The Listener Stories of 2024

We are at the end of 2024. It’s been a great year for me, and I hope it has been for you too.

As you probably know, every episode of What Was That Like ends with a Listener Story. This is just a 5-10 minute personal story, sent in by a listener. I’m always looking for new listener stories, so I’d love for YOU to send one in. Just record it on your phone in a quiet environment and email to me – Scott@WhatWasThatLike.com.

And these stories are a very popular part of the show. They’re always the very last thing in an episode, so it’s worth staying around til the end!

And our tradition is, for the last episode of the year, which is today, I put together all of the Listener Stories for that year into one full episode. So today you have more than 3 hours of storytelling. I know you probably can’t sit down and listen to all 3 hours at one time, but these are short stories so it’s easy to break the episode into bite-size pieces and just listen when you have a chance.

So – enjoy these stories, and get ready for the new year because I’m working on a bunch of amazing  episodes and crazy stories. Looking forward to seeing you here in 2025.

Full show notes for this episode are here:

https://WhatWasThatLike.com/201

 

Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.

Want to discuss this episode and other things with thousands of other WWTL listeners? Join our podcast Facebook group at WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook (many of the podcast guests are there as well)

 

 

Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):

We are at the end of 2024. It’s been a great year for me, and I hope it has been for you too.

 

As you probably know, every episode of What Was That Like ends with a Listener Story. This is just a 5-10 minute personal story, sent in by a listener. I’m always looking for new listener stories, so I’d love for YOU to send one in. Just record it on your phone in a quiet environment and email to me – Scott@WhatWasThatLike.com.

 

And these stories are a very popular part of the show. They’re always the very last thing in an episode, so it’s worth staying around til the end!

 

And our tradition is, for the last episode of the year, which is today, I put together all of the Listener Stories for that year into one full episode. So today you have more than 3 hours of storytelling. I know you probably can’t sit down and listen to all 3 hours at one time, but these are short stories so it’s easy to break the episode into bite-size pieces and just listen when you have a chance.

 

So – enjoy these stories, and get ready for the new year because I’m working on a bunch of amazing  episodes and crazy stories. Looking forward to seeing you here in 2025.

 

Hi Scott. First, I want to tell you how much I enjoy your podcast. Thank you for all your hard work and putting all of these episodes together. My name is Brenda, and I’d like to share a listener’s story that happened to me many years ago. This was in the late 1980s and became a bit of a family story heirloom.

 

My husband and I decided to take our kids to Disneyland for summer vacation prior to school starting. We drove from Washington State to the Bay Area in California where my sister and her husband were living. They had just purchased a brand new travel trailer and, along with their daughter and her two small children, joined us on our trip down to Disneyland. My sister and her family were in a large van pulling the trailer and my family and I were in a separate vehicle following behind.

 

Several miles down the freeway from their house, my brother-in-law pulled over on the side of the road. Not knowing what was going on, I got out of our car to find out what was happening. My brother-in-law said my sister couldn’t find her purse and thought she may have left it in the trailer. I followed him inside, and while he was looking around the front part, I went to the back of the trailer to the bedroom and looked in cupboards and closets for the purse. All of a sudden, I heard the trailer door shut and the lock turn with a click. Before I could get to the trailer door or call out, the trailer started to move and pulled out onto the freeway.

 

I ran to the back of the trailer to the back window to signal to my husband that I was a trapped passenger in a moving trailer but, to my dismay, the back window had an outside cover pulled up for travel. This was, of course, all well before cell phones, so I was literally trapped with no way to communicate with anybody. It was very warm in the trailer, in the middle of California, in August. I was feeling helpless. I started to panic a little, trying to calm myself down. I couldn’t help but see the humor in the situation and decided the only thing I could do was ride it out till the next stop.

 

Not too many miles down the road, I felt the trailer start to slow down and pull over again. I was laughing hysterically as I met my brother-in-law at the trailer door, mostly from relief, but also just from the ridiculous situation. Come to find out, my family thought I had decided to ride in the van with my sister’s family without informing them, but then decided that would have been a rude and out-of-character thing for me to do, so finally pulled up alongside their van signaling, “Where’s Brenda?”

 

My sweet brother-in-law, after finding the purse, somehow had figured I had slipped out of the trailer ahead of him and had gone back to my car. He finally put two and two together and pulled over right away. Everyone was relieved that I came out laughing instead of spitting mad or upset, and we all chuckle every time we retell the story. I’m sure we all had a great time at Disneyland that year, but this story kind of overshadows it in my mind. Thanks for listening.

 

I just really love your podcast. Apparently, I would like to be on it because I’m sending in a listener story. When I was a teenager, I had a friend who worked at a convenience store, and they kind of took advantage of her because she’s always willing to work, and she sometimes worked open to close, which was, like, 6 am to 1 am for consecutive days.

 

One day, we decided to go to my boyfriend’s cottage and then we came back. We partied a lot, and we didn’t sleep very much. So, she was really exhausted and I said, “Well, I can go in to work for you.” Her boss knew me because I was always there. She was my best friend and I used to hang out there and keep her company and help her stock the shelves. I usually did the cash and all that stuff too. So, it was kind of like she was getting paid and I was hanging out anyways. I told her that I would do it. She said, “Great!” She gave me a quick rundown on the store closing procedures because I didn’t always pay attention to what she was doing by then because it was kind of late and I just wanted to get out of there.

 

Anyways, she gave me the key to lock up and off I went. Somewhere around 11.30 or so, 2 men came into the store and they were wearing stockings over their faces. Normally, you would think that somebody would be scared seeing that but, just looking at their statures, I knew it was my boyfriend and her boyfriend and they were probably just coming to scare me as a joke because I didn’t really work there.

 

Anyways, I didn’t really think too much of it, but they yelled at me to give them all the cash in the register, and I was like, “Yeah, okay, I’ll just get right on that. I’ll give you all the cash in the register, no problem.” Then, all of a sudden, one of them stuck a gun in my face, and I realized that my original assessment was not accurate, and they’re not my boyfriend or her boyfriend. I’ve never seen a gun in person because I live in Ottawa, Canada and, back in the 80s, that just was not a big thing. It wasn’t mainstream for people to be walking around with guns. Neither my boyfriend or her boyfriend, I knew neither of them had guns, so I knew this couldn’t have been them.

 

So they took me into the back room to steal cartons of cigarettes from the tobacco cage, but I didn’t have a key because I didn’t work there. I told him that and he said I was lying. So, I told him the story about how I didn’t work there and my friend was hungover, so I offered to work for her and all this. Then, I said, “I don’t have keys. I have a key for the front door, but I don’t have a key for the tobacco cage or the time lock safe or anything. I’m really kind of useless.” After a couple of minutes, they realized that I really was useless. They just left me in the back where the tobacco cage was and they went out and they opened up the cash register. Somehow they figured it out. I actually think it was probably somebody who worked there at one time or at a retail store that knew how to open the cash register. Anyways, they did that. They grabbed all the cash, and then they took as many packs and cartons of cigarettes as they could before they took off.

 

I was kind of stunned, so I called my friend and she was still dead to the world. So, I called Ray because his number was posted on near the cash register because he was the store manager and I told him what happened and he was so confused about why I was there working and why my friend was not. Anyway, he just said he’d be there shortly and to call the police. I was in a real sketchy neighborhood. The police came pretty quickly and they seemed like they really didn’t believe my story. They were kind of rude to me about it all. In retrospect, I think it’s because I wasn’t freaking out too much. I guess I was more in shock than anything. I think maybe they were figuring, I’m young. I’m only, like, 16-17. So if this really happened I should be a little more panicked, but I wasn’t. They asked me to describe the gun, and I really couldn’t say too much about it other than it was black and it was a handgun.

 

Apparently, tossing weapons onto buildings was a real popular thing to do back in the late 80s, because one of the cops used the emergency stairs. There was a set of metal stairs going up to the top of the building. This is not a very tall building. One of the cops went up there and he came back down with a gun in his hand, so he asked me to look at it and let him know if that was it. So, I was like, “Yeah, I guess so.” I was happy that they’d found it because it validated my account of the events. Surprisingly, they both started laughing at me, which I wasn’t very happy with. They asked me how I couldn’t tell that it was a starter’s pistol. I had no idea what the hell a starter pistol was. Then, my fear turned to anger and embarrassment and I said, “Because I don’t live in this shitty fucking neighborhood, that’s why!”

 

I honestly don’t remember anything more about that night, other than Ray letting me go home and not letting me finish my shift. But yeah, it was not fun. I still remember I wasn’t terrified. I don’t know why I wasn’t terrified, but this is definitely something that’s still stuck in my mind all these years later. I’m 55 years old and this happened, like I said, when I was 16 or 17, and it still feels like it was yesterday. Thanks for listening. Again, I enjoy your show. Keep it up and I’ll keep on listening.

 

I just woke up from a pretty crazy nightmare, but that’s not why I’m calling. I’m calling because of the source of that nightmare. Just last weekend, I was assaulted just outside of my own house. It was at 11.30 PM and I was having a small open fire in my small fire pit – it’s portable – just outside of my home in Columbus, Ohio. I live in a bad neighborhood and a lot of people feel their need to protect themselves. So you’ll see people waiting around for their DoorDash to arrive with a banana clip hanging out of their pocket – some big extended clip for a pistol, very obvious kind of stuff.

 

I was approached by a would-be security guard, and he seemed polite enough. He was asking me what I was doing, and I said, “I’m just having a little fire.” He said, “So you’re going to clean it up when you’re done?” I said, “Yeah, I’m not going to walk away from an open flame. I know better.” He said, “Yeah, a lot of people aren’t smart enough to do that.” And I said, “Yeah, I agree.” He started asking me where I live and if I belong there. I said, “Look, man, I’m not going to give you any of my personal information, but I do belong here and I do live here.” He said, “Well, I’m going to need to identify you and confirm that you live here.” I said, “Well, I’m not going to give you any of my personal information, so what happens next?” He said, “Well, I can physically remove you.” I said, “No, you’re not. You should probably call the police or a supervisor.” He quickly cut me off and said, “I am a supervisor.” And I said, “Well, let’s call the police.” I pulled out my phone and I went to look up the non-emergency number, and I told that to him verbally. I said, “Look, I’m going to call the non-emergency number because I have time.”

 

Long story short, my phone died right in my hands, and this guy started asking me if I have any weapons, and I said, “I’m polite enough to tell you I don’t have any weapons on me. I’m not going to make any moves against you, but I belong here. You should probably get the police here because I’m not going to give you any of my information.” And I asked what happens next. He said, “Well, I can physically remove you.” I said, “No you can’t.” So the guy got behind me and he started yelling, “Pull your hands out of your pockets!” I’ve got my little 75-pound pit bull with me and she’s just all love and all kisses. She saw him grab ahold of me, pulled out a taser, and tased me in my chest. Well, this guy flipped me and he threw me on my back and I landed on my back on a pile of rocks and dirt. I tried to stabilize myself on his leg and he grabbed my jacket and wrapped it around my throat and he was choking me.

 

This time, my dog slipped out of her harness when he flipped me the first time. He pulled back and the harness came slipping right off of her. Anyways, this guy was holding me down by my throat and by my neck, and he’s got his knee on my chest, and he’s telling me, “Tell me where you live!” At the threat of coercion, I saw my little dog running around without her harness, freaking out.

 

I told him that my apartment number is 2125. There was this lady that was with him, and I thought she was, like, a passerby. So, as this all began, I said, “Ma’am, can you please call the police? This man’s going to assault me.” This lady got behind him and she went, “Just tell us where you live.” So she’s with him. I thought it was his girlfriend. I later found out she was a security guard for a different security unit, but she was in plain clothes.

 

After he attacked me and I told him where I lived, I ran into my house and I called the police. By the time the police got there, this guy was long gone. They’ve since got his name, his company and we’re filing charges, but I have not been right since. I can’t sleep, I can’t leave my house, and I just want to let everybody know that not everybody who’s in security should be trusted. This guy attacked me for no reason when I had every right to be where I am.

 

So, Scott, I love your show. You’re amazing. I doubt this is going to make it, but I just had to share this with somebody. This is tough stuff. I just woke up from the worst nightmare and I just had to get it off my chest. Have a good one, buddy. I love your show. You do amazing things. You are the most awesome interview I’ve ever heard. Have a good one, buddy.

 

This took place in about 1994. At the time, I was editing TV commercials and this one was sort of like a high-end fashion brand. I also helped do the graphic design and animation – like sketching it out. The director was, like, a big deal, had won an Oscar for costume design on a big movie, and this was her first directing gig, so it was kind of a big pressure. We sort of do what’s called “offlining”, which means we do a cut, but it’s low resolution, it’s not polished. We needed to polish up and really make the graphics look great and make them pop and just the best they can be, so we hired a video effects person who was, like, one of the best in the city. This was in New York city. Everybody loved him. His name was Grant. I had a relationship with him and he was just great.

 

The next day, I showed up bright and early for the video effects studio to basically Grant sitting at a million-dollar console doing his work. The thing about Grant is, unlike many others, you don’t have to pipe in, you don’t have to give him direction, he just does it. So I was just going to lie there on the couch. The art director was there and one other person– and I’m not sure, it might have been Grant’s assistant.

