Tell us a story!

[airman15 4,113]

Tell us a story!

 

There are threads around the Off Topic forum about jokes, movies and food. But I haven't seen a thread where the community can share stories, so I decided to make one.

 

If you have any interesting stories or tales, feel free to post them here! Any story; true or far-fetched are welcome.

 

[Cpt Johnny 58]

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[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Try this.  It is a true life adventure.

[AkemiAzula 280]

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4998222/1/Bartessa

[airman15 4,113]

This is a story on BBC News I found through Reddit about a man who threw a message in a bottle into the English Channel as a boy 34 years ago and met the French woman who found it.

[The Avatar 1,089]

Is this for personal stories/experiences too? I have some pretty funny ones to share.

[airman15 4,113]

Is this for personal stories/experiences too? I have some pretty funny ones to share.

 

Yes, any story is welcome 

[Mr Saturn64 742]

Is this for personal stories/experiences too? I have some pretty funny ones to share.

 

Yes, any story is welcome  If that's so...

I was at (in true Philadelphia fashion) a baseball game. To be more specific, the Cubs at the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park (good stadium) and I was with my parents and my older brother at the game. So it was a night game, and I was around... Oh, 8-10 years old. It comes the 5th. I remember it specifically. It was going to the bottom of the 5th with the bottom of the Phillies lineup coming. They start getting hits and winning, so I'm enjoying it, then, up in the upper deck of the stadium, then things got weird. There was even a blurb about it on the news. I was watching Jimmy Rollins bat (when he was good) and... A drunk guy fell on me from the top row. Yeah, my brother and I got knocked down and hit the people in front of us. The lady in front of us starting cursing the drunk guy out in the thickest southern accent you'll ever hear north of the Mason-Dixon line. And obviously, that's gonna draw attention. The park security came, and the drunk guy claimed he was pushed. There was no one up there. The security arrested the guy, had his tickets confiscated, and had to do community service around the Sports Complex and was arrested for probably a week with that service. We left the stadium after the police came and arrested the guy, as we needed to do all that stuff like reporting the guy. But when your a kid and Ryan Howard is batting, you don't care. That was when he hit 60 home runs that year and all that. So I went to first aid after hitting the seat, the guy got arrested, and the Phillies won. Always good when they win.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Not a bad first person narrative.  You can write well, and a little editing could get that published as a first person story in RD.

[AkemiAzula 280]

One day a long time ago when I was at Burraneer Bay school in the 90s me and a friend started an expedition to dig up dinosaur bones in the schoolyard. We agreed to dig until we found bones. He was sceptical, however.

 

We dug and we dug and then I came across a bone. He hadn't come across anything. I showed it to the teacher and she said it was a chicken bone and to throw it away. But I could tell it was no drumstick. So I took it to the Australian Museum in Sydney.

 

They identified it as a Macropod metatarsal, the heelbone of a kangaroo. Kangaroos having lived in the Sutherland Shire some time ago. It was put in the bone collection in the Search and Discover room.

 

That was probably my finest moment, my having not the most interesting or privileged of lives.

[airman15 4,113]

I have a story to share.

 

 

I took a canoeing trip to Folsom Lake over the weekend at the end of June with my scout troop. The plan  was to canoe across the lake to our campsite before sunset, the next day would be spent on the water and then we would head home the next morning.  On the second day, we took our canoes and we paddled to some beaches as stops during a 'tour' of the lake. Afterwards, we went back to camp for some lunch and then headed back out to the water. 

One of my friends and I wanted to practice how to right our canoes in case they capsized (We did this close to the shore in case something went wrong, and this also counts as a requirement for a canoeing merit badge). We tipped them over as planned and we had to figure out how to flip them right-side up. However, two men who were watching us came down and they wanted to help.

We flipped the canoe and the men asked us if we were OK. I looked at them and said "Yes, we're good. We wanted to flip these canoes". The men looked at us perplexed saying "Wait, you flipped these on purpose?" We told them "Yes we did. We're in scouts and we were practicing how to get back on our canoe in case we flipped" We had a good chuckle and went our separate ways after.

Overall it was a fun weekend, but I learned the hard way to keep putting on sunscreen every couple of hours...

