conditional_soup

So, what's your experience with weird people? I don't mean socially awkward people, mind, I mean people that might actually be wizards or three aliens in a trench coat kind of weird.

When I lived in the poor part of Tulsa, there were people like this in spades. One old goat had the monicker of "crazy man Stan". Stan had a way of just appearing, almost out of thin air. You never saw him coming, you'd just look over one way, and look back to find Stan there. There was a laundry list of other weird shit Stan was known for that I've since forgotten. One day, he fucked my mom's truck up. She was sitting there, gabbing with a friend, when Stan does his presto-hobo apparition trick, leans in through the driver side window, and forces the turn signal switch back and forth as hard as he can for the few seconds it takes my mom to get over the shock and hit his crazy ass. Every time she hit the turn signal after that, the horn would beep in time with the light coming on. We had our last straw with Stan when a friend and I saw what looked a hell of a lot like Stan actually appearing in the middle of the street out of thin air one night. My mom declared that he must have been in league with the devil. My step dad had been putting up with Stan's antics because it's Oklahoma in the late 90's, what else do you have going on? I don't think he believed that devil stuff, but he was always pretty keen at figuring people out, and I think he reckoned that Stan was the kind of person that had trouble hanging around him like a cloud of flies. and decided he didn't want any.

There was another guy we knew who would scry for random treasures on a map and did aura readings. Besides the claim to psychic abilities (he never referred to them as such, he was the type of Christian that believed he was given gifts due to the manifestation of the holy spirit in his heart), he usually had smart things to say, so he was sort of the shaman of the ghetto. I can't speak for the aura readings, but everyone who ever went out with him on one of his adventures vouched for him finding something interesting. He never did it for money, so it wasn't like it was some kind of scam he was running, at least as far as I could tell.

Around 2010, we lived in some apartments in Newnan, Georgia that used to be an old factory. Most of the other resident we ran into agreed that weird stuff would happen there, like seeing apparitions of people. Very little happened to me, personally, but my wife experienced much more than I did. Some of these experiences include, but aren't limited to:

-She had the front door unlock, open, shut, and lock again all on its own. It happened with so little fanfare that she, at first, assumed that I had walked out until she realized I was in the shower.

-She got a coat hanger thrown at her. We were in bed and she was woken up by the clatter of a coat hanger coming to rest on her side of the bed (concrete floor and metal coat hangers make a fair bit of noise). The hell of it is, the only place we kept coat hangers was in the closet, and the only two ways that it could have made it there from the closet was 1. to go left into the bathroom, make a 90 degree turn, and then forward out of the bathroom OR 2. launch up and over the closet wall and then go forward about ten feet.

-She would feel somebody poking her feet at night time. Of course, nobody was ever there.

A couple of times, we'd hear these loud footsteps go racing across the metal roof. I've had metal roofs before, and I know what it's like when trees drop stuff on them; you can hear the debris rolling and banging down the slope of the roof until it falls off or settles into a depression. This wasn't that. There would be loud, fast thuds that would run across the length of our apartment, across the slope of the roof in a matter of a second or two.

We also had a friend stay there to dog-sit while we were away. He has excellent vision, and told us that he saw an extra dark shadow in the corner of our vaulted ceiling that the dog also honed in on shortly afterwards. When I say dark shadow, I mean that the lighting there was inconsistent with how it was every other day; that corner was never that dark before or after, but for whatever reason had a deep shadow in it for that one of several days my friend was there.

What really sells it for me is that my wife never had any kind of paranormal experience before or since. She's not generally the kind of person who's into this whole scene; she loves a good ghost story as much as anyone, but she's not the type of person who commits much thought to it or sees spirits around every corner.

Anyway, it didn't really seem to build towards anything, it was just kind of a thing that was there and sometimes you happened to notice it (or vice verse, I suppose). A couple of the residents tried to invite one of those ghost shows out, but the property management team caught wind of it and shut that down immediately. Used to be that you could see tenants talking about the haunting on their google reviews, but I just looked and they must have cleaned those up.

Everyone's got a favorite "war story" to bust out when it's story time. What's your go-to?

One of mine is the time I picked up some dude who slammed a brand new bottle of hydrocodone to try and keep from going to jail. They'd just picked up the bottle when he popped the lid off and just downed the whole thing in front of his family, who (rightly) freaked out and drove straight to the nearest fire station. By the time we got there, dude was on the dark side of the moon. We get the story, do an initial, take over bagging, drop 2 of narcan in his nose, load and go. I know this guy, he's going to be a jerk about it, and I don't to allow him the lattitude that he'll have at the scene. So, five minutes pass, IV's in, re-assess to find no change. Shocker. I dump another 2 in the line. Nothing. Well, shit. Re-assess to make sure I didn't miss anything, and opiates are still the best explanation. tl;dr we have a long transport time, so I end up making base contact a couple of times and finally dump the tenth mg of narcan in the line as we roll up to the receiving facility. We get inside, tell the hospital what's going on, transfer him over, and the dude jerks awake. He sits bolt upright, tells the doc "take your hands off me, {bundle of sticks}", grabs the NPA out of his nose, and then slings it into the corner of the room as hard as he can with an almighty "FUCK!"

Everybody piles out of the room and sort of awkwardly stands there, waiting for security to show up. While we were waiting, I remembered it was EMS week, so I asked the nurses if this meant I could have my shirt now. They said no :c

Those of you who left EMS, what are you doing now, and are you happy about your choices?

I left full time paramedicine after 12 years. I've been in software development for a little over a year now, and I still do some part time for shits and giggles. I don't regret my choice, especially seeing how hard the full time folks at my company get ran. It's fun to do this job again now that I'm not dependent on it for finances. I will say, though, programmer stories make a much smaller impact with friends and family.