 

It was really boring. Hours went by and Grant was just doing his work, and we were just sitting there. It was after a few hours and Grant went *gasps & sighs in relief* And the art director said, “Yeah, it’s like watching paint dry.”  Then, Grant just threw back his head, his arms thrown back, and he slumped in his chair. They laughed because they thought he was continuing this joke, but I knew something was wrong. I got up and I went to look at his face because we’re sitting behind him and his eyes were completely dilated. His skin was turning blue. I said, “Okay, Grant, we’re going to deal with this.” Then, I got the art director to help me get him laid out on the floor. I don’t know if maybe that was the wrong thing. I wasn’t really confident about my CPR skills. So, I knew the people in the next room, I knew the editor, and I asked him if he knew, and he said, “Yeah.” I said, “Come with me,” and he went in with Grant. I went to the front desk, and I told them what’s going on. “I’m going to call 911.”

 

The other editor kept working on him and eventually the paramedics arrived and they worked on him for a while. It was just a shock. The whole place– everyone’s work stopped in all the sessions and all the rooms and he was taken out in a stretcher, but not with a sheet over his face, so I thought maybe he would be okay or he’d have a chance. Well, we obviously couldn’t continue the session, so I ended up going home and I was shaking.

 

I did get a call from the owner of the company that Grant had died. I got a call from the big shot director. It was very nice. She asked if I was okay and how she knew Grant’s work and how wonderful it was. She knew he was a popular and really nice person and people really valued him, and I really appreciated that because, otherwise, she could be pretty tough.

 

The part that I regret is when it was time for his funeral and I was getting ready to go and then I didn’t – maybe it was because of laziness, selfishness or I just couldn’t handle it unconsciously. I regret that to this day.

 

I’m a runner. In 2014, I was training for the Disney marathon. I’m a huge Disney nut. I was in pain. I had injured myself but I thought it was something small. I actually had an MRI appointment scheduled but, before the appointment, I was walking to work – it was January – in New York city, walking up Park Avenue with a big 7-Eleven coffee in my hand and I fell on some ice. The second I fell, it felt a lot of pain, but I didn’t realize how bad it was. I spilled my coffee everywhere and my first thought was, “Oh no, I’m going to have to go get more coffee.”

 

I realized I was having trouble getting up and some people swarmed around me and they  seemed– I’m sure if I was okay but one woman made a beeline to me and picked me up, and I was leaning on her. I said, “Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I have to go to work.” She said, “You can’t go to work. You’re hurt. You have to go to the hospital.” I don’t know how she knew this – and I didn’t. Anyway, I was like, “I guess. Okay. Sure. I could tell I was in a lot of pain.” So she said, “I’m going to call you a cab.” And I said, “You don’t have to do that, please. I’m sure you have to be somewhere.” She said, “No, I’m going to call you a cab.” So she called me a cab and then I realized how much pain I was in and that I couldn’t really walk.

 

The cab arrived and she said, “You know what? I’m going to get into the cab with you.” And I said, “Please don’t do that. Don’t you have to go to work too?” And she said, “No, I’m going to get in the cab with you.” So she got in the cab and told the cab driver where to go, “NYU Langone,” which is a hospital. And I said, “Who are you?” She said her name was Sharon , that she actually worked for, like, a medical device company, and she knew the right hospital to take me to because she said that when she had moved to New York City, she and her friends had memorized the best hospitals to go to in case of emergency in case they got drunk and needed to go to the best hospital. I would not have known that.

 

Then she told the cab to take me to a special entrance that I also would not have known about. So we got to the hospital and she said, “You know what? I’m going to go get you a wheelchair.” I said, “You know what? You don’t have to do that.” In my head, I was thinking, “I hope that you help me because I can’t do this alone this whole time.” I’ve been telling her, “No, go to work.” And in my head, I was like, “Please help me.” She seemed to have known that I needed her help. So she went and got me a wheelchair and she’s like, “I’m going to wheel you in.” And I’m like, “No…” but she does. Then, she wheeled me in and helped me do my paperwork. She helped me go to the bathroom – a stranger – and she wheeled me into the doctor. She stayed with me the whole time.

 

In the car, I discovered that her name was Sharon because she was from Sharon, Pennsylvania and that happened to be the town where my Grandmother lives and where my family is from. They did an emergency surgery on me. I had broken my hip. I could have died. There could have been a blood clot. I had to go on work disability and I was on crutches for a long time, which was actually when I started listening to podcasts. I fell in love with podcasts on crutches and the doctor had told me, “You’re never going to be able to run the same way. You can maybe run, but you won’t be able to race.” And I thought, “Let’s see about that.”

 

I did everything they said. I followed all of the physical therapy. I took it really seriously and I came back really slowly. I’ll never forget the first day I was allowed to run. I was so excited. I had the date marked on my calendar and I went out on my run. I was allowed to run for 7 minutes and I came back. My husband said, “How was it?” I was in tears and I thought, “This is why people hate running. This was so terrible. I’m never running again,” but I kept at it.

 

Less than a year later, I was in the Disney World Half Marathon – it was a princess half marathon – and I was wearing a Tinkerbell costume because I love Tinkerbell and I won the whole race. There were tens of thousands of people in this race and I won, and I had no idea that would happen. I remember starting out and thinking, “Oh my gosh, I think I’m going to get in the first 10, the top 10.” And then, “Oh my gosh, I think I’m going to be in the top five.” And it was, honestly, the happiest moment of my life to cross that finish line. It meant so much more than if I had won any other race. I was in Disney World, the place where I felt the most magical and happy in my Tinkerbell costume, where I also felt very happy, and I won.

 

I kept in touch with Sharon for a while afterwards, but I have lost touch with her. So Sharon, if you’re listening, please reach out to Scott and have him connect us once again because you saved my life and you made me love running again, and I just don’t know where I would be without you.

 

Okay, picture it. I am in my twenties. I’m living in an apartment with my girlfriend. I’m in the kitchen washing dishes and she’s in the bedroom and she yelled to me, “Hey, is something burning?” And I said, “No, nothing’s burning.” And she said, “Are you sure nothing’s burning?” I said, “No, nothing’s burning.” Then, she walked from the bedroom to the kitchen where she found me washing dishes, standing literally next to a George Foreman grill – I mean, come on, we’re in our twenties – on fire, pouring smoke, and I didn’t know. You know why? Because I don’t have a sense of smell and this is the story of how I discovered that and what it’s been like.

 

But first, why don’t I tell you about myself? My name is Jason Pfeiffer. I am the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and I do a whole bunch of other things – write books, make podcasts, speak, startup advice – but one thing I would like you to know about is that I have a newsletter. It’s called “One Thing Better”. Each week, one way to be happier and more effective at work and build a career or company you love, you can find that at onethingbetter.email. That’s a web address, just plug it into any browser – onethingbetter.email.

 

So how did I discover that I don’t have a sense of smell? Goes back to that girlfriend, actually. I was in college and I was dating this girl and she had a great sense of smell and a great ability to taste food. She was, like, a supertaster, a super smeller, I don’t know, whatever. She was the first person in my life who had ever pressed me on things – “What’s that smell? What flower is that? Oh, what ingredient is in this food? Is that rosemary?” I eventually realized I did not know what she was talking about at all, so I told her that once. I was like, “You’re picking up something that I’m not.”

 

So we decided to do a taste test, a blindfolded taste test where I tied a shirt or something around my face and she had me taste different ice creams – I can’t remember what they were, but let’s just say vanilla and chocolate and strawberry. I tried these ice creams and they all tasted exactly the same, and our minds were blown. I didn’t realize until that moment that I was experiencing the world differently than other people. Maybe you’re thinking, “Well, how could you not have known? Isn’t it obvious?” No, it’s not obvious. You don’t know if you experience the world differently than other people because all you have is your own senses. Maybe some people have gone through this. The first time that you ever put on glasses, like, as a kid, the first time you went to an eye doctor and they said, “Oh, your vision is not very good” and you put on glasses for the first time, that is when many people experience, like, a total shift in how they perceive the world. I remember putting on glasses for the first time and being shocked that I could see individual leaves on trees. I could see the fabric on the carpet. I didn’t know other people saw that stuff until that moment, and I didn’t know that other people smelled things that I didn’t either.

 

My parents were aware that even as a kid, I didn’t care about food. I was not motivated by it. I didn’t seem that interested in it, but they just thought, “Eh, kids don’t like food.” But then, in college, I dated this girl, did the test with the ice cream, and discovered, “No, there is something different about me and I didn’t know what it was.” But I’ll be honest, I wasn’t that concerned because I had gone through my entire life like that. So what was there to do? What was there to fix? It seemed fine.

 

Then, a couple of years later, the fire happened and I couldn’t smell anything. That was when I thought, “Oh, I understand how this can be dangerous. If there’s a way to fix this, I should fix this.” So I went to a taste and smell clinic. There are a number of them around the country. I went to the one at the University of Connecticut and I saw every possible doctor. I saw a dentist. I saw a general practitioner. I had a CT scan of my brain. I saw an ENT who stuck a scope up my nose. Why were they all doing this? Well, it’s because a loss of smell can come from anything. It can be an indicator of, like, anything. It can be nasal polyps which is a very simple, little inflammation in your nasal passage – not a big deal – or it could be a brain tumor or it could be anything in between. So they wanted to see if there was an active cause. After lots and lots of testing, the answer was no active cause. They couldn’t find anything which means that it was probably one of three things that happened or, well, it could be four. One of them could be that it’s called congenital anosmia, which means that I was just born that way. But in this case, that’s not what it is because I actually get occasional whiffs of things. I can smell that a candle is different from the regular air. Like, I was picking up something, just not enough to identify the smell. So it’s not congenital. And I have no memory of ever being able to taste and smell things.

 

So my doctor or person or whoever it was at the taste and smell clinic told me, “Look, there are three main causes of what was really olfactory nerve damage. The olfactory nerves are these tiny little nerves that control your sense of smell. They live basically right at the top of the bridge of your nose, almost between your eyes, and they’re easily damaged. If they’re damaged, then you lose your sense of smell. The three things that can do that the most are an upper respiratory infection – like a bad cold that happens to get in the wrong place and fry your olfactory nerves – chemical exposure, breathing in chemicals, or head trauma, which is the reason why a lot of people, when they have a car accident, lose their sense of smell.

 

I told my parents this and they said, “Head trauma.” The answer is it was head trauma. I didn’t know this but when I was a baby, a babysitter was strolling me down the street and I wasn’t buckled in and she hit something and I fell out of the stroller and landed on my head and was in traction. So that was probably what happened. That was probably what did it. Now that I know that, there’s nothing you can do about it. Your olfactory nerves can regenerate on their own, maybe. If you have a car accident and you lose your sense of smell, it could come back. But me, probably not because it’s been so long and that’s okay.

 

So what’s life like? Well, first of all, here’s the thing, you might be wondering– I’ve been talking this whole time about smell and olfactory senses, but the taste test was with the ice cream, which is really about tasting things. So what’s the connection? The connection is what you think of as taste– if you taste a chocolate cupcake, you’re actually doing two things at the same time. You’re utilizing two different senses. So you are tasting, which is technically just sweet, salty, sour, bitter. It’s from your tongue. But then odor molecules from this chocolate cupcake go to the back of your throat and up and are read by your olfactory nerves, your sense of smell, and that is what creates the sensation of flavor. The chocolate that you taste is actually you smelling chocolate inside of your face. It’s not a taste. It’s a flavor. It’s a combination of taste and smell. My tongue works just fine. So I get taste. If I eat chocolate, it’s sweet. It’s just not chocolate. That’s why chocolate is vanilla, is strawberry, is everything.

 

When I was single, I did not marry that girl from college. Eventually, I moved to New York. When I was single, I was very afraid of buying things that would smell. I didn’t buy milk, for example, because I didn’t want it to go bad. I was afraid of not knowing. I was also obsessive about washing my sheets and my towel cause if I brought a girl over, and it smelled bad, I wouldn’t know and that was scary. Now I’m married and it’s actually pretty useful for my wife because she had me change all the diapers or a lot of the diapers when our kids were very little because I couldn’t smell it. I take out the garbage. I walk down the street in New York City where I live in the summer. Garbage outside is smelly. It doesn’t bother me. I and my wife, when we go out to eat, she tends to order two things and I’ll just eat whichever one she likes less because it doesn’t matter to me. I also don’t crave food, so that’s pretty useful. I don’t know if I could fix this. If I could fix this, I would because I understand that I’m missing something, especially when you travel and so much of travel is about food and the sense of place and just ingesting that, and I miss some of that. I know. But on a day-to-day basis, I just don’t think about it much.

 

The way I’ve just kind of come to understand this is we have these senses and it’s how we understand the world. If you have to lose one of them, then I think I lost the right one. Sometimes, in life, that’s as much as you can ask for. So that’s what it’s like to not have a sense of smell. If you have more questions, feel free to reach out. That newsletter that I told you, One Thing Better, you can get it at onethingbetter.email. If you reply to that email, any of the emails that come from that, it goes directly to my inbox. I’ll read it. I’ll get back to you. Go enjoy your chocolate and vanilla and strawberry ice cream and tell me how it is.

 

My name is Meklit Hadero, and I want to tell you about the time when I went from the equator to getting stuck just outside the Arctic Circle within the course of 24 hours. I was in a music residency in Kampala, Uganda, right around the equator. It was time to go home after a beautiful few weeks of spending time with musicians from all across the Nile Basin. It was part of a project that I co-founded years ago called the Nile Project. We were just finishing up teaching each other about each other’s music, learning music, and co-arranging. It was glorious.

