I’m the charge nurse in a huge emergency room. It’s a holiday, and we are very busy. The secretary comes up to me and says there’s a phone call from somebody who just got discharged. The caller is yelling about 911 and saying they have a major emergency. I drop what I’m doing and take the call.

Patient: “You need to call 911! Call them right now!”

Me: “What’s going on? What’s the emergency?”

Patient: “I just spent all day in your ER. I had such a bad headache, and they had to give me medicine in an IV.”

Me: “Okay. What’s happening now?”

Patient: “The medicine made me so drowsy, and they told me not to drive home, so I called a taxi. They dropped me off at my house.”

Me: “Fine, but why are you talking about 911? If you need an ambulance—”

The caller interrupts and talks over me. 

Patient: “Not an ambulance! You need to call 911! Call the police! They were here, and they took my money. You need to tell them to give it back.”

Me: “… What? You’re telling me the police stole your money.”

Patient: “The taxi driver called them. I told him I wasn’t paying. I came from the hospital, so it should be free. He called the police, and they came to my house, and they said I had to pay for the fare.”

Me: “Who told you the cab ride would be free?”

Patient: “Call the police! Call the cab company! Tell them the ride is free! Give my money back!”

Me: “Miss, I’m not in charge of the cab company. I’m certainly not in charge of the police. And I don’t even have your money.”

The patient yells an insult down the phone. 

Patient: “If you don’t give my money back right now, I’m coming back there, and people are going to get hurt.”

Me: “Oh, you just said the magic words. I’ll call the police for you right now. What’s your address?”

The patient gave me her name and address. I hung up, called 911, and reported that she had made threats against the hospital. 

About an hour later, the patient wound up back in my ER, this time in handcuffs. Apparently, when the police got to her house, she took a swing at a cop. They brought her to us to get the taser darts removed.

My dad tells me a story of when he was stationed on the East Coast before I was born. An idiot jerk he knew let his “valuable show-quality” German shepherd act however it pleased, including chasing neighborhood cats. No leash, of course.

I don’t know if, in this case, the cat owner was Dad or a friend of his; he’s told it both ways. But one of those cats was a full-grown but still small Manx cat. One day, the cat had enough and jumped on the shepherd’s back, hung on with her front paws, and beat the absolute crap out of the dog with her hind legs. With claws. This, of course, destroyed the “show-quality” part.

[Dog Owner] took [Cat Owner] to small claims court. The judge was not sympathetic, pointing out the trouble the dog had already caused and that the area had leash laws — never mind the dog starting the fracas. [Dog Owner] had to pay [Cat Owner]’s court costs.

There was also a bit of disbelief that a cat that small had beaten up a dog that size. Both animals were in the courtroom — the dog because the owner was showing off the damage done (and shockers, the dog was on a leash) and the cat for reasons Dad didn’t say, safely secured in a cat carrier.

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual Assault, Violence (Carjacking, Stabbing)

I’m seventeen, and I’m being given a tour of the new workplace by my boss. One of the guys sees me and says:

Employee: “Oh! The new guy! I hope he doesn’t end up like the last guy!”

At first, I think it’s normal workplace banter, but as I go around, I am constantly told, “I hope you don’t end up like the last guy!”, so I have to ask my trainer what gives.

Trainer: “The last guy we hired for your position never did what he was told and always mouthed off, so he eventually got fired. Then, about three weeks later, he groped a random lady in a nearby park, ran to the store to steal a car, and tried to carjack a customer, who stabbed him a few times. Then, he ran all the way back here and locked himself in our employee restroom to hide from the police, like he thought we were going to protect him or something.”

I laughingly assure him that I have no intention of doing any of that.

Trainer: “Yeah, there was something oddly talented about his level of stupid; it was like he was trying to find the stupidest of all the bad choices. He succeeded spectacularly.”

I recently read this story about a thief. Back in the olden days, thieves were less sophisticated but still successful.

I knew of a guy who would go to home improvement stores and pick a large, inexpensive item that came in a box and put it in his cart. He would ditch that item, keeping the box, and then get busy filling that box with power tools and expensive merchandise. He even carried a roll of clear packing tape to seal it back up.

He’d just roll his cart to the checkout with the barcode facing up, and he knew which cashiers were lazy and would just scan it without checking. He could easily get over a thousand dollars of product for thirty or forty bucks.

Related:
He Was Clearly Hoping No One Could Put A Finger On The Problem

I was working for a temp agency in the 1990s, and they sent me to a “business center”. It was a small mall in the 1980s and had now been turned into four or five businesses in the same space, sharing the general facilities — lunch room, copy machines, etc. I was brought on as a tech as these businesses really weren’t big enough to have their own IT departments. I was told that the previous guy in the position, “Joe”, had left for a more stable job, and everyone in the place was sorry to see him go.

The first week I was there, I started finding problems with the guy. I came into one place and was told a computer was acting up. The business owner looked like she was about to burst into tears.

Owner: “When the last computer did this, Joe said it was broken and I had to get a new computer.”

I fixed the problem in five minutes with a free antivirus program and set up the rest of the computers in that office, as well.

Me: “What did Joe do with the old computer?”

Owner: “Oh, he took it home for parts since it wouldn’t work anymore.”

And all that week, I kept running into things that were really simple fixes, but good ol’ Joe had either taken all frickin’ day fixing them or announced that the machine was borked and had to be replaced. And Joe was apparently the designated recycler.

One owner said Joe was always in the office, working on the system; he’d be all day working on that computer. It turned out that before he’d left, he’d tried really hard to convince the owner to turn that tower over to Joe, and Joe would replace it “for free”. But the owner decided not to do that; he told me he just didn’t trust Joe all that much.

After taking a look at the computer, I could see why Joe wanted to take it with him; it was full of adult material grabbed from the Internet. After I showed this to the owner, Joe became persona non grata at that place.

It gets better.

It turned out that Joe couldn’t hack it in the real world and ended up going back to the temp agency. He asked for his old job back, but no, I had that position. So, he came to the facility and tried to bug me into quitting. I reported him to the agency, and he was written up and told not to return to the facility for any reason.

And when he did return to the facility, I informed building management, who called the police. Upon seeing the po-po, Joe took off like a cheetah, trying to exit the building through the back door — but failing because it now had a lock on it due to a break-in a few months previous.

After he tried (and failed) to resist arrest, the cops called in a request for his records and found out that Joe was wanted for suspicion of dealing. I had been talking to the cops at the time, and upon hearing this, I had my own suspicions. I went to check that computer that Joe had spent so much time on.

Sure enough, hidden in the files was a partial record of Joe’s activities back when he’d worked there. I printed out the file, handed it to the cops, and told them I’d send them anything else I found on the computer.

The next day, the feds showed up and took the computer. Joe went to prison for five years.