People are Funny!

[Snargfargle]

@AdmiralThunder inspired me to start this thread.

I was sitting at my desk studying late one evening when I heard a bunch of yelling and squealing coming from across the road. I gave it a couple of minutes to quiet down but it just kept getting louder and louder. As I was the night manager, and as the noise was disrupting my studies, I went over to see what the problem was. This is what I heard as I walked up.

Wife: "Lord, Jesus, save me!"

Husband: "Where did it go?"

Wife: "It's under the AC!"

Husband: "What was it?"

Wife: "It's a giant sewer rat!"

Husband: "Well, let's go into the house."

Wife: "I'm not going anywhere near that door, it's gonna jump out and bite me!"

About this time, I'd reached the couple. I took a look under the AC, and pulled out this.

 

Edited March 10 by Snargfargle

[Admiral_Karasu]

(I see nothing. I get a 'bad request'.)

[Snargfargle]

A girl called me one afternoon, sounding fairly distraught, and asked me if I could come over and remove a snake from her apartment. Now, snakes in apartments might be somewhat rare in other areas but this was a college town known for its cheap housing, so the apartment complex I was managing was rather porous where wildlife was concerned.

I knocked on the door and heard a muffled call for me to come on in, which I had to do with my master key as the door was locked. The girl was standing on a chair in the middle of the living room. Now, venomous snakes weren't unheard of in the area, especially copperheads, so I had a careful look around but I didn't see any snakes.

I asked her where the snake was and she said "it's on the floor!" I looked more carefully but still didn't see a snake, only what appeared to be a small bit of broken shoestring or perhaps an errant noodle from her dinner under the chair she was standing on. I told her that I still didn't see any snake and she said "right there, under the chair!" I then bent down for a closer look under her chair and, indeed, there was a snake there.

It was a baby lined snake, about four inches long.

Edited March 10 by Snargfargle

[Snargfargle]

1 hour ago, Admiral_Karasu said:

(I see nothing. I get a 'bad request'.)

Can you see this one?

[thornzero]

HAHAHA a GIANT SEWER rat.

 

geezus

[Snargfargle]

I'd just got out of the Army and was enrolled in college. I was standing line ready to pick up my first GI Bill bulk payment. I got paid every month but the government withheld the payments until it was sure that I'd actually enrolled. That bulk sum, plus the BEOG Grants I also was entitled to, made me a Warren Buffet in the eyes of many of my classmates. Why, I might have as much as a five hundred dollars left over after I'd paid for my tuition fees, and books!

When it was my turn to pick up my money, the girl at the desk wouldn't give it to me. "Why not, " I asked? "Because you never signed up for Selective Service," was the reply. "I've been enlisted in the Army since I was 17," I said. "I was in the Army when I turned 18. In fact, I'm currently on terminal leave so I'm still active-duty Army." "What part of 'veteran's benefits' don't you understand?" "That doesn't matter," said the girl, "My checklist says that if you didn't sign up for Selective Service then you can't receive government benefits.

I handed her a military ID. "See, that's me, I'm in the US military." "That's not a military ID," said the girl, "It's a Red Cross CPR Card."  I said, "It's got a red cross on it, sure, but what part of 'Department of Defense Geneva Conventions Identity Card' don't you understand?"

About this time, the girl's supervisor came by, took a glance at my ID, made a note in my record, and gave me my money. I said "It's because I'm active-duty Army, right?," I said. "No," was the reply, "It's because you were born before Dec. 31, 1959."

She was both right and wrong. If you were born after Dec. 31, 1959, even if you have served an entire military service contract obligation, you still have to sign up for Selective Service if you are not yet 26 by the time you are discharged. However, you don't have to sign up as long as you are on active duty or in an Academy. You don't have to sign up as long as you are in prison either. What a weird law.

I was in on the old, good, GI Bill. When it came time for my benefits to expire, I got a letter telling me that, since Congress had already authorized the funding, all of us still enrolled in college would be getting an additional year of benefits.  I believe that the benefits still cut off once you got a bachelors but, since you could pick up as many certificate courses as you wanted, I made sure to complete my EMT, paramedic, and intensive-care technician programs before finishing up my bachelors. I used all those leftover hundreds of dollars I got each semester, plus what I'd saved up working three jobs while going to college, to help pay for grad school.

Example only, I'm not that cute. Wait... is that Captain Kirk's great-great-great-grandmother?

