How much craziness do YOU deal with ?

[PepperElf]

I work in a downtown bar dealing with drunk and stupid tourists in Key Weird Key West, Florida, "where the weird go pro."

Or end up in a Jimmy Buffet book

Back when I was a nursing student, one of the students in the year ahead of me was talking about her tour in the psych ward. All i remember was that one of the men really believed he was Clark Kent / Superman.

and one of my chat friends said her mother-in-law called up Tony Blair to sing him a lullaby.

[Anriana]

I had a teenage caller who wouldn't give me his address because he thought we were going to kill him by beaming signals into his eyes from our broadcast satellites. He also had some pretty crazy abuse stories (like "my mom tears me apart then sews me back together every day.")

There was the caller who would not stop talking for half an hour about how there is a great coverup on the aggressive tendencies of labrador retrievers. Apparently everytime one bites someone it's covered up by the FBI and blamed on a rottweiler. He fosters rottweilers to stick it to the government. He also couldn't have a tech come over because if the tech rang the doorbell the dogs would all pee at once.

[1756GR2]

Sweet older lady customer who came to us for cell service because she was certain that her landlord was crawling under the skirting of her mobile home and tapping her home phone line. Listening to her conversations with her boyfriend, IIRC.

Another customer who claims to be on medically-prescribed marijuana for some obscure disease (he does have something wrong with him and talks incessantly with random connections between the last half-statement and the current one), who was arrested for posing as an undercover agent at an estate auction, wearing a set of holsters with no guns. Keeps the phone numbers of almost 1000 local and national businesses, hot dog stands, pizza parlors and law enforcement officers in his cell contacts because "you never know when someone will ask for one of those numbers."

[going gaga]

The weird ones I get are generally of the harmless variety and strangely enough are sometimes more polite than the 'sane ' ones.

Mr K

This guy is actually really nice if some what confused about reality.
For example coming to my department for his doctors appointment,and to get a free sandwich (I was working in the a toy store for this one), he has a very bad short term memory.
After meeting his helper I found out that his condition was a result of a bad crash on a motor bike (I'm assuming head injuries)

Glasses

This guy is another old man and again pretty harmless,though he freaks out some of the younger members of staff who've met him.(though personally I don't know why)
If he every did turn nasty I wouldn't have to call security, he's so frail one good push and I'd probabbly hurt him.
He doesn't look after himself, and I did wonder if he was homeless.
It strange because when I do see him I have the exact conversation with him every day.
I don't mean the exact same topic , I mean word for word, no matter the day or my response. Not sure what this guys story is, he's just a sad old guy who needs some one to talk to, or at as the case may be.

Obscene lady

She talks to herself , or more accurately to who ever's talking in her mind, it's pretty nasty stuff and it's usually punctuated with swearing.
I don't go anywhere near her, and leave here well alone, because I get the feeling she would most likely take a swing at me.

[freaktard]

Nothing really elaborate to report. Our store used to sell these dog figurines as decorative accents in our furniture department. One lady bought one, then returned it a week or so later because it was haunted or something. I remember she said it would bark during the night, and would also be facing a different direction every morning.

I had fun filling out the return form for that one! I was tempted to put it on the markdown table, with "Reason for markdown: possessed by evil spirits" on the tag.

[Sorianna]

c
Nothing scares me as much as mental health problems. I'm not scared of the people with them on the whole, but the idea that one day a person can be sane and the next day not terrifies me. I have a lot of craziness in the family, and suffer from cyclical depression myself, and I'm sticking with terms like crazy, round the bend and loony.

Victoria J

Yeah, it is a spooky thought that that could be us. All the kids I've taken care of have been disabled since birth, though, so it's not such an immediate thought for me. I'm sorry to hear about the depression. What tends to worry me more is getting old. I have nothing against old people, I love them, but both my grandparents (they're 84 and 76) on my dad's side are pretty crazy. It just gets me kind of worried.

[Victoria J]

some of them are crazy(I'm so bad. I'm still not very PC I should learn the correct terms one of these days...)

I guess I'm not very PC about this either. I do normally believe in the politeness and thoughtfulness that tends to get characterised by it's opponents as "Political Correctness" - but in this case I refuse to be respectful to illness. I'll be polite to the people with those illnesses, but I'm damned if I believe the illnesses deserve nice names.

