I have one to share. This happened a few years ago and prompted a laughing fit so bad I nearly burst something.
I was getting my oil changed at a place where you sit in the vehicle while they work. I was driving my little white pickup truck (I loved/hated that truck) and the oil guy pops the hood. All of a sudden he yells **“Hey Lady! (A-la Jerry Lewis) Your pizza is ready!” **and holds up a slice of pizza. I was completely dumbstruck- what the hell? Was he showing me his lunch? Was he insane?
He comes over to my window holding a slice of pizza. He told me that some animal must have picked it out of the garbage and smuggled it up inside my truck (where it was warm) to eat. Apparently he didn’t like Pizza Hut with everything on it, so he left it. Right on top of my air filter. (It really was the exact same pizza we had for dinner a few days prior- I had indeed thrown some away, and our garbage was outside)
Thing is, the whole idea struck me as the strangest thing I’d ever heard. He tells me “Oh, we see it all the time”, which makes it even MORE funny to me. I am hysterical- laughing, embarassed, confused. He goes on to list all the strange stuff they’ve seen under car hoods. The more he goes on and on (very matter of factly) the harder I’m laughing. It took about 3 months before I could tell that story without laughing myself to tears. I still go to that oil place, and they guy ALWAYS yells “Hey Lady! Your lunch is ready!” or something to that effect.
My parents got their Cat, O.D. (stands for Overdose, she’s 35 pounds) that way.
Mom drove our truck home from work one cold winter’s day, and as she turned off the engine, she heard this pathetic mewing sound coming from somewhere. She searched for about 20 minutes before she realized it was coming from under the hood. She popped the hood and sitting on top of the air filter was this little fat black kitten. O.D. had apparently snuck up in there to get warm and ended up getting the ride of her life.
My mom and dad immediately adopted her, and she’s now become the Queen of Sheba in my childhood home. That silly cat actually lays down to eat, and it’s never a suprise to find her asleep with her head in the food bowl. God, she’s fat. Oh well. My weird car engine story.
I met a woman at a bar in Arlington, VA. We talked through the evening, and came around to the fact we both had had braces. I mention that I once had a local orthodontist contact my original orthodontist so that the former could remove two last bands. He found out that my original doctor had died in a plane crash.
Then she gets a look on her face. Her orthodontist had died in a plane crash too. “Dr. Christiansen!” we both said together.
We had gone to the same orthodontist 1600 miles away 8 years before. She lived in a small town in Utah, and I lived in a city in Colorado where out doctor practiced. We may have been at his office at the same time, but I probably wouldn’t’ve noticed her; I was 20 and she was 13.
My favorite bizarre incident also involves a black kitten:
I was lounging about one fine spring day at the parade ground on LSU campus (big open field surrounded by wonderful old oak trees). Five kittens were entertaining me–someone had brought a litter of half-grown, coal-black kittens with hopes of giving them away. They had climbed the oak I was sitting under and were running around and playing in its branches.
Then along came a jerk to spoil it–one of the Fundy fanatics who liked to stand on benches in front of the Student Union and harangue people decided to take the show on the road. He started pestering me–he wanted to know what my religion was; telling him that I didn’t care to discuss it only made him more persistent. Overhead, an altercation had begun over right-of-way among the kittens; I didn’t notice. I stood up to leave; he moved to block my way and demanded that I tell him what religion I followed. Really angry now, I glared at him; the silence was broken only by the squabbling kittens. Then I said, “I’m a witch.”
At that very moment, one of the kittens lost his case in Oak Tree Traffic Court and came tumbling from the tree–and made a perfect 4-paw landing on my right shoulder. He froze there (in shock, I suppose) staring straight into the Fundy’s eyes. Said eyes promptly assumed the dimensions of saucers and vanished as the jerk fled.
I don’t normally keep pets, but I would have adopted that cat on the spot if he hadn’t gone running after the Fundy a moment later. I never saw either of them again.