 

 

[Admiral_Karasu]

@Wolfswetpaws Could you run a check on the Star Fleet database for Kirk, James T. to find out the name of his great-great-great-grandmother?

[Justin_Simpleton]

19 minutes ago, Admiral_Karasu said:

@Wolfswetpaws Could you run a check on the Star Fleet database for Kirk, James T. to find out the name of his great-great-great-grandmother?

I live real close to where he will be born, Riverside, Iowa; maybe she lives next door to me.

[Wolfswetpaws]

1 hour ago, Admiral_Karasu said:

@Wolfswetpaws Could you run a check on the Star Fleet database for Kirk, James T. to find out the name of his great-great-great-grandmother?

https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Kirk_family

Edited to add:  https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/James_T._Kirk
 

Edited March 13 by Wolfswetpaws

[Asym]

On 3/10/2024 at 6:51 AM, Snargfargle said:

Can you see this one?

It's a ROUS !!!

Oh, may the Schwartz help us !!

He'll grow up to look like:

Abandon all Joy !  Call the National Guard !  Alert the NCA and deploy SAC.....it's inevitable because of all of the Cow Farts.......ROUS!!!

[Asym]

Can it be possible that no one can name the movie this ^^^ humor comes from?  Hours later and Wolfie is confused.  sigh........ 

Please tell me everyone knows about "Rodents of Unusual Size.."

[Snargfargle]

4 minutes ago, Asym said:

 "Rodents of Unusual Size..."

I first saw a nutria when I was stationed at Ft. Polk. A fellow medic and I had re-built a wrecked boat and were out fishing with it. When we came back in, just about dark, there was a nutria sitting on the boat dock. I said "What kind of monster muskrat is that?" and was told that it was a nutria.

Nutria are all over the place in Louisiana. However, I was surprised to see them in the creek behind my apartment complex in Oregon. I did some research and found that they were introduced for fur-farming purposes during the 1930s in both places. Nutria are quite widespread in America. They look a lot like muskrats but are quite a bit larger, though smaller than a beaver. Some people say they are good eating but I've never ate one.

Convergent evolution has made these three only distantly related species of semi-aquatic rodents quite similar in appearance. It's yet another instance of form follows function. Nutria are more closely related to guinea pigs, beavers to kangaroo rats, and muskrats to lemmings than any are to each other. 

[Snargfargle]

6 hours ago, Asym said:

It's a ROUS !!!

When I was doing some genetic work at Texas A&M one fall, I had a "visiting scholar" parking permit and got to park next to the football stadium, which was only a short walk away from the biology building. However, during the A&M/Texas game the parking lot was reserved for football parking so I took the day off. I didn't have a lot of money back then. In fact, I was living under the Brazos River bridge and taking showers in an emergency chemical shower in the basement of the biology building. However, an afternoon matinee of "Princess Bride" was showing for only $2. That didn't sound like anything I was interested in but I needed to kill some time until the game was over and I could get back to the lab. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the movie.

[Ensign Cthulhu]

On 3/10/2024 at 1:16 AM, Snargfargle said:

and pulled out this

Aww, it's a meth rat! ♥️

[Wolfswetpaws]

3 hours ago, Asym said:

Can it be possible that no one can name the movie this ^^^ humor comes from?  Hours later and Wolfie is confused.  sigh........ 

Please tell me everyone knows about "Rodents of Unusual Size.."

I'm well aware of the R.O.U.S. from the movie Princess Bride.
I'm just surprised anyone could mistake them for an Opossum.  🙂 

P.S.  Your earlier hyperbolic words reminded me of some of the lines Graham Greene spoke in the movie "Atlantic Rim".  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2740710/

Quote

"Abandon all Joy !  Call the National Guard !  Alert the NCA and deploy SAC.....it's inevitable because of all of the Cow Farts.......ROUS!!!"

 

[Snargfargle]

3 hours ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

I'm just surprised anyone could mistake them for an Opossum.  🙂

I asked the "sewer rat" lady where she was from, thinking that perhaps she hailed from somewhere like Hawaii and had never seen an opossum. However, she said that she was from Kansas City. There are opossums in Kansas City, which is actually pretty wooded; when I lived there I saw them all over the place. Maybe her mamma told her that they were sewer rats?

This is Kansas City, both Kansas and Missouri as the KU Medical Center sits on the state line.