 

I got on the plane from Kampala, Uganda to Amsterdam. I was on this leg that is going from Amsterdam to Seattle, and then from Seattle to San Francisco, where I live. Just outside Amsterdam, around 45 minutes into the flight, I noticed something sort of funny. The wing– huh, it doesn’t look right. I was sitting in a window seat because I always get a window seat. I was like, “What? No, the wing– gosh, that wing looks just like it looks when we’re landing. That’s interesting.”

 

Moments later, the pilot got on the intercom and was all like, “Oh, ladies and gentlemen” – the way that pilots do – and he told us that the wing flap is stuck in the up position and I was like, “Okay, well, put it down.” They cannot put it down. And surprise, this means that we are burning gas at about twice the rate that we are supposed to and we need to land, except that we are over the Atlantic or about to be over the Atlantic. This was the leg of the flight from Amsterdam to Seattle. So I was like, “But where in the world are we going to land?” They were just telling us, “We are doing our best to find a landing strip.”

 

Now, these are not the words you want to hear from your pilot. The murmurs started rolling through the whole plane. You hear the whispers and some kid starts crying 10 rows back, and you feel the parents trying to hold in their own stress. And me? I was just like– I was dumbfounded. What is happening? So the flight attendants tried to reassure us that it’s going to be okay. I was like, “Okay, you probably are reading off a script that says you’re supposed to tell everybody that it’s going to be okay, but guess what? We are over the Atlantic and we need to find a landing strip or we’re going to go down.”

 

Obviously, everybody’s talking to each other at this point, like all social conventions are broken. You’re talking to the people in the row in front of you. You’re talking to the people in the rows behind you. You’re just, like, desperately searching for bars on your phone. It took some hours before the pilots said, “We found a place to land.” The relief is palpable, but where are we supposed to land? Well, the pilots found a landing strip in a place called Iqualiat, Canada, which is just outside the Arctic Circle. Yes. Remember that I had just been on the equator that morning. It was almost funny. But sort of, twisted, kind of funny, but they did.

 

They found a landing strip and the landing strip was built in World War II for Allied forces from North America, Canada, and the US to be able to stage flights to England. It is the closest airstrip in North America to Europe. Now, it is generally not in use anymore, but it is in good enough shape that we can land there. Okay. Hallelujah. We found a place.

 

So we started to descend and all I could see was white – the clouds are white. The water is reflecting the clouds and it’s shimmering gray. We started to see brown. There were lots of brown rocks and gray rocks and not a single drop of green. There are no trees, there are no plants. In my mind, I’m thinking to myself, “Maybe there are lichens somewhere. Maybe there’s green moss somewhere on these rocks. Other than that is billowing white snow, brown and gray rocks.”

 

We landed and I am so relieved. The guy sitting next to me worked for a ski apparel company and he happened to have an extra ski hat that, much to my sheer delight, actually fit over my afro, which is not normal. Like, mostly if somebody says, “I have a hat for you,” it ain’t going to fit me, but this one somehow did. Also, to my delight, I had bought a pair of African print oven mitts that I had intended to give as a gift to my housemate at the time, and those were going to be my gloves. Remember, I just came from the very warm equator, so these gloves and this hat totally saved me.

 

We stayed on the tarmac for a good long while – a couple of hours – until they ferried us off eventually and we got into a school bus. Now, I don’t know if any of you remember what it’s like on a school bus, but these things are totally uninsulated. Maybe the heater reaches the school bus driver, but it does not reach you all the way in the back. Once again, thank God for those African print oven mitts and the ski hat from my neighbor. It was -50 degrees. They took us to a giant community center.

 

Now, at the community center, they’ve got air hockey tables everywhere and everybody just started playing air hockey. I mean, at that point, there was only one way to get the tension of the moment out, which was like, “When are we going to get out of here?” So it becomes this competitive air hockey tournament situation. Eventually, a couple of beers made their way into this group of people and we started kind of drinking and everybody’s talking to each other because, once again, yeah, social conventions are totally out of the window.

 

I noticed that someone was looking at me and I turned around and saw this person who was very clearly an Ethiopian guy. I’m Ethiopian, he’s Ethiopian. So we’re like, “Hey.” He’s like, “Actually, I know you. You’re Meklit.” I was so surprised that somebody on this flight would recognize me. I mean, what in the world are the chances? It turned out, his name was Leelai Demoz. He’s this amazing Oscar-nominated producer. He had this film at the time called Difret, which was making the rounds to all of the film festivals. It’s this beautiful, powerful story. And turns out the film was going to be at Lincoln Center some months from then, and I ended up opening for his film at Lincoln Center – what are the chances? Got stuck in the Arctic and got a gig out of it.

 

We were there for about 8-10 more hours waiting for a plane to arrive from Atlanta. It finally does. We got back on. We went through security at this tiny little airport. Everywhere around, we saw these beautiful indigenous syllabary, carvings, and drawings, and it was just a small peek that we got into the community that actually lived in this place called Iqualiat in Canada, because after all, we’d only been at the community center. We got on the flight and made it to Seattle. A few hours after that, I was on my way back home to San Francisco.

 

I had just been promoted to a management position at a job I’ve been at for a little over a year and was about to take on a team of about 20 people. The manager of the training found out that– the team was actually going to be cut down in half. We were about to have to fire 10 people. She decided that’s not how she wanted to leave the company. She was not going to do that. She went ahead and left earlier than she had originally anticipated and made it my problem. So my first active manager was supposed to be to 5-10 people that I had never really interacted with at all before.

 

That was pretty anxiety-inducing and nauseating, but went ahead – this was during COVID, so we were all virtual – and the 1st gentleman that I called was very upset. It was completely out of the blue. He was very angry, very sad. He was also very worried because his wife and son also worked at the company in different departments – they were not impacted but, unfortunately, he was. It was a big mess. He kind of let other people know what was going on. It was not really the way that I wanted to start my career in management.

 

A couple of months later, I inherited another team from the same company and his wife was on that team. I was very worried it was going to be awkward. I had fired her husband. It only got more awkward when I got a message from 23andMe. Somebody was looking to put pieces together for their family member who had been adopted, trying to track down relatives and things of that nature, and she gave me the last name of the relative she was working into – the connection that she thought she had made to that last name – and I said, “Well, I don’t think I have any family members with that last name but, oddly enough, I do have an employee with that last name.”

 

So I went back and forth, talked to my employee, and found out that my first act of being a manager was to fire my third cousin. So that was just fantastic. Just got to love those coincidences.

 

Hope you have a great day, Scott.

 

This happened in the summer of 1982. It was a summer job between high school graduation and college. I got a job with a group of other kids who were in my high school – about five of them – at a country club, and we were basically a mixture of janitors and laundry people. Where we work was not air-conditioned. It was really hot. The laundry place with dryers and no ventilation got extremely hot. Someone even passed out. We had to wear these course uniforms. It was a little uncomfortable, but that was fine.

 

Now, I have to give a little background. I worked at a Jewish country club because I’m Jewish. Because the other two country clubs in my town were restricted, there were no Jews allowed and no people of color. Our boss was this older German woman in her mid to late seventies, and she was very sprightly and very stern. She had very high standards and I really wanted to please her. I’m pretty much the only one who went above and beyond, and she really liked me because I was a good worker. This group of high school students– all of them made fun of me because I was like the teacher’s pet. We kind of jokingly said, “Oh yeah, she was probably a Nazi, ha-ha-ha-ha.”

 

Little by little, she’d invite me a little bit each day to come into her air-conditioned office and she would serve me cake and Start to tell me about her life before, during, and after World War II in Germany. Over the course of a couple of weeks, I heard more bits of the story that she wanted to tell me. Basically, what I remember is that she had such a great marriage. She met her husband before the war. He was, I believe, a mechanic and he joined the Nazi party because his boss made him do that and he just went along. She said that, as things kind of got worked up in Germany, people saw something in Hitler because things had been so bad before. Her husband was drafted and went to war.

 

The war ended and that’s when the whole concentration camp stuff came out. At this point, she got very emotional. I mean, there was some crying and she said, “We didn’t know. We didn’t realize. Nobody knew. I was 17 and I didn’t know how to process it.” So I was like, “Well, I’m in air conditioning and I’ve got cake. That’s good.” She told me what happened to her husband. He was captured by the Soviets, ended up in a gulag, and eventually sent back home. By the time he returned, he was so emaciated. His health was so bad. He had been tortured. I think he had broken bones – they didn’t heal well. He was just in really bad shape and he died soon after. She was bawling.

 

I didn’t really know what to make of it, so I just listened and I supposed she was confessing to me like I was a surrogate jew and I was going to forgive her. Other kids I worked with weren’t Jewish, so she picked me to confess to, I suppose. So the summer ended. I went off to college and I thought maybe I’d write something about it. I thought maybe I could make some meaning about it, but I didn’t. I just went on with my life and that was my summer job before college.

 

Hello, Scott. My name is Jasmine and I am from Phoenix, Arizona. I was listening to episode 76 recently and it reminded me of a time when I took a spill down a mountain. It was March 10th, 2021, I believe, and it was my 30th birthday. So I took my 2 kids – one was 12, I believe, and one was 6. I took them to hike the mountain Picacho Peak with our 1-year-old lab pit bull, Olive. It took us about an hour and a half to get from our house to Picacho Peak. So we drove out there with just the kids, the dog, and myself because my husband was working, and we started to climb Picacho Peak. The kids are loving it. The dog is loving it.

 

But there was a woman out of the corner of my eye who was trying to approach my dog and I told her, “She’s friendly, but she is shy. So please don’t touch her.” The woman proceeded to come closer and tried to touch the dog, Olive, and Olive freaked out and ran. I have her leash around my wrist, which I know better now– it was around my wrist and she just pulled me down the mountain.

 

We were maybe a little bit less than halfway up at this point and she was just pulling me further and further down. I’ve got dirt all over me. I am scraped beyond belief. I’ve got cactus in me and I can hear my kids just yelling from up higher on the mountain. I got my bearings back after what felt like forever, but I’m sure it wasn’t very long at all. I stood up and I was making sure the dog was okay first, of course. Then, I took a look at myself and I was beaten up pretty badly. I am bleeding from my knees, my elbows, my arms, my legs.

 

When I looked back up the mountain, I saw my kids but I didn’t see the lady who scared my dog anywhere. But in the end, I was okay – pretty beat up, like I said. We went to the gift shop afterward and I was able to get the kids something to calm them down and I drove the hour and a half home. When I got home, I was able to take a closer look at myself and pull all the cactus out of me. I had to throw away my pants because they were completely shredded. But it was still probably one of the best 30th birthdays because I have a story to tell and lots of scars still.

 

Thanks, Scott.

 

My mother and I were in New York for a brief trip. We were there for, I think, three or four days. On our very first day, we thought we would get up early and go and hang out on the Today Show Plaza. For anyone who is listening and doesn’t know what that means, the Today Show is a morning show on NBC and they have an area outside their studio they call the Plaza where, a lot of the times, they’ll have the camera crew kind of pan across so you can see everybody waving and they have little segments where sometimes we’ll have people say, “On a trip to New York from Bay City, Michigan” or whatever, where the people are from or if they’re celebrating something.

 

My mom and I thought we would go and see if we could at least get on TV so people could see us waving or maybe we’d get really lucky and get to be one of the people that does a little segment that says hello to our family. So we got up early in the morning. It was late January, so it was pretty cold. We had heavy coats on and everything. We made our little sign and we were just kind of out there trying to figure out how this would work and how we could get someone’s attention to be on the little segments.

 

All of a sudden, we saw a couple of people kind of pointing at us and someone came over and said, “Hi, who are you here with? What’s going on?” And I was like, “Well, this is my mother and we’re here together.” One of them said, “Well, we’re looking for somebody to do this little segment. We call them ambush makeovers.” I immediately was so excited because I love makeover shows, or at least I did at the time – this was about eight or nine years ago now. Just the idea of somebody giving me a makeover was just so exciting to me. My mother, bless her, does not really like to be the center of attention but was willing to do it for me. So we were like, “Yes, definitely. We want to participate.”

 

Before they actually taped us saying anything, we had to sign some sort of liability form, I’m not sure. Then, we had to do the little reveal on camera where it looked like they picked us for the first time. We had to kind of fake the excitement a little bit because we already knew, but we made it look like they were just telling us for the first time. We were the pick for the ambush makeover.

 

What happened for the next three or four hours– oh my gosh. It was not at all what we were expecting. It was much more elaborate. They took us inside the studio and, seriously, for hours, we were in chairs. They were doing hair and makeup. I had never had my hair dyed before, except I think I had highlights once. This was, like, a super elaborate multi-step process. They did a really, like, crazy job on my hair and then they cut it and then they did makeup. They had us trying on different clothes. And I think the thing that surprised me the most was like, they really didn’t care what we thought of the clothes at all. They were very concerned about, like, making a look that their producers would like, which is fine, but I guess I just didn’t expect to not be a voice in this decision of what I was going to wear at all.

