Your Anecdotes

[thestrangequark]

Inspired by some of the tales in the "Unexpected Meet Ups" thread, I got to wondering, if there are indeed two types of people: those to whom anecdotes happen and those to whom they don't, which are you? And if you are one of the former, what are your best anecdotes? People love to talk about themselves, so here's a thread to talk about you!

 

[Jadzia]

I'm one of the latter, for whom anecdotes never happen. One of my friends is quite the opposite, with tales of the unexpected happening to her every week. One of the more memorable was when she visited her doctor and discovered that her medical records had her marked as deceased.

 

[An Officer]

^

I am probably one of those who has an anecdote for every other day. I remember when I went to a newsagents with friends, and the owner started shouting for me to get out. Screeching: "I thought I told you to never set foot here again!". I don't recollect ever having been there before. My friends thought it was absolutely hysterical.

More recently was the time someone had started tampering with our rubbish and I became so incensed when I caught him red-handed, I ended up hanging out of the window in the middle of the afternoon with a hockey stick, yelling what I'd like to do with said stick.

Then we have the occasion I went out to eat at my local food market, with a blinding headache, but starving, and looking rather bedraggled I suppose. A random guy came over to cast me as a stoner extra for a movie. Apparently, I had just the right kind of face for a hippie junkie of the 70's.

I remember when quiet birthday drinks with a friend at a touristy bar, turned into my being mobbed by a group of French students who thought I was famous in France, and wouldn't believe me when I tried to set them straight.

I remember having no extra money to take a holiday or time of work and being offered a one week job in the Caribbean.

I remember having to play a kangaroo, a rabbit, and a chicken among other things to earn a living.

 

[Mallory]

I am probably one of those who has an anecdote for every other day.

Same here, although life slowed down a bit during my 40s and 50s. Work, sports, politics, kids, just about anything. Here's one I haven't posted before.

My first home was on some wooded land in a rural area. Nearest neighbors were about a half mile in either direction. I was outside cleaning up alongside the driveway with a string trimmer and my oldest daughter (four at the time) was playing in a pile of raked up leaves behind me down by the house. I get about halfway up the driveway concentrating on mowing down the grass and weeds when I get a funny feeling that I'm being watched. So I stop concentrating on what I'm doing and look around. And what do I see? A big ass black bear watching me from the end of the drive! Once we looked at each other he starts shuffling towards me. I can't just leave, I'm between this bear and my daughter. So I start yelling at my daughter to go inside and I'm keeping the string trimmer raised up in front of me. And part of me is thinking "this is ridiculous, I'm about to have to defend myself against a black bear armed with nothing more than a string trimmer!". Finally, my daughter looks up, gets a clue and runs back inside. At this point the bear is about 20 feet away. I start backing away faster. When I got to the corner of the house I dropped trimmer and ran like hell for the door. Made it too. The bear spent some time nosing around outside and then finally wandered off. We spent the rest of the day inside just to be safe and none of us went outside for the next week without an armed escort. Eventually, the wildlife people trapped the bear and relocated it.

That was a great story to tell at the office on Monday though.

 

[trampledamage]

Inspired by some of the tales in the "Unexpected Meet Ups" thread, I got to wondering, if there are indeed two types of people: those to whom anecdotes happen and those to whom they don't, which are you? And if you are one of the former, what are your best anecdotes? People love to talk about themselves, so here's a thread to talk about you!

I'm one of those people to whom anecdotes do not happen, I'm also a person who doesn't like to talk about myself much. These two facts may be linked!

 

[Zulu Romeo]

I don't really do anecdotes, although I'm sure there's a story behind it as to why that is...

 

[thestrangequark]

This is what I needed, stories to keep me entertained! An Officer, I LOVE that you were nearly cast as a stoner extra -- it's hysterical!

I am one of the people to whom anecdotes do happen, and all the time. I just always seem to be in the right place at the right time to meet the oddest people and have the strangest things happen. My earliest story is from when I was five: My friend's mother took us to the beach to go swimming. It was a hot and sunny day, and I guess I hadn't had enough sleep the night before, because as soon as I got out onto the water in my little tiger striped bathing suit with ruffles, and sat in my little pink innertube, I drifted off -- literally and figuratively. I floated away and was found several hours later, miles out to sea, by the coastguard.

 

[Lookingglassman]

When I was in the Army we were deployed to Macedonia. There was a hill, Tupan Hill, along the border with Serbia and Macedonia that we were told to establish a patrol base on overlooking a Serbian outpost. The Serbs got mad and sent an armed patrol out after us. We were not allowed to lock and load our weapons due to the useless UN rules (I still hid one of my guys with the SAW locked and loaded overlooking the hill with orders to waste the Serbs if they tried anything).

Well the Serbs came up and tried to make us move. As the only officer present I refused to move because my orders said to stay there 3 hours. They were adament about us moving and I was adament about us staying. God must have had mercy on us because after an hour of arguing back and forth a storm front moved in and icy rain started to fall. We where dressed for bad weather and they weren't so they quickly left us there and ran back to their outpost. We never saw them again that day.

 

[T'Girl]

When I was just out of high school, I had a temp job passing out flyers and balloons while dressed as a clown, the flyers were to promote monthly/yearly passes for the metro buses. Anyone who wanted a balloon could have one. Northern Seattle on aurora ave. has a lot of street prostitution, soon you saw dozens of these girls walking up and down with these balloons tied to the backs of their belts, tied into their hair. Whole thing struck me as strange. Of course I'm standing there in clown make-up the entire time.

 

[TheBrew]

I will have to think about it: My anecdotes are either alcohol fueled or tech related so I will see how well I can remember them and explain them, but I can relate a funny one that happened to my friend in HS.