Edited March 14 by Snargfargle

[Snargfargle]

The leaves were starting to turn color and it was time to get the furnaces in the apartment complex serviced. When doing scheduled maintenance on every unit in a complex, it's generally good to have two of you per apartment so that the work goes faster. Therefore, I was going around with another maintenance guy, who was a kid right out of high school. 

We came to the next apartment on the list but the kid refused to go in, saying that the cats in there would attack him. I told him that I'd been in that apartment a few times and never had a problem with the cats. In fact, they were always like this with me.

He assured me that they would attack him but I told him to get his butt into the apartment and help me out. The instant he walked into the door, this pretty much this happened.

Those cats actually drew blood and he ran out of the apartment screaming at the top of his lungs. When he was gone, however, the cats were once again purring and rubbing around my legs, meowing at me to pick them up.

It wasn't until sometime later, when I got to know the kid better, that I found out why the cats didn't like him. He was quite the "horn dog" and was always hitting on the girls in the apartment complex. I'd have fired him for unprofessional behavior had he not been the nephew of the owner. Those cats were just protecting their mamma.

Edited March 14 by Snargfargle

[Wolfswetpaws]

Cool story.

[Snargfargle]

2 hours ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

Cool story.

Working in apartment management gives you all sorts of funny stories to tell. Here's another one.

I'd talked to the new owner of the units next to mine once and commented on the fact that he was really fixing them up. He said that he had to get everything up to code because he'd gotten a government contract to provide low-income housing. I'd been on quite a few EMS runs to the "projects" in a nearby city and knew exactly what was going to happen. I tried to warn him but he wouldn't listen, he was going to get him some guaranteed money from the government.

I was the night maintenance manager for the complex I lived in and also one just down the street from it. At the time, I was doing some volunteer work in EMS for a neighboring county and occasionally would come home wearing my uniform. My EMS uniform didn't look much like the local police or sheriff's department uniforms but when I walked through the low-income housing, I'd still hear "It's the man!" and see people running inside the buildings.

Now, we had a really friendly postman who delivered mail down the block every morning. I got to know him pretty well and told him what was happening to me when I was in uniform. He laughed and said that the same thing happened to him in his postal uniform and he guessed that a uniform was a uniform was a uniform where the "pharmacists" and "ho ho ho's" were concerned.

Some interesting things happened out of those low-income units. I'd see the same car driving around the neighborhood playing loud music with subwoofers blaring. I finally realized that the car was always playing the same song. That was a dealer's car, playing the "drug song" just like an ice-cream wagon plays a tune to let kids know it is on the block. The inner-city pimps and drug dealers had a pretty good thing going for a while in their new base of operations in that college town. Fortunately, after a few drug task force raids most of the crime started to go away.

There was still a lot of theft coming out of that low-income housing though because the tenants there would walk behind my complex to get to the shopping strip on the other side rather than having go around the block. There was a chain link fence separating the shopping strip from the apartments but it stopped behind my complex. I talked to the strip mall's owner about extending the fence but he wasn't interested. I therefore, build a section of wooden fence on my side. However, the people from the low-income housing units just kicked a hole in it and kept walking through my parking lot.

Now, we had a problem with wasps in the complex and I was always out spraying them. After fixing my fence several times, only to have new holes kicked in it each time, I collected a few active nests in paper bags, getting stung a couple of times myself, and tacked them to my fence. A few days later, I heard a bunch of screaming and cussing out my back window. That was the last time my fence had a hole kicked into it.

I'm not making this up. It's been thirty years since I managed those apartments but my fence is still there.

 

 

[Snargfargle]

I was picking up trash around the dumpsters one morning because tenants apparently can't be bothered to throw trash into dumpsters, only near them. There were some little kids watching me. They kept talking amongst themselves saying "You ask him." "No, you ask him!" Finally, one walked up to me and said "Mister, are you homeless?" I said, "No, I'm just picking up trash." I thought to myself, "Now why in the world would they think I was homeless?"

I then went into a friend's apartment to feed her cat because I was taking care of it while she was in Japan. I'd known that cat for years but this time she hissed at me and ran away. I thought about the situation for a minute, removed my work coat, and called the cat. Snowball then came out from under the kitchen table, all purrs and meows. I will have to admit that my work coat was getting a bit ratty but I didn't think it was that bad yet.

Hey, if clothing items are still serviceable, there's no need to replace them, right?  I'm pretty sure my tennis shoes have at least five more years left in them.