Nothing scares me as much as mental health problems. I'm not scared of the people with them on the whole, but the idea that one day a person can be sane and the next day not terrifies me. I have a lot of craziness in the family, and suffer from cyclical depression myself, and I'm sticking with terms like crazy, round the bend and loony.

Victoria J

[Sorianna]

Well, I work with disabled kids (well, not all that young really, but they're not adults), taking care of them at their homes, and some of them are crazy(I'm so bad. I'm still not very PC I should learn the correct terms one of these days...). But most of them are really sweet most of the time.

Although one of the girls I took care of (they apparently don't need me anymore, so I'm just taking care of one kid now) has a tendancey to break things if they weren't working, and would sometimes start screaming if people weren't doing exactly what she wanted... She was sweet most of the time. She liked to call me her nanny. I'm kind of missing her, to be honest...

Other than that, I'm not thinking of anything/one that's too crazy right now.

[depechemodefan]

There is gang-rape lady. She calls the library saying there are gangs in her neighborhood and she calls the cops and the mayor's office, and she's afraid she will be raped. This type of call is interspaced by other calls from her about how the gangs come in and burn her house and rape her.

The guy who erects shrines. He gets these river rocks and pile them on top of each other and ads things, like bloody newspapers, top parts of fences, free AOL cd-roms.

Guy who wants really specific books and when we tell him we don't have them he says we had them before. OH well. Though once he took off his shirt when we told him we didn't have a book. And sometimes he wears a colored-wire hat that looks homemade.

People who come in with food/take material to the restrooms (prohibited to do that) and get angry when we tell them they can't do that.

Guy who took a dump against the outside wall. Another guy took a dump right next to a tree, while standing up.

[thehippie777]

Had a guy once that checked in. He was a little off. He paid cash. Not 10 minutes after I checked him in he claimed that some guy he didn't know was following him around the hotel & he hadn't even made it to his room. The only guy I had walking around at that time was my Night Maintenance guy, and I doubt he had been following him. He demanded his money back, said the hotel freaked him out, & left by foot.

Had a homeless man just wonder in our doors & just take a seat infront of our big screen TV in the lobby. I had to have Security come & tell him to leave.

Have had a couple people wonder in asking odd questions. I feel the need to just ask them to leave the hotel.

Believe it or not, there are quite a few well-to-do people who stay at this hotel & often I wonder about their sanities.

[depechemodefan]

He had four kids and their first names all started with the letter G, so he could say he was pulling four Gs.

I might be wrong, but that reminds me of George Forman who named all his sons "George".

[wagegoth]

That means he is a lawyer who is the son of satan. Not really a far stretch.

Known a few of those.




I worked for Lear Fan. It was a company started by Bill Lear of Lear Jet. He wanted to build a commuter/private turbo prop plane with a body made of Kevlar that could get 10 miles to the gallon. We had test pilots. They are interesting. Very entertaining at times. Would I fly with one? Hell, yes! Would I marry one? Hell, no!

One guy had been a test pilot on the C5. He had these incredibly pale, gray eyes. They were the classic "nobody home" eyes. He just seemed to sort of drift here and there.

They were all crazy to fly, but the one in charge was just kinda crazy. He had four kids and their first names all started with the letter G, so he could say he was pulling four Gs.

And the engineers? There was one guy who had worked for NASA. He would only use green felt tip pens. We all hated him. When he left we gathered up every single green felt tip we could find and burned them. That was an unholy stench.

I just realized I kinda miss all the crazy. I wonder if I still have my Lear Fan shirt.

[Victoria J]

I'm a Corrections Officer at a Maximum Custody state prison. I see crazy, and I mean truly, medically, textbook crazy, all the time.

Yeah - the rest of us normally have to guess (though I do sometimes get to know the diagnosis of the people I work with). I sometimes feel I ought to be allowed to diagnose people - I'm generally right by now !

Working with people with mental health problems is sometimes sad and often surreal and can make the day more interesting - but I'm guessing you also have a lot of the real scaries. The personality disorders and socio paths/psychopaths ?

I work in a downtown bar dealing with drunk and stupid tourists in Key Weird Key West, Florida, "where the weird go pro."

Makes note to visit Key West one day.

In this instance I'm looking for mad not weird though. The occasions you end up dealing with people you really would expect to be going to psychiatrists not pest control / bars/ the library. I'm just wondering how much time we all spend on this, and how common learning to deal with it is.