 

So my mom and I were in the same room while they were doing our hair and stuff, but they had a sheet hanging up so we couldn’t see each other. I had no idea what she was going to wear, anything like that because they wanted it completely to be a surprise when they did the big reveal. For, I’m going to guess, about three hours, we are going through all this process of hair and makeup and clothes. Then, finally, it got to the part of the show where they were going to do the live reveal and they had us line up. They wanted me to come out first and then they were going to bring out my mom.

 

Another interesting, like, little tidbit is that I wear glasses. I’m very nearsighted. If I have my glasses off, things have to be probably an inch from my face to be clear. I can see colors and shapes fine without my glasses, but no detail. They didn’t want me to put my glasses on, I guess, because they thought it would mask some of the makeup or whatever. They let me carry my glasses out but they wanted me to go out and turn around to see myself in the mirror and not put my glasses on. They wanted me to fake it a little bit, being able to see the details on camera, and I really tried my hardest, but when I turned around and looked in the mirror, I couldn’t really see, so I tried to fake it but Hoda Kotb, who was one of the hosts who was on the stage, said, “Put your glasses on” because, clearly, I didn’t fake it very well. Anyway, I turned around and my hair, I was so, like, unrecognizable to myself. It was very interesting. They put me in designer jeans that they had tailored for me, a top, and then a leather jacket. I did really love the hair color and definitely more makeup than I’ve ever had on in my life. I did like the makeover.

 

Then it was time to bring my mom out, so they had me turn my back. They didn’t want me to see her right away. They brought out my mother, whose name is Joan, and I heard gasps or whatever because they show the before and after. Then, I turned around and my eyes got so wide because my mother looked so beautiful. She probably looked 5-10 years younger because of the way they had cut and highlighted her hair. Then, they had put her in the same leather jacket as me, so we kind of matched. She had different pants and top, but the same leather jacket. So I thought that was really sweet because we had told them that we share or exchange clothes sometimes. They gave us the same jacket. So it was really sweet, a really, like, definitely once in a lifetime memory, and I really, really treasure that memory with my mother, for sure.

 

But we always laugh because I think the funniest part of the whole experience is, once we had done the live shoot, they let us stand on the stage long enough to take one picture. So seriously, like, one or two minutes, somebody took a picture of us with our phones, and then they were like, “Okay, do you want to wear the clothes out or change back into your clothes?” And we’re like, “Oh, we’ll wear it.”

 

So they literally just directed us down the stairwell and out this door that closed and it was one of those doors that leads out to the street, and there’s no handle to get back in. It’s an exit only. So the door closed and it was just all of a sudden we were just back in the normal real world, and we were just like, “Did that just happen?” It was just really funny. We were in this weird space for three hours where we were doing all this stuff we’d never done before and then, all of a sudden, very abruptly, we walked down some stairs and out a door and it was back into the real world. So we loved it. It was a great experience – not always what we expected, but a great memory. Our joke now is always that we got to have an ambush makeover, probably because we were the worst-dressed people on the plaza that day.

 

April 23rd, 2018 started off as a typical busy Monday morning for me. The kids had school at 8 and I was due to work at nine. My husband wasn’t home because he was working as a truck driver and he was out of town. I was having my morning coffee and getting ready to make the kids their lunches when I realized we were out of lunch meat. I thought, “Oh no, I have to make their lunches. How am I going to do this?” Because I also realized we were out of milk and they’re going to want their cereal. So I thought to myself, “Okay, well Albertsons supermarket is just down the street. I will go get dressed for work, run down there, get it, be back.”

 

So I was getting dressed, which turned out to be a pretty important part of this story because it ended up saving my life. I was a dog groomer at the time. When you’re grooming dogs, there is a lot of hair and I really wanted to wear my leggings because they’re so comfy, but I knew that they would just get so hairy because whenever I got done working, it looked like I came out of a blizzard of hair. So I just threw my jeans on and thought, “This’ll do.” My son’s just getting out of the shower and I tell him, “Hey, your little sister’s still sleeping. I’m going to run down to Albertsons to get milk and lunch meat. I’ll be right back.” So I head out to the car and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, I don’t have my cell phone.” But then I thought, “Well, fine, because I’ll be right back.” It was still on the charger from the night before.

 

I pulled into the parking lot and I was really happy. There weren’t that many people there and I thought, oh good, I can make it in and out and I can get on with my day. I got the milk, went to the lunch meat aisle, and I’m like, “Okay, which kind am I gonna get? There are so many different kinds. Do I want Turkey? Do I want ham?” Next thing I knew, I looked down the aisle and there’s a man coming – a much older man – and I thought to myself, “Oh, I’ll just move out of the way.” Cause I could tell he wanted to go look at the same place I was. He was looking at lunch meat.

 

I was just standing there and he said, “Excuse me, do you know what time it is?” I said, “Oh my gosh, sir, I’m so sorry. I don’t have my cell phone. I do know it’s probably about 6.15 because the store just opened.” Before I could even get anything else out, he lunged at me and hit me in the stomach. It was terrifying. It was so traumatic. It hurt so bad. It was, like, a stinging, stabbing pain like when you get punched in the gut. That’s kind of what it felt like. I was like, “Oh my God.” I kind of looked up at him and I started to cry. And I said, “Why would you do that? Why would you punch me?” He looked at me and he held up his hand, and I saw a knife, and he said, “I just stabbed you.” And I was like, “Oh my God.”

 

So I was, like, running – because he’s coming after me. He was, like, running after me up and down the aisles. I was trying to find somebody. I was screaming. I was sitting there thinking, “Where is help?” Finally, I got down the end of one aisle and I saw a worker. It was a man that was working in the meat department and I ran up to him, “Sir, please. Oh my God, please help me. This man just hit me and he’s following me. He’s chasing me.” The meat man, when I was telling him, he turned and there’s the crazy old man staring at us at the end of the aisle.

 

The meat man stepped in front of me to protect me, and he said, “Sir, what is the problem?” And the man said, “I stabbed her, and I would stab you too.” At this point, I was just, like, going hysterical because I was like, “What is going on?” The man got on his walkie talkie and said something. The next thing you know, two other workers come. By this point, the man was flailing the knife around in the air. They knocked the knife down, they knocked him to the ground.

 

After that, the meat man turned to me and he said, “Ma’am, are you okay?” And I was thinking, “No, I’m not okay. This crazy old man just punched me.” And the guy said, “Are you sure he didn’t stab you?” And I was like, “No.” And I looked down and there’s blood. At this point, I was freaking out, screaming, crying. The man was grabbing towels to help me. Then, the police came. They questioned me. They questioned the guy. The guy was still yelling, “I stabbed her, and I will stab you too!” It is insane.

 

Then, the ambulance comes and they take me to the hospital. Luckily, the knife only went in about an inch and a half. The doctor did tell me that what saved my life was the waistband of my jeans. So had I worn those leggings that day, the knife would have gone all the way in. I mean, I could have died and it’s still so shocking to this day that that happened. They did have to do a lot of stitches.

 

I was happy that they did charge the man with felony assault with a weapon. It turned out he was 74. About a week later, I did find out they sentenced him to Warm Springs State Psychiatric Hospital here in Montana because they did find him mentally ill, which isn’t surprising.

 

The only thing that I found really awkward was when the police questioned him about why he did this, he said that he was homeless and that he was very angry at the VA. I still to this day do not know what would push somebody to go hurt somebody else because of that, but I’m just so grateful that I made it and that I’m okay. The police did call my sister. So she was able to come take care of my kids for me while I was going through everything. It’s very traumatic. I’m lucky to be alive. I’m much more aware of my surroundings. Lots of therapy. But I’m okay.

 

The main thing of this whole story is this happened but I’m okay. Even now, every year, my co-workers celebrate my Stabiversary on April 23rd. They usually get me a cake from the Albertsons where I was stabbed at. Usually, they’ll say something like, “We’re so glad you survived.” And I just take it as that. I’m okay and I’m so thankful.

 

Hi, Scott. My name is Gina. I was wanting to tell you kind of a freaky, scary thing that happened to me. It was in February, 2013. The police in Southern California were on a manhunt for a man by the name of Christopher Dorner. You may have heard of him. About a half hour prior to it first being on the news, I had gone to get gas at an Arco gas station in Lake Elsinore, California. As I was standing in line at the register to pay for my gas, a man walked in and I got the most terrible feeling inside of me. He was a tall, good-looking man but, when he looked at me, I knew he wasn’t a good person. I immediately left. I knew in my heart that this guy was bad news. I didn’t get gas. I got in my car and went home. That’s how scared I was.

 

I told my adult daughter about the feeling I had gotten when I saw that guy. About an hour after I told my daughter the story, we were watching the news and they flashed a picture of that exact man. I had gotten that terrible feeling from at the gas station. I jumped up and said, “Oh my gosh, that’s him. That’s the man that I saw at the gas station!”

 

Christopher Dorner was a former LAPD police officer, and he was seeking revenge for losing his job. It all started on February 3rd, 2013, and ended on February 12th, 2013, when he killed himself during a standoff with the police in the San Bernardino community of Big Bear. He killed four people and himself. The victims were law enforcement officers and a daughter of one of the LAPD captains. There were four counties involved – Los Angeles County, Orange County, Riverside County, and San Bernardino County. At that time, it was the largest manhunt in Southern California history.

 

I have an uncanny ability to know if someone is an evil or bad person. I’ve been that way since I was a young girl. It has happened to me several times but never with a person as horrible as Christopher Dorner. Some of my friends say, “Oh my God, doesn’t that bug you that you get those feelings?” And I said, “No, because sometimes that could probably save my life.”

 

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my story.

 

I’m an avid outdoorsman, and I enjoy hiking, fishing, mountain biking, camping, and backpacking. This story takes place on a solo backpack trip in Montana on the 1st of June. Winters around here can feel long when anticipating adventures in the high country. Snow collects and blocks easy access to the back roads that don’t get plowed or maintained during the winter months. Camping for me is a year-round occurrence. However, this lack of access to the high country limits my backpack trips in these areas. So, once the snow melts and the roads begin to open, I’m ready to go with many adventurous plans.

 

This year, my first backpack trip in June was to a high mountain lake near the border between Idaho and Montana. Sunday morning came and I got onto the road early and arrived at the trailhead without a vent. This trip was just myself and my 40-pound rescue dog, Cedar. The hike into the lake was short – around 3 miles. However, nobody had been to this lake since the previous year. Wind-blown trees crossed the trail every 50 feet or so and progress was slow. Over, under, and around these trees was slow going, as was traversing over the top of large snow drifts blocking the trail.

 

After two hours or so fighting through these obstacles uphill, I finally came to a clearing of the lakeshore and was amazed at the beauty in front of me. The lake sat in a basin with mountains on all sides except for where the stream outlet left the lakeshore and flowed downhill in the direction from where I came. All around me, large snow patches remained and the melting snowpack caused numerous waterfalls to cascade into the lake. These waterfalls were almost on all sides of me and the beauty and sound was mesmerizing. This is what I’d come for – beauty, solace, and personal reflection.

 

Excited to spend time relaxing in this beautiful arena, I hurried to get chores done first. I set up my tent, rolled my sleeping bag, collected firewood, made and ate lunch, and pumped water to refill my canteens. Now, I was really ready to take in nature’s beauty and observe the wonderful landscape until the sun went down behind the mountains. I took my backpack chair down to the lake, along with binoculars and a beer. I had carried that one beer as a personal reward to enjoy after the camp was set up. So, beer cracked and pressed on my lips. I looked out across the lake to the mountains on the far side – so relaxing. How blessed I felt to be at this location.

 

My eyes followed along the top of the largest waterfall and came to rest on a dark object way up on the mountainside. Setting down my beer, binoculars in hand, I focused and saw a black bear slowly emerging from a cave. It was absolutely beautiful to see this creature on top of what I had already witnessed earlier. As I watched, the bear slowly made his way downhill in my direction toward the tree line and finally disappeared out of sight. “No worry though”, I thought. I was carrying both bear spray and a 44 and I felt prepared.

 

I sat there for another 15 minutes or so until I started to really focus on wondering where the bear had gone. As I pondered what the bear was doing, I started to think about how the bear had likely come out of hibernation very recently, if not when I saw him. My mind started to replay stories I’d heard of people being harassed by skinny hungry bears that had come out of hibernation recently and motivated to regain weight. Although prepared for our worst, a conflict with a bear was the last on my to-do list that day.

 

Not being able to fully relax and camp, I made a decision. I reluctantly rested on the decision to pack up and car camp at the trailhead. Besides, the other five beers in my six-pack were in my car. So, I shoved my gear back into my backpack and started the descent with Cedar out in front, running back and forth loving life and exploring and smelling everything she could. Progress downhill was slow, and I took careful attention to watch every footfall as they picked through the trees and the snow.

 

Snowfall was melting and falling onto the trail ahead of me and, as it hit some rocks around a corner from me, the sound muffled any other noises within my immediate vicinity. As I neared this water, my head was down focusing on the trail when I heard a THUD THUD THUD. I looked up in time to see a full-grown bear running directly toward me down the trail at full speed. Each time I hear a THUD! The bear’s feet are landing as he’s breathing hard and hauling ass directly towards me.