[MandelSoft 2,775]

I too have a story to share...

When I registered on SimTropolis back, I still was one of the members in the crowd. A nobody. Still connected with a data cap of 250MB a month, so I was cautious with downloads, didn't use things like cloud servers and YouTube.

Now, I have no data caps and I have kind of a prominent role within the community, something I didn't expect to happen back in 2007. People I've looked up to in the past are now my fellow NAM Team mates and I've been a mod for a year now, making my presence more prominent (but I also have to be more responsible).

What's more interesting is that also that SimTropolis/SC4Devotion and Real Life have crossed at some points. For instance, SimCity did play a role in my choice for my university study, which I'm happy to note that I've almost succesfully finished the bachelor degree. Furthermore, I've been to Dutch Day 2012 and 2013 of SC4D, meeting other dutch SC4D members in Real Life...

But the greatest endavour took place this year. In the start of this year, Felix (riiga) and I got this crazy idea to meet up one day. He wanted to visit the Netherlands some day. I offered him a place to stay. Knowing him longer, I trusted him to come. So by the end of April, it was finally realised and it was a fun meet-up during the weekend. It went by all to quickly....

But soon after the meet-up there was the idea of doing it in reverse; I was planning to visit his place in Sweden during the summer. Furthermore, that would also be the first time on a plane for me. That's a double endavour for me then. After some planning, we managed to pick a week. And right now, I'm enjoying the stay at his place and we just visited Stockholm today. I have no regrets of doing it

And that's all because of SimTropolis and SC4Devotion. Without those sites, we would've never met each other...

Best,

Maarten

[Snugies 91]

Warning: do not try this at home

One evening I didn't have much food to eat, as I hadn't gone to the grocery store in awhile. So all I had was some very spicy Korean noodles. I didn't know it has to be sauce instead I made it into a soup, my first mistake. Second mistake: wake up in the morning after these spicy noodles I had before bed, went to starbucks got a venti coffee black. After I finished about 1/3 of my coffee it hit. I've never had such a force of pressure to goto the bathroom. I swear to god it was so bad I thought I was going to blast off. It was like a mixed some combination of explosive fuel.

[airman15 4,113]

Yikes! That reminds me of something that happened a few months ago.

 

We were running into a problem where every gallon of milk we bought went bad before its expiration date. One night my dad went to pour himself a glass of milk and we heard him gagging and coughing. The milk was rotten a week before the date posted on the jug. It turned out that the temperature inside our refrigerator was too low to keep the milk cold enough. Since we got it fixed, we haven't had any problems with milk expiring early.

[AkemiAzula 280]

Me and this guy were testing berries to see if they were ready to pick. I tried the gooseberries and they tasted quite good but the other guy said they were sour. 

 

Boringest story ever.

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

There was once an ugly barnacle. He was so ugly, that everyone died.

The End.

[Cpt Johnny 58]

.

[airman15 4,113]

Here's a tale that happened to me on the job yesterday.

 

During the summer, I work with my family doing specialty cleaning. So far, this is the third summer I've worked on this job and this is the busiest time of the year since the weather is good. We service carpets, tile & grout, gutters, windows and upholstery. We have our own truck mounted machine that steam cleans the carpets, tile and upholstery. Normally we service homes but we have been called by commercial entities before.

 

Yesterday, we were called by a retirement complex to clean the carpets and furniture in the Memory Care section. My family and I worked for five hours, and we were under a time limit because the people living there wanted to be back ASAP. We had just finished and while my mom and dad were speaking with the management about the results, I was tasked with packing up our work van and turning off the machinery.

 

As I was packing up, I see a lady with a walker standing near some of the hoses which I had next to the van. I turn to her and say "Hello there. Do you need to pass?" She said "Oh, no thanks. I was just coming by to say thank you" I wasn't sure what she was talking about so I asked her "Thank me? What for?" and she replied "For turning that damn machine off". It was because we had the machine running for so long, but I got a good chuckle out of it.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I live in a senior's apartment building which is 100% self-care.  During the heat-wave, however, the building supervisor, also a resident, organized some general meetings in the downstairs lounge, one for ice-cream and fixings, and later for iced lemonade, which also went around the building on a cart.  This is very much outside his duties, but shows how we manage to care for one another in this place.  Mostly, the residents here are what I tend to call LOLs waiting for God, but we are a caring bunch.