And enjoying the really surreal stories...

we have one who carries a rather large knife and told our manager that he would 'offer our store 'protection' if we would give him pastries in exchange.

That genuinely made me laugh aloud. Protection pastries.

Sounds like a great deal to me !

Wow, I can create a whole site from the crazies at the library.

What is it about libraries ?

I used to work in an advice centre located in a library. People would come and see us when they had no money, when they were homeless, when they'd been ripped off, when their relationship was breaking down... Loads of people in really stressful situations. Plenty of mad people too.

However we never had more than the odd screamer - while the librarians had repeatedly had the police called, had a couple of staff injured by "customers", and dealt with a level of insanity each day that I can't begin to imagine.


More of my stories :

Had to deal with a psychopath once - he was trying to arrange medical treatment which was kind of difficult as he'd stabbed his last doctor and had a history of attacking medical staff (thankfully he very specifically didn't like medical staff - not advisers !). He scared my manager so much he ended up photocopying hundreds of rants written on cereal packets and adding them to our file - all the rants were about how a soup he liked had been discontinued by the makers...

I had an old lady come in and sing Incy Wincy Spider to me.

I had a guy with severe mental health problems (including Schizophrenia) leave saying "Thank you for telling me to move Cornwall" - leaving me kind of baffled because I certainly hadn't.

I saw a hoarder - whose house was so bad the people who came round to inspect it wouldn't go in as it was a safety hazard. He carried a laundry bag everywhere with 3 coats, a tin of fruit and lots of other stuff. When he left I found I was developing a rash - and the only thing I'd touched was the paperwork he'd given me.

I colleague of mine once helped someone make a complaint about the health service - he wrote his complaint in poetry and it was all about how the view from his window wasn't fit for a dying man. He wasn't dying either.

There was a guy trying to track down the person who'd left hidden codes in his medical records. He had copies of his records - the codes were obviously written in with a pen afterwards...

Many many more, but that's all I can remember right now.

Victoria J

[LifeCarnie]

Iseeing a drag queen with a Dr. Seuss hat and leather bustier during lunchtime on a weekday wouldn't even turn my head anymore. (That would just be considered normal Key West craziness, after all.)

You call it crazy. I call it just another Tuesday on Key West

I always thought that fending off the a brutal hangover, cats, and chickens at Blue Heaven while trying to eat breakfast was the craziest thing that happened to me in Key West.

[depechemodefan]

Wow, I can create a whole site from the crazies at the library.

There's the salamander man, who says that the CIA did experiments on him, placed a salamander in his head, and we have documentation of the experiments, which he wants us to give him. He also wears a tin-foil covered hat.

There's people who claim the be the mayor's kid (so far we had 2 diff. mayors while I've been here) and want us to do research for them.

There's this one woman who brings her school-age daughter, who is wearing some school uniform (the daughter, not the mom), during the day. The mom is nuts, she'll complain about the librarians and the customers. And she berates her daughter, who sits at a table doing homework. One day a customer told her she shouldn't talk to her daughter that way and there was this loud agrument. And the mom is always borrowing pens, staplers, etc from us. One day I told her she needs to bring her own supplies, so she complains about how rude I was, and how I should show more compassion. Of course, my spineless manager told me that I knew she (customer) was crazy, I shouldn't have said anything and let her borrow the stapler.

There's Mrs. Gold. She comes up with these weird requests, like "can you give me a list of shoe repair stores that will dye shoes purple." Me: "here's the phone book. You can call them." Her "but can't you look it up on your computer?" The managers will of course look it up for her and give her free printouts. This was going on for more than a year. One day one staff member saw she had a butcher's knife. So the police was called and they took her knife but didn't take her in. The cops said if she shows up again, to call them and tell them her name so they would bring back-up. They had to haul her in for other things before.

There's the guy who calls and either asks for "where in the bible does it say..." or "what is a vagina? What is a hormone?"

Then there was this guy who called and said he just go married and he doesn't know how to have sex with his wife can we tell him how. Ther first librarian to answer told him we had books he can check out. He hangs up and calls back with the same question. Oh, and he fakes an accent.

We have a lot of mumblers, who will walk around, mummbling to themselves.

There's a woman who says she's the legitimate Queen of England and we are doctoring the documents.

More to come.