At his HS, there was one of those food vans/trucks that had a kitchen inside and sold food to students. One of his classmates who is not too bright, asks what is good to get there. One of buddy's friends says that the cunnilingus is pretty good. So she goes up to the lady who is taking orders, and to that lady's shock and my friend's amusement, she proceeds to order a "Cunnilingus, no tomato."

 

[Sakrysta]

Nothing ever happens to me.

 

[Jono]

Back in 04 a group of friends and I went on a holiday together. One night we're at the swimming pool drunk swimming and I was standing near my best friend and his girlfriend. She's facing me and he's got his back to me. He ducks under the water and I decide to give him a scary by grabbing his head under water. So I move forward, hand outstretched searching for him. I finally grab something but instead of been hairy it was flesh so I start squeezing. Next thing I know his girlfriend's head is cocking to the side and I really odd look is on her face. Next thing you know my hands are in the air and I'm backing up saying, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" Everyone pauses looks at us and asks what's going on. My friends gf answers simply and calmly. "Jono, has just felt up my thigh."

I of course rapidly start explaining it was an accident, that I was just trying to get my best friend. Thankfully everyone believed it was an accident, because it was. Still struggling to live it down.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

My first anecdote is a bitch, because it really scared the crap out of me - I have a not insignificant case of claustrophobia. I think it got worse after this.

It was in Boston, after I had just seen a game at Fenway Park. Trying to get into the $#(*^ subway station was one of the worst experiences of my life. The crowd wasn't mean, there weren't any fights breaking out, no one kicked or punched or anything like that. It just seemed like the entire population of Boston, let alone the baseball park, was trying to get into the station at the same time, and it did not help that the station in question (Kenmore) was - and probably still is; this anecdote happened a year and a half ago - undergoing the construction project from hell. Anyway, I must have stood there in the midst of this seething mass of humanity for at least an hour, with absolutely no way out, until I found an elevator down into the station and thus got out of the worst of it. Although the crowd was still really bad, even after I actually got onto the train. After I got back to my hotel room, I checked myself for bruises, fully expecting to have to ice my whole body down. Then I sort of collapsed on my bed.

I'm not used to this kind of crowd, because when I go to New York, the subway stations outside Yankee Stadium and Citi Field are both *above ground* - and, unlike the one in Boston, directly across the street from the ballparks - and thus the crowd is more evenly distributed.

As for *the* worst day of my life, my worst anecdote would be three weeks after the previous one. June 27, 2008 - the storm that blew down half the trees in the city, two of which landed on my house. Actually only one actually landed on my *house*, the other landed on the power lines outside my backyard which knocked out my power for four days. My whole neighborhood looked like a warzone. It took an hour just to drive across town to check on my parents. *That* was the absolute worst day I have ever had. And I was relatively lucky that day - some people actually had their homes destroyed, and at least two people died...

 

[1001001]

There was that time I hurt my back lifting a dead hooker off the toilet....

 

[MANT!]

Anecdotes? Nahh... I Have a War Story...

Was forward deployed to Alhorn Air Base in Germany..
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/2258635.jpg

Was caught up in a NATO "Escape and Evade" exercise where we were driven 15 miles away from the base and had to return to the base avoiding the German Territorial Army (At the time rather like the National Guard in the US) who were playing the Soviet Army.. one of my friends had been captured on a prior exercise and after his capture was brought to a nearby Luftwaffe base and treated to FREE BEER from the NCO mess there... So we went around LOOKING for Germans, and making as much noise as possible..we were captured within 10 minutes and spent the balance of the exercise (24 hours) re-living Octoberfest on the German government's tab...

Good times...

 

[RoJoHen]

All of my anecdotes involve a lot of drunkenness.

 

[thestrangequark]

All of my anecdotes involve a lot of drunkenness.

My old roommate was like that. They were entertaining at first, but got annoying really fast, and eventually I just came to think of him as an idiot. For example, on his birthday one year he, our other roommate, and I went to a bar a few blocks from our place. We were having an okay time, but he started behaving very childishly after a few drinks, going around to different tables and annoying other patrons. On top of that the bartender was a bitch and I had an exam the following day. I decided I'd had enough when he started chatting with some really shady guys who were leering at me a bit too aggressively for my taste, and I went home. An hour later or so my other roommate showed up and said she couldn't deal with him anymore either.

Several hours later, we awoke to our roommate pounding the buzzer. We found him on the sidewalk, drunk and without his keys or coat (on an NYC winter night). Those shady guys he'd been chatting with sent him on a coke deal, and rewarded him by stealing his coat and cell phone. My idiot of a roommate was so thrilled by this tale he boasted that it was something he would be telling his grandchildren someday.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Oops, almost forgot. On yet another of my many trips to the city, I happen to buy a Trek novel at a bookstore. I go to Washington Square Park to read it, and I'm about halfway through when a bum tries to steal my shoes.

KRAD gets a real kick out of this, mostly because he wrote the novel I was reading (The Art Of The Impossible).

 

[Mistral]

My life is nothing but anecdotes.

I went 350 miles away, to San Diego, for vacation. This was a year or two after high school. I'm boogie boarding one afternoon(July 4th, actually) off Ocean Beach and I've swam about 500ft from shore. I turn back towards the beach to wait for a wave and a voice says, "Jon? Jon Smith?(not my real name)" - from behind me! Turning back out towards the ocean, I see a gal who lived a block from me all through elementary school and jr high. She'd attended a different high school so I hadn't seen her in years. I was like, "Hi, Vicki!" Then a wave smashed over both of us and I was pushed almost all of the way to shore. I couldn't find her again no matter how hard I looked.

 

[captcalhoun]

hope she didn't drown...