 

---

 

LOL = Little Old Ladies, in case anyone was wondering.  Never bet that when you write that everyone will know what you mean.  This term was around long before the Internet.

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

LOL = Little Old Ladies, in case anyone was wondering.  Never bet that when you write that everyone will know what you mean.  This term was around long before the Internet.

I thought it meant lots of love?

[AkemiAzula 280]

I have only known the acronym to mean 'laughing out loud'. Although I have heard the term 'little old lady'. 

 

Anyway here's another 'story' from my past. I haven't lead a particularly interesting life. I'm like the doctor in that I tend to observe others and places rather than really interact with them. 

 

Back in 2008 I had just finished being homeschooled. My mother had rushed the final year so I could apply for benefits to help pay the rent. I wasn't particularly looking forward to social interaction or working. Not that I was not fond of working itself, but people and me had never got along since I began being homeschooled in 2000. When they took Megan to Perth in 1999 I stopped caring about humans, pretty much. At any rate I had to sign up to a recruitment agency as part of the deal to get benefits.

 

This place is no longer around, it was shut down a while ago. It was called IPC Employment and was a fairly standard run of the mill agency where you jobsearched on archaic computers with floppy disks and heard lectures about how to maximise the potential of your resume etc. Not a bad place, but nothing special either.Anyway I was due to start a jobsearching course and I had heard it would be like high school (which I never went to). This frightened me greatly as I really didn't know what to expect, having only seen Daria and The Simpsons etc.

 

So I planned to run away to the bush and starve myself to death if I couldn't somehow make a living there. I had read up on bush tucker etc and knew there was a very slim chance of a non criminal person surviving without human interaction. However I simply couldn't consider the jobsearching course as it meant interacting with people my own age, who were weird and scary types.

 

So while my mother was jobsearching (she didn't believe in women working and only did it to get benefits) I stole away with a small amount of money (I had saved a bit on my benefits but what use is money in Asgard lol) and took a train to the Blue Mountains. I planned to hide somewhere in the eastern part of the mountains which is low lying gorge-riddled land. I got to Glenbrook Gorge but it was near sunset and I lost the track, having to climb up a cliff after losing it completely. I planned to go down into the gorge.

 

So I took a train to Mount Victoria, where I had visited before and knew well. I spent the night at Mount York, which is an abutting head of escarpment north of the town, overlooking the Kanimbla/Hartley Valley. I have a picture of it in the photos thread. It is a nice spot and I spent the night thinking and looking out over the valley. You could see the Milky Way clearly due to the lack of light pollution there. There was a distant thunderstorm also. I saw the cars on the road below, with their lights visible. I heard Kangaroos in the bush around me throughout the night. I didn't see any people that night.

 

The next night I planned to spend near Victoria Falls, and I walked to Asgard Swamp but it found private property, although there were some interesting rock formations too. However as I climbed a small hill and planned to sleep there I noticed signs of human activity, rubbish. Sweet wrappers and drink cans etc. So I went back to Mount York. This night I went up to the lookout where the explorers had cut a road in the early nineteenth century and saw campers so I returned to the lookout halfway along the road. I got a Coke at the servo.

 

The next night I had two choices. Return to Wollongong and try Mt Keira where the canopy was thicker, or go south of Katoomba towards Mount Solitary. I heard helicopters above me and remembered a police television show where they had infrared satellite vision. This made me realise also that police had sniffer dogs and such. The humans wouldn't give up that easily.

 

So I had to return as had I remained they would have found me some how. 

 

The cops thought I had gone to Mount Keira, it was nice to think I'd outsmarted them.

 

Not sure if we're allowed picture in this thread. It's cool if we aren't, but I've put in spoiler brackets a picture from Google of a track I took at Mount York. This was the track that had been the first road to cross the Blue Mountains in around 1813.