 

Because of the water noise and my focus on my feet, by the time I had heard the bear and looked up, he was probably 20 feet or so away from me and closing the gap alarmingly fast. There was simply no time to reach for the bear spray on my hip or the 44 in my chest. In fact, he was moving so fast that I didn’t even have time to drop the beer I was still holding and grab a defense item. All I had time to do was yell, “HEY!” at the top of my lungs. I guess this yelling startled the bear and he brushed past me downhill, off the trail, and into the bushes as fast as he could go. When he left the trail, he was about five feet from me, still, at an all-out sprint, and I could feel the wind on my face as he careened by. A couple or more bounds, and he was gone, and I just thought to myself, “Well, I guess that just happened.”

 

It happened so fast and was over so quickly. My heart rate did not have time to rise. I stood there, heartbeat steady, hands calm, surprised by what I saw. When my rescue dog came trotting down the trail towards me with that same demeanor of, “Hey, you still coming?” I still wonder how that bear got around my dog. If he was running from Cedar, you would think he would have continued downhill in the opposite direction of my dog. Was the bear after me until my loud yell changed his mind? I guess I will never fully know. But I will say that if you are in bear country, you better see them first because they can close the gap surprisingly quickly, considering how big they are.

 

Take care.

 

Hi, my name is Lily. I’m from Virginia. I’m 22. This story happened to me, I believe, when I was 6 years old. Me and my family were on a cruise ship. This cruise ship was going to Mexico. Whatever port that we were supposed to go to originally, for some reason, we could not go there. I couldn’t remember why but we ended up having to dock at this port that had no gate and no railing around it at all. I was walking around with my family with lots of people around.

 

I didn’t know how this event happened with all these people around. I was looking up at the side of the window. We were on the dock. Everyone had left the ship. I was looking up at one of the windows on the ship and I saw that there was a purse in the window but it was on the inside. It was almost to where I could touch the window, so I walked up to the side of the ship and I fell in between the dock and the ship. It was, like, a 10-20 foot drop into the ocean.

 

I remember being able to tread water. I had taken swimming lessons. That’s probably the only way that I would have been completely alright because I ended up completely unscathed. But I remember treading water for a few minutes. Looking back, under the dock was complete darkness. It was daytime but, underneath the dock, you cannot see anything. I remember just treading water for a few minutes and I remember a rope being tossed down to me. My mom told me later that my dad was screaming, “EL ROPO!” which does not mean rope in Spanish.

 

Yeah, completely terrified but I don’t remember being terrified. I just knew how to swim. I was calm. I do remember watching my little glittery jello shoe fall off my foot and float down into the ocean. A firefighter was able to come down and get me and they hoisted us up – I don’t remember how long this all took but it was probably under 5-10 minutes – and they took me to the ship’s little clinic I guess they had, and they gave me some M&Ms and a stuffed dolphin. And that’s my story.

 

It was about 6.30 in the evening in Kansas City, Missouri. We were at our friend’s apartment complex. We were leaving, walking out to our car, and our friend Logan was following us out, and he mentioned something about his 4-wheeler and how he wanted to show us something. So we’re like, “All right.” We got in the car. We were following him out. When we got to the stop sign, we put our blinker on to go left. We watched Logan make a big hook to the right. So he made a big arc like he’s going to head left, but just kind of swings it around.

 

As we were watching him, I looked at my boyfriend and I was like, “What is he doing? I have no clue what’s going on right now.” My boyfriend was like, “I have no clue what this guy’s doing.” As we’re watching a car comes from the left side and slams into him going at least 40 miles per hour – maybe more – and Logan went flying like a ragdoll so far up into the air, just straight up, and he just slammed down. All I was saying at that point was, “Oh god.” And when he landed, my instant thought was, “He’s dead. He has to be dead.” I pulled up into the lane where he was – they were kind of in the turn lane – and I got out of my car really quick.

 

I saw that the four-wheeler was jammed underneath the car that hit him. There were liquids pouring out of the car. The bumper was ruined. The four-wheeler is absolutely totaled. Our friend was lying there and, then, the absolute craziest thing happened. He jumped up and he sprinted away. I have absolutely no clue how he did this but we later figured out that it was probably a concussion mixed with adrenaline that just made him sprint away. So, I went and sprinted after him.

 

As I was doing that, my boyfriend was talking to these two gentlemen who were in the car. I did not hear their conversation but I do know that one of the first things they said when they got out of the car was they didn’t have insurance. We understand our friend also did not have insurance which meant that our friend did not want to call an ambulance, and the closest public hospital was 20 minutes away. So I asked him, “Please let me call 911, get you an ambulance. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but I know it has to be something bad. It has to be.” He said, “No, just take me to the hospital. Just take me to the hospital.”

 

So we got into the car. My boyfriend grabbed these guys’ information, their phone number, and their names, and we went to the hospital. On the way, he was asking me questions like, “Am I going to die?” That just scared me so badly. I was like, “I have no clue. You could have internal injuries. I don’t know.” He also thought that his face was caved in because he just had a huge gash on his forehead with blood, pretty much making him blind in one eye, and he’s like, “Am I going to be able to see again?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” And my boyfriend gave him a shirt to put on his head.

 

We finally got to the hospital. We walked into a sea of absolutely horrified faces because I don’t think most people who get hit by a car just walk into the emergency room, but he did. He’s a trooper. They took him instantly back to triage. As he was back there, I was calling his girlfriend, trying to get her to come up to the hospital. She was completely out of the loop. When she saw the scene, there were cops there but nobody knew what happened. The other guys left the scene because they didn’t want to get in trouble for having no insurance.

 

So she got up there and they transferred him to a trauma hospital. They get MRIs and X-rays, and he is so lucky he only came out with a fractured vertebra, a pretty mangled-up thumb, some pretty big gashes on his head that needed stitches and staples, and a concussion, and that’s it. He got out of the hospital that night with just some pain pills and a recommendation to go to physical therapy.

 

I saw him a week later. He looked like he was healing up fine. He could walk fine. He showed us that he could bend his back. It’s just honestly a miracle. I asked him if he felt like a superhero because I was like, “You just got hit by a car and you’re alive.” And his response was, no, he doesn’t feel like a superhero. He is just mad that his weekend was ruined.

 

I just listened to your most recent episode about Chris and it made me think about the time that I did a study abroad program in Greece. I am a musician. I’m actually an elementary music teacher and I teach piano lessons as well but, in college, I studied voice as an opera singer.

 

My professor was doing this program in Greece and he invited me to come. I was like, “Yeah, I’d love to travel. It’s like a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” Of course, I was 20 years old. Now, looking back on it, I kind of can’t believe my parents let me travel all the way there by myself. But I was an adult, so I went all the way to Greece by myself and met up with the people there. We took a boat to Athens, from Athens to a little island called Syros, which is beautiful. I was supposed to be there for five weeks. I did end up doing the whole program and learned a lot, got to sing in a beautiful performance venue, and ate a lot of gyros and yogurt and stuff like that on the island.

 

On my first night there, I was sitting on the beach. Of course, I met a boy. We were sitting on the beach and the beaches there on this island are, like, rocky. So, it’s like a rock beach. We were sitting on the beach on the rock, basically, outside of our hotel. Since we were sitting out there, the romantic time, I ended up, like, sitting on his lap. For some bizarre reason, he decided to stand up and I fell backward. We were on a ledge. I fell backward about, I don’t know, six or seven feet – maybe even higher than that – and hit my head on a rock, and I lost consciousness. I woke up and spent my first night on the island in the hospital and my grandma had given me money to spend on the trip and I had to use it on my hospital stay. So that’s my crazy story.

 

Hello, Scott. This is Camille. I want to share with you an experience that I had and explain to you what that was like. For my 40th birthday, I decided that I wanted to try skydiving. Of course, I had been trying to do special things for my birthday. For my 37th birthday, I went and got a nose piercing that I had wanted to do for 20 years. For my 40th birthday, I said, “I’m going to skydive” and I found a location in Georgia and I went.

 

A gentleman I was dating at the time went with me. Of course, if it’s your first time, you do it attached to someone else. They call it, I guess, tandem. So you’re basically strapped onto a more experienced skydiver. The guy that I was strapped onto– we had to ride a bus and then from the bus, we got on the little plane. The whole time, he was checking that I’m completely strapped onto him and I felt really good about his OCD because I was like, “There’s no way there’s going to be a mistake here because he keeps checking and rechecking.” And I keep feeling him tugging on these straps.

 

We got up in the air. It was our turn. They told you just to fall out of the plane and they also warned me that the air rushing at us and hitting me in the face would make it hard to breathe. I had actually witnessed a friend of mine – or been with a friend of mine – when she gave birth by C-section and I remember the anesthesiologist telling her the same thing that she would feel like she couldn’t breathe but just to continue to try to breathe and that it would work itself out. They had warned me. So we fell out of the plane. I mean, I could not catch my breath and I remember the anesthesiologist telling my friend to just keep trying. So I was able to catch my breath but it was quite terrifying not to be able to breathe. Then, on top of that, you’re seeing the earth come at you at a really, fast pace. I wasn’t prepared for just that free-falling feeling and seeing the earth come closer and closer.

 

Then, the gentleman told me to go ahead and pull our cord, so I did. Of course, I was trying to find it. I was panicking. I pulled the cord. We slowed down. We were enjoying the view. We’re enjoying descending and we actually had a perfect, beautiful landing. I was not expecting that either. I mean, it was just smooth and easy. So we got up and he, of course, unclips me from him and, really, it could not have been a better experience.

 

My partner at the time and I walked around the property a little bit and we enjoyed just kind of walking around. We got in the car to go home. It was about an hour and a half drive to where we lived or I lived at the time. We got in the car and he was driving and I was hit with this incredible wave of nausea and vertigo and I was just instantly sick as a dog. It got so bad that I asked him to pull over. I fell out of the car, opened the door, and fell out. I went and laid in the yard of someone on the side of the road. I don’t even know whose home this was. I just laid in the grass. All I could do was moan. I was so scared.

 

Well, of course, my partner was really worried about me. So, we drove to a pharmacy and he went in and talked to the pharmacist and, apparently, this is a thing. So he called the company that I did the skydiving with and it does happen quite regularly to people that skydive. Now, I had talked to probably 10 people that had skydived before. No one had ever mentioned this, but when he called, they said, “No, this does happen.” So now, just as a side, my purple public service to the community, anyone that tells me they’re going to go skydiving, I am sure to tell them, “Oh, it’s wonderful. You’ll love it but do not be alarmed if you become sick because I got so motion sick and it honestly took about eight hours for it to wear off.”

 

I got home. I laid very still. I will say, overall, I enjoyed the experience of skydiving. I’m really glad I did it. I would recommend anyone that’s interested in doing it to do it but I would never do it again. I was so absolutely sick afterwards. That’s my story. I’m going to tell you, from my 50th birthday which I just celebrated, I did something a little less adventurous. We decided to take a trip to Acadia Park in Maine and do that instead. Anyway, thank you for letting me share.

 

Back in 2018, my husband and I had three kids, a 7-year-old, an 8-year-old, and a 3-year-old, and we were always looking to do fun, cheap things with the family. My husband had started a new job and they were hosting an event for just the families of the company and it was at a carnival. We drove out there – like, an hour away from our home – and we took the kids on all the roller coaster rides and we were just having a great time.

 

Then my husband said, “Hey, I’m going to take the older two to go on a ride. Why don’t you go with the little guy on a little kiddy ride?” So I was like, “Sure, that sounds fine.” So he pointed out the ride that he wanted to ride on which was, like, a little dragon roller coaster and it was a little kid roller coaster. I’m not sure if adults were allowed on it but, for some reason, I was like, “Okay, you want to ride on this one? You want to go by yourself?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And he was so excited. It was the first time he was ever going to ride on a rollercoaster alone. So I was a little nervous but I was, like, okay.

 

So I buckled him in. I stepped back to watch the ride go. As soon as it started going, it went up to the first, like, hill of the roller coaster. Right as it was coming down, it basically stopped and actually went off the tracks. My son was just at the perfect angle where he hit his face right on the little metal cart thing that he was in. So I was standing there in complete shock, like, “This can’t be happening.” My little 3-year-old son was screaming and bleeding and it was so terrifying.

 

Then, all of a sudden, I saw my husband run from the other side of the carnival. He saw what happened, so he jumped over the fence, climbed up the roller coaster, got him out, and we were all just wow. “Oh my god, what do we do? So scary.” We rushed him to the local emergency room right there and he ended up having to have five stitches in his head, and it was just so scary and so traumatic for all of us. He was like, “I never want to go on a ride again.” And we are just never going to do a carnival again. Nothing against amusement parks that don’t move. It’s just those little carnivals that are just built by random people. I just really don’t trust them anymore. We will never be doing that again as a family.

 

But we did end up suing the people that put together the rides and we settled out of court and my son got $18,000 in a trust fund for his college. So it’s not all bad but it was very scary. I don’t think that we will ever do another carnival-type event again. A few years later, we ended up having another baby, and my youngest son was born with a cleft lip. It’s kind of sweet because after he had his surgery to repair his cleft lip, our older son has a scar on his right eye from the roller coaster, so they both have cute little scars on the right side of their face that were not planned and we would never wish either of those things to happen, but it’s just kind of sweet that it tied it all together in kind of a positive way.

 

A few years ago, I took a trip to the Galapagos Islands. It was all organized through G Adventures, which is a small tour group operator. So all I had to do was get my flights. Because they organized everything, I did not do the kind of research I would normally do for a trip which turned out to be a huge problem. The trip to the Galapagos went well, except for a baby sea lion bumping into my eye mask – something they commonly do to be playful – resulting in a bruise on my nose.

