While I was waiting for the train this women suddenly started screaming just about every controversial term she could think of.
OSAMA BIN LADEN!!!
HELTER SKELTER!!!
VIETNAM!!!
GEORGE W. BUSH!!!
I really wish she could have somehow tied all this together. :rolleyes:
Oh please, start.
Well, that’s just common sense.
last tuesday a guy in the bar i work in gave me a £50 tip because i let him make his own drink. he gave no reason for needing to make it himself, he seemed fine with me touching his glass when i showed him where they were, and as far as i saw he made the drink completely normally, i was watching to make sure he wasn’t putting extra shots or anything dodgy in it.
How badly would it disturb you to know that this has been the subject of several passionate multi page threads around here?
Secondly, how badly would it disturb you that when the zombie apocalypse does come that you’ll be begging this friend for help? 
Yes, yes, usually it happens this way… But this time, it was the other way… The nut one was the one insulting the poor lady because she “could see from where she was that your nails are so dirty !!” 
I was unable to translate it either, it doesn’t make so much sense, but maybe he was trying to say “jeune” which means “young”.
Ooooooh!
gets QtM started
C’mon, I’m sure you have enough material for several posts
I’ve had a few but they’re family, do they count? It’s not like I just met them, sigh
We had a customer in the store last week who, well, just wow. She was a little pushy when I first talked to her but I didn’t think too much about it. Some people are like that. But then she kept asking questions about things she could use to embellish a pair of jeans. I gave her several suggestions and pointed her in the right direction to find those things, but she wanted me to take her there personally. Then she wanted me to show her each thing I had mentioned, and then she started asking repeat questions. She didn’t have any clue what I was telling her, and I think it was because she wasn’t paying any attention, really.
Next thing she’s telling me how she has four full-time jobs, including one with FEMA (which really scares me) and two that seem to include some kind of real estate speculation. She tells me her secret nickname, which she never tells anybody because people will think she’s taking credit on herself that really belongs to God. See, she prays for people all the time and she’s responsible for thousands of people coming to the Lord. But she’s telling me all this as she’s telling me that she’s not supposed to tell anyone.
Okay, well, all the things I’ve shown her to decorate her jeans? They’ll have to wait until she actually buys the jeans, which makes all this “an exercise in futility”. Her words, actually repeated several times. Next thing she’s telling me how nobody gave her anything for her birthday two weeks ago and wondering why. Then she’s telling me how much she gives other people, including the lady for whom she bought a new roof. She wants me to tell her why nobody ever gives her anything. (I politely refrained from telling her what I thought) Maybe it’s because she and her brother, who’s also a lawyer, as she is, won a $4.5 million case some years ago. You think that’s it? Hey, lady, I don’t know.
She finally left me to try on a couple of skirts. (We don’t actually have a fitting room, but she could use the restroom) Then she checked out and left.
I didn’t find out until afterward that she found the bathroom door locked so she went into the employee breakroom, right next door, and apparently stripped off to try on her items. Our young male associate walked in on her when he went to take his break. And then, lucky fella that he is, he was standing close to the checkout when she informed another associate that “shopping gives me orgasms”. Oh, it was an interesting evening.
I don’t think family counts, no. The randomness of the encounter factors heavily into the overall nuttiness.
::: grabs jumper cables:::
Here let me help you get started.
Please?
At work: We advertise on a local talk radio station. It is plainly an advertisement, although it is read by the host. We have had at least two calls from people who want to take up whatever it is the host is on about and discuss it with us. We are a financial services company who works with debtors, and I make it a point not to listen to the talk radio station on which we advertise, cause it seems to find all the bits of ignorance the Straight Dope ain’t yet fought and expound upon them. This makes for very interesting conversations with nutters. “No ma’am, I wasn’t aware that Kim Beazley is the root of all evil, and that the Greens are trying to kill us all…er…are you having trouble paying your bills?”
In the street: We live in a…colorful…area of Sydney to begin with, but we have two resident nutters. One is harmless, we call him Chihuahua Man. He’s a tiny, very old man with a tiny, very old dog. If you are unlucky enough to have him engage you in conversation, be prepared to stand for a very long time looking for an opportunity to escape while he goes on about whatever the aliens have planted in his head today. If you do not see the dog, some kind soul has provided him with a badge that basically says the dog is at home and ok. (People sort of look after him in the neighborhood around here.)
The other resident nutter is not harmless, he is Satanic Electric Scooter Man. His electric scooter - the kind that disabled people use to get around it - is painted with every comic book incarnation of satanistic symbolism you can imagine. Then imagine some more, and its on there, too. He goes around on it at top speed (do get out of the way, he won’t stop) playing FULL BLAST every offensive, racist, heavy metal tune out there. * He occasionally wears fake blood on his head to make it look like he’s been bashed. And I have seen him get off the scooter, walk up to someone, and take a swing at them. He gets a wide berth.
On the way to the train station: There was the Fuck You C**t man, for a while, till he disappeared. He used to scream at me when I walked past, well, what I just said. Without the asterisks. (As a side note, when has the cbomb become more offensive to me than the fbomb? Anyway…) The first time it happened, I was just startled, and replied, “And a good morning to you, too, sir!” Then I started wishing him a good morning before he could get off his signature line, and that became the pattern. “Good morning!” “F you, C!”