[The Avatar 1,089]

Back when I was in eighth grade, around the end of the year, it was my time to get braces. I was defiant; I thought my teeth were fine (even though they were horrid, and I looked like I was a werewolf with those fangs). Fortunately, I didn't have much of a say in the matter, and I am no longer werewolf/vampire boy, but the process I had to go through to get the braces makes for a good story. When my mom and I went to see our orthodontist for the first time, nothing much happened. He examined my teeth, took some pictures and x-rays, and talked about the procedure. However, at one of the following meetings, he informed us that I would need to have some teeth pulled. That's where I really started to freak out. I hate anything to do with surgery and needles. I asked if I would have to have an IV in my arm, and the orthodontist told me I wouldn't. What a joke. At least it was reassuring at the time. Sometime later my mom and I visited a maxillofacial surgeon for a pre-surgical meeting/pep talk/nightmare (it was all of those things). We waited forever until the doctor came to assess my teeth and tell us which ones had to go. While our orthodontist said only four teeth had to be pulled, the maxillo-whatever guy said that my wisdom teeth were pretty bad too, and that they might as well pull them out too. Great news. After the meeting came the pep talk with the lady who scheduled our appointment for the surgery. We decided to have all eight teeth pulled on the same day - to get it over with - which brought up my most important question: is this going to hurt? The lady assured me everything would be fine, saying I would be under the effects of laughing gas, and that I wouldn't feel a thing. What a joke. Then came the nightmare; she dropped the bombshell. I would also have to have an IV in my arm. It was at that moment that everything came crashing down on me. Braces I could handle. Laughing gas? No sweat. But a needle in my arm was the straw that broke the camel's back. We left the surgeon's office, me dreading the day of my surgery. Eventually it came, and it was time for me to man up. As I lay on the bed in the operating (is that what they call it for teeth pulling?) room, a nurse came in to make me loopy in the head with the laughing gas. In a short while, the magic substance had already begun to take effect on me, but I was not completely knocked-out like I wanted. Then came the worst part of this whole story: the clueless nurse and the IV. I knew it was coming. The nurse informed me she was about to insert the IV into my arm, but I knew it anyway; my needle senses were tingling. My mom held my hand as the sharp, piercing tip was injected into my skin like the venomous fang of a deadly snake. I felt the sting of the needle, like the sting of a vicious wasp. I felt my hand desperately grasping my mom's, like a person grasping at the edge of a cliff as they dangle there, helpless. I felt... relief that it was over, like the relief you probably feel knowing I'm done using similies in this story. But it was not over yet. It turned out that the nurse had made a mistake, and the IV had been inserted incorrectly and had to be inserted again. The nurse tried with my other arm. Again I felt the pain of a thumb tack being pushed into my skin. Either my veins weren't cooperating that day or the nurse was an idiot, but the second attempt failed too, and the IV had to be inserted into the first arm again. More pain, more pinpricks, more holes in my skin. Finally, after three tries, the IV was inserted and working properly, but that didn't negate my anger at the nurse. I wanted to see how she liked getting stabbed with the needle three times, but the IV-laughing gas combo had me out like a light in no time. After what seemed like minutes, but was probably hours in reality, I was awake again with eight heavily-bleeding holes in my mouth, stuffed full of gauze. The end. 

 

There's my overly-dramatized, poorly-written tale of how I got eight teeth pulled. I'm too lazy to put it into paragraphs. I probably used way too many commas too - I tend to do that a lot. Years of writing formal essays has taken a toll on my creative writing skills. Take it for what it's worth. I'm tired of typing now. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Ouch!

[airman15 4,113]

Mark_Kochan- Pictures are acceptable. I believe they help give an idea about the setting and the way a character would look.

 

Mama Luigi- I feel your pain! I had braces before (between 2007 and 2009) and I had to go into surgery too. Before I was told I had to go into surgery for my teeth, I had some X-rays done to show how my permanent teeth would be growing in. The X-ray showed two of my bottom teeth were growing sideways (!) and I needed to have my Wisdom teeth removed.

 

In order to fix the sideways teeth, they had to attach chains around the teeth and on the braces. And to get my wisdom teeth, they had to cut open my gums and extract them from the inside. When I was recovering, it wasn't the chains that was painful, it was the holes left behind by the wisdoms. For several weeks, I had to flush out my gums with hot salt water using a specially designed syringe. Not the best thing i went through, but at least now I have straight teeth.