 

 

 

 

[Wolfswetpaws]

25 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

Hey, if clothing items are still serviceable, there's no need to replace them, right? 

Well apparently your clothes are required to pass the "Cat Test".

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/serviceable

[Snargfargle]

12 minutes ago, Wolfswetpaws said:

Well apparently your clothes are required to pass the "Cat Test".

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/serviceable

There we go. A little Shoe Goo, and they are ready for another summer.

 

[Snargfargle]

 

Edited March 15 by Snargfargle

[Snargfargle]

BTW, if you are ever in a college town, by all means do go "dumpster diving." College students will throw out all sorts of nice things because they usually have either no means or no desire to transport the stuff to a new city when they graduate. If they flunk out, so much the better because then they will oftentimes throw way all of their books and class materials too. I found a complete college course's worth of nursing books plus a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff in a dumpster once. Another time I found a bass guitar, which I gave away. Yet another time, I found a complete set of Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe books. After I read them I donated them to the local library.

I collected a lot of stuff from vacated apartments and the dumpsters and had sale when I finally left the complex myself. You know what the most popular items were? Cleaning rags. I'd pick up abandoned towels, wash them, and then cut them into cleaning rags to use in my maintenance job. I eventually had a truckload of the things stacked in a storeroom.  I sold bundles of a half-dozen 16" x 16" terry-cloth cleaning rags for a dollar each and made several hundred dollars.

I also sold a dozen Kirby commercial vacuums for $45 each. College students will be given an old Kirby to use because their parents have bought a newer and lighter vacuum. When they graduate, their parents will tell them to just leave the heavy old thing behind because they don't even want it back. I have my parent's old Kirby myself. Fortunately for me, it's a self-propelled model. I use it on one floor of the house because it's too heavy to lug down into the basement. I just weighed it -- it weighs 25 pounds. $45 was a heck of a deal on a Kirby because they sold for several hundred dollars new and you could buy new HEPA liners to line the old cloth bags.

Kirby's almost never wear out and you can still get manuals, parts, and bags for even the oldest models. I've used Kirby's on every janitorial job I've ever had, way back to when I was making money sweeping classrooms after school when I was in Jr. High. We kids got a free ride until sixth grade but after that if we wanted something other than food and clothes, we had to earn our own money to buy it. I sometimes fussed about having to work to buy things like fireworks, malts, and science fiction books at the local drugstore. I didn't figure out until years later that my parents were saving their money to by me some pretty awesome birthday and Christmas presents, like a bike, shotgun, chemistry set, microscope, fishing pole and tackle box, or a toolbox full of tools.

When I was teaching out in Oregon, every morning there would be an old fellow come riding up on a utility tricycle to collect cans and bottles from the dumpsters. In Oregon, there is 10-cent deposit on beverage containers. The old man wasn't "homeless" -- he lived in a pretty nice house -- he'd just found a way to make some good money and be his own boss by collecting cans and bottles. He said that he made about ten bucks at each apartment dumpster he visited on his morning route.

This guy hit the jackpot. I've never found a single girl in all of my years of dumpster diving.

Edited March 15 by Snargfargle

[ArIskandir]

On 3/13/2024 at 3:13 PM, Snargfargle said:

I first saw a nutria when I was stationed at Ft. Polk. A fellow medic and I had re-built a wrecked boat and were out fishing with it. When we came back in, just about dark, there was a nutria sitting on the boat dock. I said "What kind of monster muskrat is that?" and was told that it was a nutria.

Nutria are all over the place in Louisiana. However, I was surprised to see them in the creek behind my apartment complex in Oregon. I did some research and found that they were introduced for fur-farming purposes during the 1930s in both places. Nutria are quite widespread in America. They look a lot like muskrats but are quite a bit larger, though smaller than a beaver. Some people say they are good eating but I've never ate one.

Convergent evolution has made these three only distantly related species of semi-aquatic rodents quite similar in appearance. It's yet another instance of form follows function. Nutria are more closely related to guinea pigs, beavers to kangaroo rats, and muskrats to lemmings than any are to each other. 

 

Why in heavens do you call that thing "Nutria"? 

In spanish, Nutria is the name for the Otter... this beau here:

We also have the Giant Otter or Nutria Gigante (Pteronura brasiliensis) those dudes are quite large (30-45kg) and very playful. When I was a kid, there were 3-4 specimens in a park near my home, beautiful animals.