 

On the way back, I had a 24-hour layover in Quito, which did not happen on the way there. I arrived in the city in the evening and wandered around taking in the sights the next morning with a few people from our group who were also on some layovers. I started to not feel good around lunchtime. My stomach felt off and I had a headache. I felt really tired and a little lightheaded. I rested in the hotel lobby for a few hours, then headed to the airport on my own for my 5.30 flight. I remember feeling really weird in the cab. Even though the driver wasn’t driving fast, things felt like they were rushing past and were a little blurred.

 

I also started to feel like I couldn’t breathe. Even recounting this right now, I need to stop and take some deep breaths remembering that awful feeling. I would take large gulps of air and my chest would hurt but I would only get a very brief feeling of relief before struggling again. I was dizzy and nauseous. When I got out of the cab, I even wobbled a little bit.

 

Moving very slowly, I walked into the airport. I felt confused and I had to keep checking my ticket for the airline. I found the line to check in and got into it although still not feeling very sure about it. I sat on my suitcase whenever I could, and I kept struggling to get air. A wave of fatigue came over me and I closed my eyes whenever I could.

 

I noticed a door to the far left that was clearly only for staff. I wondered if I should go ask for help but I was terrified that I would miss my flight and also just really scared about what could happen. I started to sweat a little bit and I felt my heart racing. When I finally made it to the counter, the agent looked at me a little strangely but she checked me in. Somehow I made it through the airport security and then down to my gate. I just kept telling myself, “Just get to the gate. Just get to the gate. Just get to the gate.” I thought if I could at least do that, if something happened to me, I would be near my flight. It was not a rational thought but it was what I was thinking.

 

Across from the gate, there was a tiny little restaurant, just a counter where you could order food. I thought maybe I needed to eat something. So, I bought some French fries and I sat and tried to eat them. I could only take a few bites. I then went and bought some water and tried to drink that but that made me feel really nauseous. I can’t remember how long I had to wait for the flight – at least an hour, probably longer. My symptoms didn’t worsen but they didn’t improve either. The worst part was the breathing. I just could not catch my breath. I had never experienced anything like that before.

 

I went back and forth in my head about asking for help. I knew something was really wrong but the fear of missing the flight home and being stuck there was scarier. I was overwhelmingly tired and slumped in a seat with my eyes closed, which also helped with the dizziness. I told myself to stay calm, that everything would be okay, and that I would be on the plane soon. Finally, it was time to board. I waited until the line was almost gone so that I would not have to stand for too long. I remember gripping my backpack so tight, my hands sweating, swaying a little as I made my way down the ramp to the plane, holding onto the railing.

 

The confusion had cleared up a little while I was waiting at the gate probably because I didn’t need to think about anything. But when I tried to find my seat, I started to feel confused again, checking and double-checking my boarding pass. The numbers were a little blurred and I stumbled a little as I shuffled down the aisle. “Breathe, just breathe,” I kept telling myself.

 

I found my seat and settled in. It was then that I realized that the air was blowing, just in general, that hissing sound in the plane, but also from my individual air fan above my head. It felt good, and I felt my lungs expand a little. I tilted my head up and just sucked in that oxygen, noticing that I was feeling better and better. By the time the plane took off, I was feeling almost normal again.

 

When I could breathe and think clearly, it hit me that it must have been altitude sickness. I asked the flight attendant what the altitude was in Quito, and she said just over 9,000 feet. Had I done my homework, I would have known that and prepared myself knowing how serious altitude sickness can get. I felt both scared and relieved that I’d gotten through it. Had I been there longer than a day, I would definitely have needed to get medical help. I love to travel and I’ve been all over the world, but even if I go through a tour company now, I always Google every single place to check the altitude. Can’t let that experience happen to me again.

 

When I was 41 years old in 2001, I took a new job working in the public schools. They said they had to run a background check for the job but I didn’t have a problem with that at all. I started at the school and about a week later I was called into the superintendent’s office. Back in those days, it took a week or so for background check results to come back. These days, you get results in less than five minutes. The superintendent showed me a copy of the results of my background check and it stated that, in 1981, I was arrested for carrying mace, marijuana, and cocaine. I was in shock. I think my jaw was on the floor, as they say. Meanwhile, my heart was racing, my face was red, and now I had an upset stomach.

 

I told him that there was something wrong with the report because that had never happened to me. He said they checked it against my social security number and he believed it to be accurate but he felt it would be okay because the arrest was back in 1981, over 20 years ago, and I was young then. Since there were no subsequent arrests, they felt comfortable with me staying employed at the school. I said I was still uncomfortable with showing these things because I knew that was not something that ever happened to me, but I would have to look into it and see what I could figure out, and that I would report back to him when I found anything out, and I left his office.

 

As I’m walking to the parking lot at work, because this had happened just before I was heading to go to lunch and I was certainly still heading to go to lunch because I couldn’t have gone back to my desk. I was a wreck. Then I started to get mad because I suddenly remembered something that happened in 1981. I was in college then but living at home. My sister was one year younger than me and told me that, one morning, when I woke up, she stole my license the night before because back then you could drink at 18. She had gone out for the night drinking with an older brother of ours and they got pulled over by the police. Of course, back then, she told me nothing had happened and she put my license back. But the reason she had told me was, in case I got a call from anyone about the arrest, but then said I didn’t need to worry about it because nothing was going to happen.

 

I was pissed and I told her not to touch my license again. I was positive that my record had to be from her back then, so I called her and I told her what happened at work and she confessed. But of course, she said the mace, marijuana, and cocaine were our brother’s and she stuffed it down her pants to hide it and the police found it anyway. So I tell her we’re going to go back to court and we’re going to fix this because I don’t want anything on my record. She tells me her husband knows someone who can get it expunged for me and I say, “Absolutely not. I want my record cleaned.”

 

So I find out what court, I get a court date, I make her go with me and I explain the situation to the judge. The judge asked my sister if she had used my license and if these were her charges, and she said she did use my license, but no, the charges were supposed to be our brother’s. The judge then said, “It’s either your charges or it stays on your sister’s record because your brother’s not here for us to ask any questions to.” My sister says, “Well, I don’t want it on my record.” And the judge dismisses us. We walked out of the courtroom and I am more angry than ever. We barely talk on the way home.

 

The next day I explained it to someone at work and they said, “If my sister admitted to the judge in the courtroom that she was the one that used my license, then the judge should have moved the charges to my sister and let her clean up her own record.” I’m like, “Yes, I think you’re right.” I called the courthouse and I asked for a transcription of our court session. Then, I got another court date. As I walked in, the bailiff recognized me. He said, “Hey, weren’t you just here a few weeks ago, the girl who came in with the sister, blah, blah, blah?” I said, “Yes, but the judge didn’t remove charges from my record, even though my sister admitted in court that she had taken my license.” He went, “Don’t worry, we’ll work it out.”

 

Once my case gets called, the bailiff speaks up to the judge. I should mention it’s not the same judge I had the first time and the bailiff explained that he was in the courtroom the last time I came and explained to her that my sister confessed, she took my license, and the rest of the story. The judge asked me if this was all true and I said yes. The judge then said the courts would update my record, showing that my sister used my information as an alias, and they would put all the charges on her record. I thanked everyone, especially the bailiff, and left.

 

Later, I called my sister to tell her what happened and she was not happy about it, but I didn’t really care. When I got to work the next day, I asked them if I could fill out a new form to have my background check rerun. They said they would give it a month because the courts don’t work that quickly. It eventually gets run again and I am cleared. And by the way, my sister never did anything about her record so I doubt her story was true and my brother actually told me it wasn’t true. I went on to work in the school system for 21 years and retired a little over a year ago.

 

I’m a scuba diver in the Tampa Bay area. Born and raised in Clearwater. I now live in St. Pete. Very familiar with the area. One day, my mom doesn’t dive – dive meaning scuba dive. My father, brother, and I went down. This was about 20 miles out in the checkerboard area of Tampa Bay and it was about 80 feet deep.

 

On the first dive, everything went kosher. I mean, it was beautiful. You roll off the boat. You go down and you can’t see anything around you. It’s serene. It’s beautiful. It’s just peaceful. Then you see the bottom and there’s so many fish around and you– I’m sorry for saying this, but you spear fish. I mean, that’s what you do. You get snapper, grouper, and hogfish.

 

I’m terrified of sharks. My brother and father know that. Apparently, on this dive, they had seen a bull shark circling around. I was just, like, shooting up fishes. My brother and dad were around me. So we went up and we had to do our deco stop. A deco stop is you have to decompress at, like, around 20 feet – it depends on how deep you are. Anyways, you have to stop. So then we got up on the boat and went to our next dive and did the same thing – shooting up fishes.

 

I breathe heavier than my dad and my brother do. My brother nailed it. He got so many fish. He came over to my dad and I, and signaled “Hi” with his hand wave, thumbs up, like, “I’m going up.” So we gave the okay sign where you put your two fingers together and three fingers up, “Okay.” Then my dad and I both looked down and I saw– basically a side note is you start with 3,000 pounds – that’s normal. But when you get to 500, that’s like E on the gas tank, like a little bit before E on a gas tank, like you need to go up. I was at about 600 and my dad was about 1,000. So I was like, “He has so much more time.” I was like, “Dad–” You can’t really talk to each other underwater, so I was like, “I’m going to go up.” He was like, “Okay.”

 

So I was swimming up, just super duper happy. My brother’s at his deco stop at 20 feet, and I was just like “Hi” because he turned around and he was like– I mean, you’re in open water, and what I describe as open water is you can’t see anything. It’s just open water. There is not a thing you can see. There’s nothing around you. He ended up turning around for whatever reason, thank God, and eyeballs got so big in his mask. I could see them and I was like, “Shit. He just did, like, a shark.” The diver’s term for shark is to put your hand up on your head. He did, like, shark and pointed and I just froze. I did the stupidest thing that you could do. I unleashed my stringer of all my fish. So the fish just started swimming around. Well, then that just got more blood in the water.

 

I just slowly turned around and saw this shark – I mean, eight feet, dorsal fin, fins down – and I was just thinking, “Okay, well, my little brother is taller than me, he’s bigger than me, but he’s younger than me. My little brother is about to see me die, basically.” I mean, this thing was coming at me super duper fast. If I can describe the way that the ocean works, it’s like a highway. Like, when you’re at 5 feet, you’re at 5 feet, when you’re at 10 feet, you’re at 10 feet, when you’re at 20 feet, you’re at 20 feet. This thing was at 25 feet, if you will, coming at me hot, super duper fast and I was just thinking, “Okay, I’m starting to swim up, trying to figure out how I’m going to push off of this thing.”

 

Well, before I even could do anything, I felt a huge push on my chest. My brother had got to me before the shark did. He grabbed my BC, which is what you wear when you scuba dive. It’s basically the vest. He grabbed the BC and just threw me on his back and had his spear gun out. The shark circled us a few times and then we went up. We did not do a deco stop which, by the way, for any divers, you should, but we didn’t because there was a huge shark in the water. When I got up on the boat, my brother basically just pushed me up. My mom was on the boat because she doesn’t dive. We were both okay. Then my dad came up and he was okay, of course, because they’re fine and used to the sharks and stuff like that. But that was the most scariest thing that I’ve ever been through.

 

I literally thought I was going to die. To anybody who scuba dives, never release your stringer. They’re not interested in your stringer. The other thing is I had my spear gun on me – considering I was shooting fish on all the dives. But my other recommendation would be if you are diving with a bunch of people, even if it’s your father, brother, or friends, let people know that there is a shark in the area so that they can be aware so that they don’t sneak up behind you because your life’s important. If my brother was not there that day, I would not be here and I know that for a fact.

 

Do you believe God has a sense of humor? I do. I’ve seen it a lot of times. The one that stands out for me the most was when I was back in college. I went to a small liberal arts college and there was a park across the street. I had a major crush on a guy. Back in those days, the men made the first move. I tried my hardest to flirt but it didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. So I just felt that I was never going to find a mate. I felt that I was not attractive and I was becoming very disheartened. I decided to take the afternoon off and go for a walk in the park.

 

I was walking through the park and I was talking to God. I told God, “Give me a sign. Give me any sign that I’m attractive to men.” I got no response and I frankly did not expect to hear one, but I kept walking through the park and kept praying and thinking. Before long, I came upon a man who was standing on a bridge and looking at the stream that flows through the park. He said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” And I said, “Yes, it is.” He looked at me and he said, “Have you seen where the stream and the river come together?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “It’s beautiful. Would you like to come and look at it?” I said, “Sure.” I was very naive at the time, so of course I said I would go with this complete stranger into the woods and look at the river and the stream coming together.

 

So we went down a long path through the woods. As he walked, he pointed out various trees and flowers to me, and he told me what they were called. One tree in particular was full of 3-inch spikes. It was very intimidating. He asked me if I knew what it was and I said, no. He said, “It’s a Hawthorne tree.” Of course, being an English major, I had heard of Hawthorne, but I had no idea about the tree. He plucked one of the thorns off of it and handed it to me and it was pretty. It was a shiny mahogany-colored, 3-inch, very sharp, pointy spike. I held it in my hand and we kept walking and before long we ended up at a clearing.