I have one, but doesn’t hold a candle to Balance’s story, and I don’t know if it’s so much bizarre as it is just a strange coincidence. Mr. Legend and I were at a hot springs in southern New Mexico last spring when we struck up a conversation with another couple. We chatted a while and they mentioned that they were from Maine. It turns out that they were my German half-sister’s ex-neighbors, and we’d actually heard stories about each other from her.
My story has to do with a fundie as well. I live on a college campus, and work on yet another one, so I get to see quite a few of those travelling preachers. At one point a few years ago, I was in the presence of a particularly annoying one, but seeing as I had about an hour before I had to be anywhere, I sat down to watch.
This fundie, unlike some of the others I’ve seen, actually had a Bible in his hands the whole time, and also unlike others, actually referred to it from time to time. This, of course, didn’t make him any less of an asshole about it, but at least he was TRYING. A few groups of people away, a couple of guys were leafing through notebooks and binders furiously. I thought nothing of it, until one of them stood up, with a picture of some dude’s head and a HUGE binder of stuff.
The guy, who looked like your typical 'net geek, started preaching along with the Fundie. Thing is, he was preaching about something else. Or someone else, anyway. The guy had a pile of stuff about Bob Dobbs, and was preaching about the Church of the SubGenius.
The fundie had no idea what to do. He left soon afterwards.
I don’t know what was more bizarre–the fact that this random guy had all this stuff about Bob Dobbs on him (including what I guess was a picture of his head?), or the fact that he actually stood up and started preaching it. Either way, it was completely hilarious.
A mechanic once left a Mag-Lite, a pair of Channel Locks, a wire stripper and a soldering iron in the engine compartment of my old 1981 Pontiac. I figured that if he had the stones to call me to ask for them back, I’d return them. He didn’t and now they’re all in my toolbox.
He was at a gas station pumping gas. A disheveled-looking woman was using the other side of the same pump. While they were both waiting, she walked around to his side of the pump and stared at his feet. (He was wearing flip-flops.)
She said, “Who cut your toes?”
He does have large toes, but he didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. She asked him this question several times. She then paid for her gas and drove off down the four-lane highway, in the turn lane, with the car door open.
Maybe she was on her way to pick up some Thorazine.
Drain Bead, that’s hilarious! The guy had to have prepared that in advance. I would have paid good money (even when I was a poor but dishonest college student) to have seen him do that to one of our resident fanatics. I had a buddy who would have done it (in full-bore televangelist style, at that), but I never thought to gather the material for him. Hmmm…he still lives in that area–maybe I should go visiting.
BTW, he has a photo of an amusing minor incident in Bolivia (he was working with his GF, a tropical ecology student). He was standing on a road in a little town out in the middle of nowhere, doing his televangelist impression to amuse his companions on the trip. Lying unregarded a short distance in front of him was a pile of fruit peelings. Just as he struck one of the classic arms-spread-wide poses, a number of sheep barreled around the corner, scurried up, and bowed down their heads to eat the peels. The timing was perfect–someone snapped a photo. It’s labeled “Joe preaches to the flock.”
One my wedding day, I had hired a white limo to drive my mom and I to the church. The photographer met us there, and took a few shots of my mom helping me out of the car.
What we didn’t know at the time was that there was a BMW truck stopped at the light right beside the limo. The truck was white, and in the pictures, you really can’t see where the top of the limo ends, and the truck begins. On the truck, in big bold letters, was the phrase “We’re delivering someone’s baby!”. It looks like a caption above the shot of me getting out of the car.
If I had a decent scanner, I’d post a link to it.
Rose
Please stop! This is hysterical and I am laughing so hard I have a headache and damn near spit my ‘medicated orange juice’ on the monitor.
Then again, please continue. I guess I was overdue for a good laugh.
My contribution was already covered in “funeral faux pas” (don’t ask me to parse, the ‘medication’ is kicking in) when I showed up to a wake wearing the same dress as the corpse.