One morning I wasn’t paying attention, and forgot to wish him a good morning. As I walked past, he yelled, “Are you too good to talk to me now? Well, F you, C!” I laughed till I hurt. He seems otherwise harmless.
Also at the Train Station: The Fat Conductor. He’s not really a nutter, in that he is obviously harmless and also obviously lonely and mentally ill. He’s memorised the train schedule, and will run up to the top of the stairs at the station shouting to people walking towards the station that they have one or two or five or however many minutes, and they should hurry or they won’t have another train to the city for however much longer it is. Actually, The Fat Conductor is quite useful. The people that frequent the station look out for him, too - though he’s gotten a bit surly and somewhat less harmless of late.
And I always seem to be the one, in a nearly empty bus, who gets the nutter who wants to sit next to me.
Cheers,
G
*Yes, I know 99.9 percent of heavy metal music is not racist. However, Satanic Electric Scooter Man has the complete collection of those that are.
Not me, but my daughter had an ‘interesting’ experience last week.
She’s in her final year of a course in Youth Welfare, and last week’s class was focussing on suicidality. Because she already works in the field and has had plenty of professional experience so to speak, her lecturer gave her the afternoon free. So she tottered off to the train station to come home…
And what should she encounter at the station but some poor soul in the throes of a schizophrenic episode. She tried to engage him and talk him down, offering to refer him to her service provider to get him housing and medical help…whereupon he started rambling about chicken stuffing and brought out a blade and began slashing his wrists…RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER.
I KNOW it’s not funny, but when she rang me in tears I couldn’t help but guffaw about the irony.
:eek:
Oh yes there wwaa-aasssss!
Damn, I bet it was the skeleton of her dead lounge singer husband. You see that sort of thing all the time in Florida.
[hijack]I can’t say either of these disturb me greatly. To be perfectly honest, I’ve spent a little time pondering such things, though not nearly as much time as my friend had. Also, it’s true that he’s the guy I’d turn to most quickly in the event of undead hordes rising from their graves to feast upon the living. I don’t know many other people (locally) with military experience and guns.
As for such discussions having gone on hear, I figured as much. This is the Dope we’re talking about. :D[/hijack]
Again returning to the thread at hand, last night I ran across a situation that probably fits into this thread.
Background: I work in the nicest college dining hall I’ve ever heard tale of. My specific shop in the dining hall offers (among other things) rib eye steaks grilled to order and live Maine lobsters. My university is also home to the Corps of Cadets, who mingle pretty freely with the civilian student body of which I am a part.
So, I’m on register last night and a group of about 5 cadets come up to the register. It’s Sunday night, so they’re all in civilian attire (complete with comical t-shirts), but they all have the standard cadet short haircuts and are carrying their cadet hats (not dissimilar to this one.)
Anyways, the cadet in nearest to me points toward one of our signs and asks me how much the lobster is. This is pretty much redundant, as the price is posted on the sign. I tell them that the lobster is $25 or half price if you have one of the flex meal plans. They look slightly disappointed and the lead cadet proceeds to ask me if I can sell them some “lobster trash.” I must have looked as confused as I was as he explained “You know, whatever’s left from a lobster besides what you serve.” Being a master of multitasking, I manage to both sound apologetic and stifle my laughter as I explain that we only sell whole lobsters so there’s no left over “lobster trash” for us to sell.
As soon as the cadets were out of earshot, my coworkers and I cracked up at the sight of the disciplined, stoic looking cadets in brightly colored t-shirts, asking to buy “lobster trash.”
For another Adventures in Public Transport one…
A while back I was on my way home from work on the metro rapid and was sitting about 3 rows ahead of these two older gentlemen, I would guess late 60’s early 70’s or so. They were having a disagreement about some minor topic that I can’t recall but it was a really minor thing. Anyway, their argument got louder and louder till they started shouting racial and other epitaphs at each other and talking about beating one another up. I almost wish I could have seen the rest of it, because I’m totally convinced that after I got off they had a fist fight.
I rarely get to see the nut cases, but I do get their phone calls.
The crazy call for this week? Gentleman calls in to complain about the March on Washington. Excuse me? March on Washington… with Martin Luther King? Yep. That’s the one, August 28, 1963.
Seems that the civil rights movement had more carrying results than we know. Large crowds of angry people stir up the mental energy pool and cause psychic distortions to bounce through time and cause future destruction . And that’s why Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans last year.
This is very very common. I have one. My best freind has one. Bascially any zombie movie fan has a real life zombie outbreak plan. I think we even had a thread about this a few months ago.
Last Thursday I had a good one.
After a wonderful sketch show in Santa Monica some of my troupemates and I went to get some drinks and food nearby. On our way back we stopped to chit chat in the alley by the parking garage. Suddenly a guy on a bicycle rode past us and then circled around. He stopped near us and hopped off his bike and proceeded to do some bike tricks… yes while off of his bike… He just lifted the bike up off its front tire and spun the wheel around. Then he tried to twirl the bike around in a circle. We did our best to ignore him. And then as we started to move again, he got on the bike and rode directly up to as and said “Never forget the little guy.” We responded with several "okay"s and "sure"s. Then he said “Do any of your live in malibu?” (he pronounced it “mah-leee-booo”) We responded with “No.”
“Well I do.” And then he sped off on his bike.