 

When we got to the clearing, you could see the stream emptying into the river and it was, as promised, beautiful. So we stood there for a while, looking at it, and then he turned to me, and he started to kiss me and hold me, and then he said three words to me. He said, “Do you fuck?” Well, at that instant, everything changed. I was thrown into a panic. What had I gotten myself into? Here I was out in the middle of nowhere, miles from civilization, with a man I didn’t even know, and he was asking me this. I freaked out, mentally. I choked out. A barely audible no, and he proceeded to grab my boobs and grab my butt and continue to kiss me and I froze up and after a bit.

 

The panic just started to subside and I was able to think a little more clearly. The only thing I could think to do to get myself out of the situation was to start pushing his hands away. I finally got my voice back and I said, “Let go of me.” As I said that, I was pushing his hands away and that sharp spike found his flesh and he yelped. The pain brought him back to his senses. He apologized to me and stopped what he was doing. Then, he started walking me back to the park. We retraced our steps in complete silence. All I could think of was how dumb I had been to put myself in that situation to begin with.

 

Finally, when we got back to the bridge, he pointed out his pickup truck to me and he asked me if I wanted to go with him. I said no, and he said okay, and started to walk away. I turned and started to walk away. A minute later, I heard him call out to me, “Debbie.” I turned and looked, and he said three words to me, “You are beautiful.” Holy crap. I guess God really does have a sense of humor.

 

Hi Scott. My name is Corinne. I live in Louisiana. I wanted to tell a quick story that kind of resembled one of your raw audio stories that I heard not too long ago. Me and my now husband were just watching TV at his apartment outdoor kitchen thing one morning and we, all of a sudden, heard a commotion. We looked out the door and it was a couple in their car. They had obviously lost something but they were yelling and he was getting violent with her, so we stepped out. The guy got out of the car and started yelling at my now-husband saying, “Go back in the house! Go back in the house!” and really just acting like he was going to hurt us if we didn’t go back in the house and mind our own business.

 

But he was clearly hurting this young woman and I felt so bad for her. Well, then, my now husband, Jesse, he went inside – we went inside – and he got his firearm. I stopped him though because I was like, “No, it’s not worth all that.” He wanted to go outside and help the young woman but I was just like, “Pulling out your firearm and things is not going to really help. It’s just going to make everything worse.” So I stopped him from doing that. But it was just such a crazy moment and I felt so bad for this young woman. I wanted to go hug her and tell her, “You’re worth way more than that. Please find a man that actually appreciates you and loves you.” But I still, to this day, don’t know how that ended up. They were gone a few minutes later and nothing really came of it for us. I just hope that young woman left him eventually and was safe.

 

This event took place when I was on vacation in the Philippines – specifically, my destination was the island of Palawan. Now, Palawan is where they filmed the movie The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio. So it’s a super beautiful place. It looks just as gorgeous as it does in the movie, and that was the main reason why I wanted to go there.

 

Now, I went to Palawan with my friend Kayla. And while there, she had the idea of going on a snorkeling and scuba cruise. Now, this wasn’t like a big cruise. It was just owned and operated by a man who just lived there. I think he just did it as a way to make money, and it was a very basic thing. We would just go around and do some island hopping, get off snorkel or scuba a few times, and then go back to the mainland. Kayla had her scuba license. I did not. So for people who did not have their scuba license, we weren’t allowed to scuba dive, but only snorkel. There was only one other person on this expedition who did not have a scuba license, and his name was Rob. So Rob and I were going to snorkel.

 

At the first stop, all the scuba people jump off, they go do their thing, and then Rob and I jump off to snorkel. As soon as we jumped off, the boat captain drove away. I don’t know where he went. I don’t know if he was following the scuba people or going to, like, their final destination, but our instructions were to snorkel back up to the small island that we were near, which was about two football fields away. So just a little bit of information, I had never snorkeled before. I did not have any experience and the captain did not give us any instructions. So I just assumed that you put your head in your water and you flip your feet and you look at beautiful fish.

 

Well, little did I know that when you jump into the ocean, your snorkel gets full of ocean water and you’re supposed to blow it out. I did not do that. So when I start snorkeling, my first breath in is nothing but ocean water. I immediately start choking and coughing and I’m, like, in panic mode. I can’t breathe. I am fileting in the ocean and I feel myself going under. Before I know it, my head is underwater and the only thing above water are my arms. I’m kicking and I’m fighting so hard to get above water, but I can’t. At that moment, I knew that I was drowning. Trying very hard to get up, but I just can’t.

 

I suddenly felt these arms around my torso and it was Rob. Let me just tell you, Rob was a very good-looking guy. So when he pulled me up and I saw his face, I was like, “There’s no better place to die because this man is beautiful.” But unfortunately for Rob, I started coughing up water onto him. I’m basically throwing up ocean water onto him and he just held me. He was treading water. He was super strong. I don’t know how he was able to, like, swim and hold me at the same time but he basically just got me so I felt safe. I was calm. I could breathe again.

 

Then, he very slowly swam up with me to the island that we’re supposed to go to. Once we got to the island, the boat was there with the scuba divers, Kayla included and I just started screaming at the boat captain. This poor man did not speak English. He probably had no idea what I was so angry about. But you don’t leave people in the ocean until you are sure that they are safe. And honestly, he probably should have had someone with us. I don’t know. Again, this was not, like, a company, it was just some guy doing it.

 

For the rest of the scuba diving and snorkeling boat tour, I barely went in the water. I was pretty shaken up. I was honestly quite scared of being in deep water for quite a while, which was sad because I love the ocean. But now I’m in a place where I can swim in the water with confidence, so I overcame that fear. But that’s about the time that I almost drowned in the Philippines.

 

About six years ago, when I was a single mother, I lived alone in a tiny single-wide trailer out in the countryside. I had a neighbor who lived in the lot right behind me. We’ll call him Tony. He lived with his wife and teenage son. They were really good neighbors. They left me alone for the most part. Past introducing ourselves, when I moved in, there was really no exchange. Sometimes, we would cut each other’s grass while we were already cutting our own, so we would say thank you if we happened to see each other, but that was about it – just how I liked it. I lived there for 2.5 years.

 

One day at about noon, me and my two-year-old daughter were taking a nap. There’s a back door right outside of my room and I was woken up by somebody pounding on it. My first thought was, “Something is happening and maybe it’s my neighbor and they need my help”, but I had a really uneasy feeling about it. So, instead of opening that door, I went to look out the front door to kind of see if I could see anything going on. When I got to the door, Tony was running up to me very clearly pissed off about something. He started screaming and yelling at me things that just didn’t make any sense. He was calling me every name in the book and accusing me of completely fabricated lies and I had no idea where he was getting any of this from.

 

At this point, I’m thinking, “Ugh, he’s drunk.” Which scared the crap out of me because not only is he drunk, he’s also unhinged and irrational. I do remember him saying something though about me being a homewrecker, which is especially confusing because I barely ever see or speak to him or his family. I’m super tiny, 5’2”, and he was a lot taller than me and he worked out a lot.

 

So I kind of just froze there for a second and was like, “What are you talking about?” He swung open my storm door and barged into my living room. I backed up and that’s when I realized my two-year-old was now standing right behind me. I told her to go to the bedroom, but she didn’t listen and I didn’t want to take her myself and turn my back to Tony. So we’re arguing back and forth. He’s practically screaming into my mouth and then he started threatening me. He said he was going to kill me, he was going to kill me and my daughter, that he was going to kill my whole family. So now I was terrified.

 

I told him to get the F out, which to my surprise, he did. He ran back home and I grabbed the biggest kitchen knife I had, called 911, then my daughter’s father. I told dispatch that I had a knife and if he came back, I would use it. They sent an officer. After hanging up, he came back yelling some more. I closed the door when I was on the phone, but I didn’t think to lock it. He ripped open the door again.

 

I guess in an effort to keep him out of my house where my daughter was, I stood in the doorframe and held the knife up to him, telling him that if he didn’t leave, I would kill him. Time slowed down and every scenario played through my head, like, “How should I hold the knife? Where would stabbing him stop him the fastest? In which way is he going to block the knife? What if he fights back and takes it from me? And how am I going to live with myself after taking someone’s life?”

 

During all of this, Tony was on the step right outside of the door. So that brought him a little lower, more face-to-face, and my knife was only centimeters away from his neck. He started calling my bluff and daring me to do it, and I almost really did do it a couple of times before he told me to, but I sincerely did not want blood on my hands. I managed to back him up into my yard, threatening him with the knife some more, and I really got to tell you, they call it liquid courage for a reason because he was still trying to push himself into me. There was just so much screaming and yelling that I really couldn’t even begin to recall what exactly we were saying to each other. I’m sure the cars that drove by were wondering what the hell is going on when they saw this tiny female waving a knife and screaming at this full-grown man. They probably thought I was the bad guy.

 

But all of a sudden, a man who I came to find out was his brother pulled up in a truck and told Tony to get in and they drove away. Shortly after, my daughter’s father arrived, and then the police officer, which is crazy because her father was over 30 minutes away when I called him. After the cop talked to me, he went next door and talked to Tony’s wife, and then he left. After the cop left, I was still outside and Tony’s wife and son came over because they were concerned and didn’t know what happened but, because I was so worked up and scared and I had no idea why any of this happened, I told them to stay the F away that he just threatened to kill my daughter and I showed them the knife I had to scare him off with. His wife just came up to me and gave me the biggest hug and I just started crying on her shoulder, just letting all the fear out.

 

Tony ended up coming back a few minutes later and went to his house. They went home and my daughter’s father stood outside with a firearm hidden in his pants. He didn’t initiate any conversation or instigate, but Tony decided to now argue with him and make more violent threats. I called 911 again. The officer came back and Tony was arrested. Not to my surprise, this was not the first time that they had crossed paths. He was sent to jail but was released on bond with a protective order which kept him from being at his house.

 

Months later, when I went to court to testify, he was brought into the courtroom in an orange jumpsuit. I guess he just couldn’t stay out of trouble. He was sentenced with several charges and over a year in jail. I moved out shortly after that because I didn’t want to be anywhere near his house or his family when he was released. I know some people might think that’s just something an angry drunk person would say, that he probably wasn’t serious, but the way he was right in my face, the whole time screaming – and I mean screaming – the things he was yelling, and his body language, I completely believed that he was going to hurt me and or my two-year-old. It was more than just accusations. There were many threats and many different kinds of threats.

 

Thankfully, I haven’t had a bad neighbor since. I do kind of miss getting my grass cut for free sometimes, but you don’t tell me you’re going to kill my two-year-old and get away with it. I still see him from time to time riding around town in his work truck, and I wonder if he’s gotten sober or not. I really hope he has. Thank you, Scott, for letting me tell my drunken neighbor story. And thanks again for all the hard work you put into creating this amazing podcast.

 

My boyfriend at the time – actually my fiancé at the time – and I went to a swimming hall, a legal swimming hall in Maryland, and this was back in 2003, and we had a wonderful time. On our way home, I was keeping up with traffic. I was driving. I think I was doing around 85 miles per hour, so was everybody else. It was very fast. A group of motorcycles went by us very quickly. We saw them for a little bit and then they sort of zoomed ahead of us and they were all, like, Kawasaki-type of motorcycles, which I guess some people call crotch rockets. One person stayed back. It turns out this was a man. This one person stayed back and he slowed down a tiny bit – he was in the lane to the left of us – and then he sped up very quickly. So he was now back ahead of us again. I remember glancing down at my speed and I was like, wow, I’m doing, like 80-85 here. So he’s going faster than I am.

 

Then, all of a sudden, he tried to stand on his seat. We were a little bit behind him at this point but he stood on his seat, wobbled, and basically fell off right in front of us. He just did a, I guess, like a somersault type– it’s almost like a somersault to the very side of the highway. I immediately pulled over. I did not see what happened to his bike. I parked and I ran over to him. He was sitting up with his legs in front of him. As he was sort of collapsing down, he landed in my lap because I went to help him – like, put my arms behind his back and he just ended up lying in my lap. It was really very emotional. He was injured. He had road rash all over him and his foot was basically off of his leg.

 

I am a teacher and I was a teacher at the time. I’m still a teacher. I can generally stay calm in the moment of a crisis and I just spoke very calmly to him. I opened his visor. I told him that he was going to be okay and we were going to get him some help. It looked like he had a lot of road rash and it looked like he had a leg injury but he was going to be okay. I did not tell him that his foot was hanging off of his leg. People started pulling over. People called 911.

 

In this particular part of the story – I actually had to check in with my husband to make sure that I saw it and he saw it – an EMT came to the scene. I guess EMTs have to stop at any accident scene. He came running over with a knife, which I believe he was going to use to sort of cut the jeans off of the person that had fallen – he was only wearing jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt, and a helmet – but instead, he stabbed him. He didn’t stab him like the knife went all the way in or anything like that, but everybody who was at the scene, including the man in my lap, jumped. Then, he was like, “Sorry.” And he was much slower after that.

 

All of his friends had come back. He had asked one of his friends to find the bike and take off whatever was on the bike, I guess. I don’t know what was on the bike. It could have been his wallet. It could have been anything. We can’t ride motorcycles while holding things in our hands. Then, a helicopter landed in front of us and emergency people came over and they switched places with me. I just moved out of the way and let them do their thing. They loaded him into the helicopter eventually and they left.

