lady from New Zealand who didn’t know how to work an American gas pump. Her accent was real enough, so I just showed her how.
The other one though was a real doozy, though I eventually bought her story as well, figuring no one could make something like this up. She was a true Southern belle (again, accent and all) with makeup and hair right out of “Dallas,” circa 1978. She was 26, and had just got her Masters of Library Science from some school in Kentucky. She bought her car the day before with a full tank of gas, and drove it all the way to Columbus overnight, coasting into the station on fumes. She’d never pumped gas in her life before, and needed me to show her how.
Of course I showed her. What can I say? I’m a sucker for that Southern drawl. 
I love this story so much that I’m contemplating celebrating Prehistoric Creatures Day. Or maybe turn it into “take a squeaky toy out to dinner” day, but without the squeaking. We do have a rubber squeaky sumo penguin who’d love to go out for a nice dinner.
My Boy Scout troop was known for bringing our penguin to every meal with us at summer camp. Rivalry and hilarity ensued when another troop kidnapped him and held him hostage one summer.
When I was in Junior ROTC in high school, we had a week-long summer training thing called Summer Leadership School. One of the weirdnesses of this school was the presence of numerous inanimate officers. Lieutenant Chokes was a rubber chicken, Colonel Bomb was a mock bomb made from sheet metal and with an Air Force uniform painted on him. While going about our day, we had to keep an eye out for theses officers and render proper courtesies whenever we saw them.
Back to the point, each day, one flight had the privilege of dining with Lieutenant Chokes, and they had to report to their flight commander what Lieutenant Chokes had for lunch.
“Sir, Lieutenant Chokes had a salad and some water for lunch today.”
Flight commander looking into rubber chicken’s mouth “Then why can’t I see any food in there?”
“Sir, Lieutenant Chokes is an anorexic!”
“LIEUTENANT CHOKES IS NOT ANOREXIC! GET ON YOUR FACE AND START PUSHING DIRT, CADET!”
IIRC, one of the basic training squadrons on Lackland AFB has cardboard Airmen and officers all around the outside of their dorm building, which you’re expected to render the proper courtesies to as well. I think it was 321 TRS or 323 or something.
326 and 324 both have them, I think. 321 got closed down back in January, I think, so I don’t know what they used to do.
Woah! Why did 321 get closed down? (Not that I remember it being a particularly stellar squadron…)
The way we heard it at Basic was that 321 was a bit overly enthusiastic in their training methods, and it was decided just to close down the whole thing and send everyone to the other squadrons. Oddly enough, many of the instructors ended up in the 319th, one of the most laid back squadrons in the 737th Group (at least, it’s laid back if you’re in Medical Hold or Fever Flight. It’s somewhat less laid back if you are in the Get Fit Flight, but I don’t think any of those instructors came from 321).
I was in 319 TRS for a long time (2+ months) in medical hold, and the Get Fit flight was in 323 at that time. A lot has changed, apparently.
319 TRS had some serious problems back then. The long-term dorm chief for what was then the only medical hold flight (it later split into four IIRC) was fond of saying that he had the worst job in the Air Force, and when I became dorm chief there I was inclined to agree with him.
What’s Fever Flight?
I’m pretty sure I had that guy’s brother, in a bookstore in Oregon. The conversation began pleasantly enough, with me leading him off to the photography section. Just seconds later, he was shouting about bases on the moon with his whole contorted face in my face.
Then there was the cranky old muttery lady who returned “Astral Projection in 90 Days” because (I swear) “it should work faster.”
I love bookstore loonies. They’re in a class by themselves.
Well, I get the impression that the current Get Fit Flight is only the current incarnation of it, dating back to some time last year. From what I understand, it gets closed down and then restarted every few years, depending on various circumstances like how the flight and its mission are perceived by the higher-ups.
319 still had some serious problems when I left medical hold back in July. Lots of the trainees there just don’t care, and refuse to listen to anyone without stripes on their shoulders, and on occasion, not even those guys. You have folks there doing stuff like breaking into the snack machine and stealing all the candy, and then wondering why they stop restocking the snack machine.
When I was in dorm B6, the charming fellow who was dorm chief at the time threatened to throw me out a second story window and then jump out the window after me so he could punch me after I hit the ground (a threat that was so over the top, my only response was to laugh at him).
The Fever Flight is basically a quarantine flight. If you get sick, and have a fever, they pretty much throw you in there until your symptoms clear, in order to limit the spread of the Adeno virus in the 737th Group. You can get sent there any time while in basic, up to and including the day you ship out for Tech School, since they don’t want anyone spreading anything to other training squadrons outside of Lackland. Nobody wants to get sent there, because it’s a black hole, and due to the almost total lack of any kind of MTI presence, some folks apparantly never want to leave. I joked that the Fever Flight merely needed more cowbell, and sadly, not many folks around me got the joke and had to have it explained to them.
I may well have played some part in that. 2+ years ago, I came out of the Get Fit flight a little more broken than I went in.
:eek: Shit, that didn’t happen when I was there. But we had a lot of suicide attempts, and people snuck down to that little patio and filled their canteens with Sprite and stuff, and when an actual Airman stayed there for a while they’d bug him and bug him about using his cellphone until he let them, then they would all get in trouble.
The only criminal thing I remember going on was when a bunch of trainees from the separation dorm (right after it split off from the main medical hold dorm) stole a bunch of cellphones from the BX. Well, that and the blanket parties.
BTW, do they still have Toilet Licker detail at B6? (Not literally–when I was dorm chief I started Toilet Licker duty for the one guy who caused the dorm the most trouble, which meant that the latrine chief was to give him the most unpleasant latrine work until he redeemed himself by some other means. The name was a dig at another trainee who separated a little bit before I did. Trainee Gary or something, total nutball–he would actually lick the toilet seat, of his own volition, to get it clean. I used to tell Gary stories to the kids making up mental disorders to get kicked out for to remind them that they’re not mentally ill.)
When I was at the 319th (aka the Chair Force), the record was a guy who stayed in for nine months, doing physical therapy that got him nowhere. They finally sent the poor guy home and I don’t think he was the same after that. I can’t imagine. I was in for 3 months and that was somethin’.