[AkemiAzula 280]

I refused to get braces when I was younger. I'd rather have bent teeth than braces. Way less nerdy at school.

 

Anyway I've only ever been to a dentist once back in 2010. I had recently moved into youth accommodation in Wollongong and the staff suggested I get my teeth looked at as I'd never been to a dentist so I agreed.

 

I'd only had one visit to a doctor in recent memory, in 2008 shortly after the mountain adventure when I got my ingrown toenails removed with a local injection. I rested for a few weeks after that while they slowly and painfully healed and I spent the time reading more Dickens and Verne than I've read before or since... Even got a large chunk of Bleak House done, and it sure is bleak for one used to being able to construct a city within a few hours.

 

So my staff worker took me to the Piccadilly Centre in town which is a rundown shopping centre haunted by low life next to the railway station. There was a dentist there. My reaction to the place had less to do with needlephobia/the idea of surgery than just the room itself. It was so freaky with that funny chair and all the weird instruments and furniture. You had to put on these goggles and lie down and open your mouth and they'd fiddle around inside with a funny mirror thing.

 

She told me I'd need two extractions, which I got (not at the same time, one was done a week or so before the next) later that year. I had local injection in my mouth for that. I had to get a blood test once. Needles in the arm are nothing, it's no different to pricking yourself with a bramble thorn or accidentally cutting yourself with a razor blade. 

 

However needles in the toes and mouth are a different matter due to the higher sensitivity of the regions. However once the stuff worked and I was numb I didn't feel anything painful beyond that, however she had to really go all Hercules on me to get them out and she took her time about it. I thought it would be like insert-twist-remove yank! But instead she was spending about a quarter of an hour pulling and twisting until it finally gave.

 

I'm the sort of person who loves getting a scar on their arm or knee or wtvr, because that is perfectly cool like the one I got for a few years on my ankle when I fell off my skateboard. But dentists are another matter altogether. I don't think humans were designed to lay down and accept somebody rummaging about inside their mouth for half an hour inserting needles and pulling out teeth and whatnot. The room itself was three quarters of the problem for me. They didn't even have any music on or anything, it was all plain white furniture and it was like being in some alien film.

 

I imagine had the room been of wooden furnishing with wallpaper and I had been given a few pints of ale beforehand I'd have enjoyed the experience a lot more!

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Dental work of any kind is an ordeal that could easily been dreamed up by the Spanish Inquisition, but at least they use local anaesthetic.

 

Wait until you get older and start having problems with your plumbing.  I recently underwent a cystoscopic examination by my urologist, and my friend, they don't use any anaesthetic!  Until you've had a pipe inserted in your urinary tract, you don't understand what pain is about.

[AkemiAzula 280]

I'll try and keep the old tract clean then lol

 

I think dental stuff is bad because you can't see it. If I prick myself with a bramble thorn in the finger or what have you I'm like 'wtvr' but that's because of the control over the situation. Not knowing who will win a football game gives me more pain than a controlled prick. 

 

Anyway I would post another story about doctors/hospitals etc but the only time I ever went to a hospital (to be treated) was shortly after I was born for an eye infection. Apparently had they not treated it I would have died. It was at Adelaide children's hospital back in 91. I can obviously not recall it that well, although I remember getting the mandatory injections when I was two. I remember that to an extent.

[Ace3 1,209]

Oh we're talking about hospitals?

When I was eight my friends and family noticed I was limping around a lot. I told my mom it was probably just muscle pains, but she didn't believe me. I said if we could just wait another week, it would probably go away, but she made me go to the hospital that night. About two hours later I was diagnosed with Appendicitus, which probably could have severely disabled me had we not gone to the hospital that day.

Funny how things work out eh?

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

I once shaved the sides of my fingers off with a woodworking machine. That was fun.

Never broken a bone, but so many penetrating injuries, including getting a pen spring stuck right through my finger. Don't know how that happened.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

You sound as if you are accident prone.  I never use machine tools without a fence or guard.