In my second semester of freshman year at college I was living in my fraternity house. We had a box divided into cubbies on the wall by the front door for mail. I rarely got any mail, but one day there was a stack of fourteen invitation-size envelopes in my cubby. Each one was hand addressed to me, and each had a stamp. No return address. The post mark was from my home town (about 60 miles away.) Inside each envelope was a single index card with a single letter on it in marker. On the back of each card was a number, written very small. When I arranged the cards in numerical order it spelled “I Am Watching You.”
It definitely creeped me out and to this day I don’t know who sent them. I asked everyone I could think of and no one confessed. They went through an awful lot of trouble (and fourteen stamps) to never reveal themselves.
When I was a more regular bar goer, I had a favorite beer. And the bartender could see me drive up through the window in my shitbucket car and made eye contact when I got out. So a lot of the time my beer was poured before I made it inside. Gave a few people a bit of a surprise when I walked through the door, grabbed my beer off the waitress station and went to the dart boards in back.
Back in 1962, when I was in second grade, I walked to and from school on my own. Boy, that wouldn’t happen now.
Anyway, one day a car slowed down and my grandfather seemed to be the driver. But I turned down the ride.
Why? I don’t know, unless it wasn’t really my grandfather. He certainly never mentioned the incident to me, wondering why I wouldn’t take the ride.
I can only assume that for some reason it was a stranger, and I’d been taught about things like being wary of strangers, even back then. So why did I think it was my grandpa?
This totally sounds like the drops left by a bitch in heat - except for the time period. It is not unheard of for a bit of ovary to be left behind during spaying which can keep the hormones flowing without supporting actual pregnancy.
But six months is weird. If it happened once per year for a period of 1-2 weeks it would make more sense.
More likely one of the dogs had anal glands which were not emptying properly (soft poop can prevent them from getting squeezed out all the way.) Every so often the glands would swell up with lymph, oil and blood, and the dog would lick the painful spot until it emptied.
Was the stuff smelly? Not all dogs have particularly smelly excretions - others it’s like rotten fish.
Was it a hot Summer? There were times in August here in Virginia when newly tarred roads would get so hot during a heat wave that the rising heat would make a parting in the rain when it first started. The cool air and heavier rain would overwhelm it, but for the first couple of minutes, road and the path beside it would stay dry.
Confirmation bias is a good explanation.
It’s also possible that your right brain was trying to communicate with you. The right side of our brains is highly visual, and has no language. If you walked along the truck with your right side toward it, so that your left eye could see the indicators for these problems but your right eye couldn’t, then only that part of your brain would have gotten the message. The information would have entered the cerebral cortex and analysis/conclusions might be drawn without the language area of the brain having converted it into language and therefore “conscious” thought. You weren’t “aware” of the process until there was a reason to speak it.
We normally dismiss this process as “hunches” or “instinct” but in fact we can learn to recognize the input with training.
Maybe the last time you ordered it, someone wrote down the specific instructions, but also communicated it verbally. Then, on this day they happened to be cleaning up and the message surfaced. Assuming it was from that day, they made your sandwich.
Three possibilities you may not have considered:
your professor or TA. Were they female? Might you have automatically discluded them in your consideration of who may have called?
a woman in the class whom you did not find attractive. We tend to assume that only those we find attractive are attracted to us. That’s why assays from people not of our preferred type or gender can be so jarring.
you guessed right, but she was drunk enough when she did it not to remember, and too embarrassed to concede the possibility that it was her.
Do any of those have the ring of truth?
Mine: I had a best friend in high school who I spoke to several times per day. It was not unusual to pick up the phone to call her and find her already on the line, when the phone hadn’t even rung yet.
Fast forward twenty years or so. We hadn’t spoken in over fifteen years, for no particular reason other than our lives had diverged. (There was no rift or “break-up.”) Her name came up in a random conversation and I went to the phone book just to see if she was listed. I picked up the phone to call her, and she was already there.
Many years ago (1980-ish) I went to visit a girlfriend of mine in the midwest. Her (then) husband was a crafty type and at the moment he was into making clocks. He had made one in the shape of the state of Texas, and after I ooohed and ahhhed over it, and he said he would make me one.
A couple of months later, I was at work back home and was just going out the door to lunch with some coworkers. As we opened the door to leave, here came the mailman up the walk with a flat box. I thought, “Oh boy, my clock.” I knew my friend would send it to work, because I lived in an apartment complex and getting packages could be dicey. (This isn’t the mysterious part yet.)
I went back in my office and glanced at the clock on the wall. It said 12:20 (or something). I put the box on my desk, opened it, and there was my Texas-shaped clock. It was set to 12:20. There were no batteries in it yet. Mysteriously, it was set to the moment that I opened it.
Still have the clock-- it’s hanging on the wall in my home office as I type.
My post probably wasn’t clear enough: I got a message from a woman who claimed to be my classmate “Erin”. “Erin” said she wanted to study for physiology class with me (including reproductive physiology–there’s where the innuendo came in.) When I called “Erin,” it soon became obvious that “Erin” was not the one who left the message. I’m pretty certain it was a different woman in my class who left the prank message, only I don’t know which woman. No one outside the vet school would have known what subjects we were studying at the time. I’m almost certain it was not possibility number 3, because “Erin” was not the type to get drunk, and she already had a boyfriend.
Thanks to the OP for starting this thread; I’ve encountered a few things recently and want to show the board (and get opinions).
First an old one from a year ago. I still don’t know what these things were. I found them while looking for submerged towns with an underwater camera. Every time I lowered the camera they gathered on the lens, but were gone when I pulled it up.
More recently (in the last week) I’ve encountered two really strange things. I put the photos in a youtube slideshow, since I can’t log into photobucket today. The first slide is a really strange organic looking blob I found near the shore. I moved it to the bank with a long stick. It seemed to weigh about 7 or 8 pounds and was organic, but not alive. Having seen all the horror movies about strange otherworldly blobs, I refrained from touching it with my hands. Note: Sometimes I have to restart the slideshow to get it to pause on the second slide.
The second photo in the slideshow was taken on Christmas Eve. I took the boat out and found myself in a thick fog bank. Since I was (I thought) alone, I stopped and drifted silently in calm, windless, flat water. After about 15 minutes there was LARGE splash nearby, and I took a picture of the waves that came past me as a result. I was at least a mile from the nearest shoreline and never heard anything that would indicate a boat nearby. For the life of me, I can’t imagine what made that a splash that loud. It was much like the sound when someone cannonballs into the pool.
I got a bill for four at a restaurant (all relatives). I paid by CC. XX amount, plus $10 tip. I take a picture of restaurant CC bills because I got cheated once, and it shows the tip. When the CC charge came through it was for XX, no tip included.
That one is pretty simple. There is a manual step required when you pay by credit card. The server, host or cashier has to enter either the total amount paid or the check amount + the tip written on the receipt. Someone simply forgot to enter the tip. It happens and it sucks for the server but it wasn’t your fault.
I had something similar happen - initially, the charge for the meal (no tip) was posted to my credit card, and a day or so later it was updated to include the tip. I believe the process is:
Restaurant runs your card for the meal amount, putting a hold on your card immediately.
Later, someone reconciles receipts and finalizes the charge that was previously submitted to the card issuer, updated to include the tip. This may be hours or days later.