 

I did give my name and number to one of his friends, but I never heard anything back. An interesting part about the story was I was in the car and the cops wanted to talk to me. My first instinct was actually to lie for him and I think it was because he was just so injured and I didn’t think anything beyond that. I just had a very injured young person in my lap who I don’t know if he could survive that type of injury – I had no idea – and it wasn’t like some sort of clean break. It was really quite bad. So I lied and the cop knew. He said, “Okay, I get it, but this is what I’m going to say to you and then I’m going to give you some time to think about it. His motorcycle continued riderless down the highway, crossed over the highway, and went into the woods. And anybody could have hit that riderless motorcycle, a person in a minivan, a person with kids, just any person and could have been Killed through nothing that they did of their own accord.” And then he left and I was like, “Crap.”

 

When he came back, I immediately told him that he had been standing on his motorcycle seat, which he absolutely should not have been doing. Then, we went home and I never heard anything. I have no idea what happened. I can’t even remember the highway we were on. We didn’t typically go anywhere in Maryland. We lived in Northern Virginia at the time. It was just this cool place we went swimming to for the day. But for a while, both now my husband and I really struggled when we saw people on motorcycles. We both said that we just had incredible fear of that person, no matter who it was, going to fall off right in front of us and that still happens. I still tense up, but nothing like it was maybe the first couple of years after. It just has always stuck with us because it was such a crazy thing.

 

I actually do have my motorcycle license, which I had gotten not very long ago from when that happened. Once I passed my test without issue and then once I started trying to ride on the street, I was like, “No, this is not for me. There’s just not enough protection for me. It doesn’t outweigh the risk.” The enjoyment did not outweigh the risk, but I know that it’s wonderful for many people.

 

Ratatouille 2…

 

I’m embarrassed to tell people that we have a pet rat. When I first met Laura, she had a pet rat, which I thought was pretty weird. She was a fantastic woman in every way, so I decided I’d try to put up with it. When she moved in, he moved in, and I’ve definitely warmed up to the little guy. He’s half white and half gray, as if his hindquarters were dipped into a can of gray paint. He’s mischievous, smart, and independent. We renamed him Ratsky. Today, I’m putting the finishing touches on his new four story home. I’ve repainted an old bookcase, cut holes in the three interior shelves, and run little ramps between the floors. The ramps are configured one above the other in the same way that staircases are in most buildings. Rasky now lives in an old dilapidated parrot cage. He can only spend time on the floor of the cage, so it’s not the ideal setup for him. However, most of the time he just explores all the nooks and crannies of our loft. I have built this new house in part because, a week from today, next Friday, we will have some very important guests visiting. I want to get rid of the parrot cage habitat. I had the idea of this new home which we would hide away when the guests arrive.

 

My girlfriend, Laura, is a temporary translator for a newly arrived French diplomat, and he and his wife are coming out to our loft for dinner. He’s also a serious art collector, which explains in part our efforts in preparing for his visit. Laura tells me that she thinks they want to check out our art as well as our loft and see how a couple of real New York artists live. Laura is creating something special for their visit – a new avant garde couch of sorts. She’s purchased eight big blocks of foam rubber, four cubes to sit on, and four thick, taller rectangles to lean back on. The overall couch will be L shaped and she’s engaged a tailor from down the block to sew zippered light gray canvas coverings.

 

Now, it’s Sunday evening and I move Ratsky from his old parrot cage into his new digs. He’s been allowed to roam the space most days, but we keep him locked out of his cage when he’s exploring. That way, when we call him in the evening, he’s hungry and he always comes. Then, he’s locked in for the night. I always call him by singing out his name in a falsetto, “Ratsky! Ratsky!” And there he is. Tonight I call him to his new home and he comes hesitantly because of the change in routine, but he’s hungry and there’s food inside along with water and some clean rags for a new bed and also some pet toys. He enters, eats, and explores.

 

On Tuesday, the foam rubber and the canvas coverings arrive and everything fits perfectly. Ratsky has also adapted well to his new four-story house. The day after his first night there, he moved in a few of his treasures from the parrot cage – a piece of red rubber, a scrap of sequined cloth, and a peanut shell. We’ve also supplied the cage with all sorts of new small toys. Thursday has arrived and we start shopping in earnest for the dinner party.

 

Yesterday, I chose the wine and decided to avoid French wine – because I don’t want to make any faux pas of any sort because of my lack of knowledge of French vineyards – and instead chose a few bottles of white from an excellent California vineyard. In the evening, I call Ratsky, and he shows up immediately and races into his new cage for a meal and a night’s sleep.

 

Today is Friday, the big day. We shop in the morning, whole wild salmon, asparagus and shallots, and those different colored little baby potatoes. We got some great desserts from Dean in Toluca. We’ll be making our own hors d’oeuvres. There is one big potential problem, though. The couch has been set up and sat on a few times, but I’ve never really thrown myself down on it. When I do, the vertical back blocks tip over and I fall backwards. I think to myself, damn, now we need a quick fix because we plan to sit on the couch with our guests for appetizers and drinks before adjourning to the dinner table across the loft.

 

We decide on a two-part solution, sandwiching multiple strips of two sided adhesive tape between the back of the blocks and the standing rectangles. And then, to be on the safe side, I use some heavy twine to sew them together behind the base blocks. Voila, problem solved. The other problem is Ratsky. We moved his cage into the laundry room. I’m pretty sure that our guests, like most people, are not fond of rats. It’s funny. I’ve been so completely converted by Laura to liking Ratsky, that I, like her, find most references to rats in popular culture to be offensive. You dirty rat. They ratted him out. He’s a filthy rat. This place looks like a rat’s nest. References to gym rats and mall rats are less offensive. But of course, we both resist telling people how we feel about their unkind words towards rats. It’s just too weird on our part.

 

They are due at 7. So, at 6.30, I called Ratsky. I sing out his name and, today, of all days, no Ratsky. We both wasted valuable time searching even though there are still preparations to be completed upstairs, in the studio, the laundry room, and the office.

 

“Ratsky! Ratsky!”

 

But he’s nowhere to be found, so we decide on a fallback plan if he doesn’t appear before they do. One of us has to be on the lookout in case he makes a beeline for our guests. That someone is me.

 

When the buzzer rings, we both look anxiously at each other, close our eyes, touch foreheads and shake our heads from side to side. Then, we put on our happy faces and greet our guests at the door. We all make small talk about their getting up the freight elevator and our great views of the city. Then, we sat down at the couch for appetizers and wine. I’m incredibly anxious but a glass of wine does wonders. It also makes my eyes lapse for a few seconds from Rat Patrol. Suddenly, from the far side of the space, Ratsky makes his move.

 

The woman has just raised a pretty little hors d’oeuvre to her lips when he jumps on and across the coffee table and runs straight up the front of her dress. She screams a scream that is truly operatic – a horrified, blood curdling scream – and at the same time, she completely straightens her body out of fear. Ratsky has taken off the hors d’oeuvre as soon as she starts screaming, but she doesn’t know that. Because she stiffens her body, our two sided tape job and sewing completely fail and the rear of the couch flips backwards, and she does too. Continuing to tumble backwards, she ends up with both her pantyhose legs flailing in the air, and still screaming, and the bottom edge of her skirt has fallen down to her hips.

 

The biggest problem is that for Laura and I, the situation is completely hilarious. The harder we try not to, the louder and more uncontrollably we laugh. We’re laughing so hard that we’re crying, but not so the diplomat. As I laugh, I clumsily try to help his wife herself, not knowing exactly where to take hold of her, and she inadvertently gives me a good kick.

 

Then, her husband pushes me aside and helps her up. He hugs her, whispering, “Mon petit chou” in her ear to calm her. And then he has some very nasty French words for Laura and I. She stops screaming and is now crying, but still our muffled laughter continues. What we’re doing is so, so wrong, which makes it all the more funny. After a flurry of French expletives on the part of the husband, they leave in a hurry. Laura and I fall onto the couch and out comes Ratsky, not to take a bow, but to clean up all the hors d’oeuvres that were scattered on the floor.

 

The upshot of the evening is that Laura is barred from the office when she goes in to apologize. Her things are unceremoniously given to her in a cardboard box and she’s asked to leave. They never return our phone calls nor respond to our apology note, the writing of which makes us both hysterical again. No matter how we phrase our apologetic description of the events of that evening, it’s beyond funny.

 

At one point, we made up a name for her, Madame Raquemier, who was one of the subjects of Ingres most famous paintings. Since then, whenever either of us needs a pick-me-up, the other one just has to call out, Madame Raquemier, and we both giggle and sometimes howl with laughter. Sadly, Laura’s and my relationship didn’t make it, but we did briefly get back together for Ratsky’s funeral. He lived for four years, which is a long life for a rat. He’s buried in a grave in Greenwood Cemetery, marked only by a couple of his treasures, both of which disappeared over time. To this day though, I’m still offended when people say nasty things about rats.

 

In my early 20s, I lived in a small town in Utah. It was a very rural town, mostly farmland. My husband and I were both going to school at a university in the town nearby. I was going to school part time, but I was working full time at a treatment facility for people with eating disorders. This facility was a residential facility and it was In the town that I lived in, which was very small, very remote, but the facility was at a house that was up in the foothills where there were no other homes nearby, kind of up in the mountains.

 

One day, I was at work and I was a cook there. My co-worker who was coming to cook for dinner – I had just cooked breakfast and lunch – she had just arrived and told me that when she was driving up to work that day. She had passed by a man who was hitchhiking on the side of the road and she said she just drove right past him and ignored him as young women should do. She just mentioned this to me as a strange thing that happened while she was driving there. Then, I left to head home. I had to drive back on this same road that she’d come upon which, to be clear, was a very strange location for someone to be hitchhiking because there’s really nothing here nearby. If you’re driving up this road, you’re going straight into nothing except for this treatment facility or just to go on a hike, maybe in the mountains. So it seemed an odd place for someone to be hitchhiking.

 

Anyway, I’d kind of forgotten that she said this until I was driving down the road and I saw a man hitchhiking when I was driving up to him. He was actually kneeling on the side of the road. This man was an older man – I would guess probably in his sixties. When he saw me approaching in my vehicle, he stood up – he had in his hand a large rifle – and he walked into the middle of the road and was waving his hands and holding his rifle. He had a look of distress on his face and I was just compelled to stop. In retrospect, I recognize that this is obviously an unsafe situation for a young woman to put herself in but, in my heart, just by the look on this man’s face, I could tell he was highly distressed. So I stopped and I rolled down my window a little bit. I was still a bit apprehensive and he told me he needed a ride and that he had actually been hunting up in the mountains with his family and he got lost. So I said, “Okay, where do you need a ride to?” So he got in my car with his gun in the front seat and kind of collapsed honestly onto the seat of my car. He told me that he had a family member who lived not too far away in this small town and that he would direct me to where he needed to go. So I said, “Okay.” And I began driving and following his directions.

 

I could tell that, yes, he definitely needed help. He was physically exhausted, I could tell. I drove him to where he needed to go, to this home. When we arrived at this home, it looked like there was no one there. He got out and he said, “I’ll call someone, I’ll get the garage code, I’ll get inside, but thank you.” And I left and I drove to my home. I just feel like this situation could have ended pretty terribly and it was definitely an unsafe situation to put myself in, but something really just compelled me to pick this man up. I’m sure that he was very grateful that I did and I’m sure also, in retrospect for him, he recognizes that he probably looked a little bit frightening carrying his gun and asking for a ride from a young woman who was by herself but I think he was so overwhelmed by his own situation that he didn’t even consider that. I’ve never seen this man again but, ultimately, I am glad that I stopped to pick him up because he was not a dangerous person and he truly did need help, but I would never ever recommend doing the same thing to anyone else.

 

This was several years ago and I was working for the company for the second time. This time, they had implemented a new employee directory, which required everybody to have their photo taken. In the directory, it had your photo, your name, and the coordinates to where your desk was on whatever floor. That was a decent-sized building – three or four floors, including the basement level, lower level – and it housed the IT department for the entire company. They took up, like, half of a level on one of the floors.

 

We had been working on one floor in this quadrant, and I started to notice some stains on my chair. I have OCD and anxiety. Germs were a huge trigger for me. I always was very clean and meticulously cleaned my desk and everything was in order and to see a large stain on my chair was disturbing. To me, it looked like maybe the cleaning crew had set a sack of collected cans. on my chair and maybe it had leaked. It was a dark substance. Everybody had red chairs, so you could see the dark outline. At this point, it was pretty dry, but I was still freaked out, so I laid a barrier down for a few days until I knew for sure it was dry and whatever was maybe on there had kind of soaked into the papers that I’d put down.

 

Fast forward a few months later, and it happens again. Monday morning, there is this dark spot on my chair. So I told my boss and I said, “I really think they’re just setting a sack of cans or something on my chair and it’s leaking. This is disgusting. I’m losing my mind. Please contact that department and let them know to stop doing that.” So they got me a different chair, and swapped it out with another chair. Now we have moved our department to a different floor and to a different quadrant, and we’re in a little cube farm. Right after we moved there, I had a dark spot on my chair. Okay. Well, now this feels pretty targeted. So this is now three times – four times, maybe. It’s not really happening to anybody else around me, just my chair.

 

So my boss was like, “Well, let’s find another chair, swap it out. She’s like, “I’ve talked to the department. They’ve said that they’ve talked to their people and they’re saying that they haven’t done that. They don’t think it’s them.” And I’m like, “It has to be them. Who else is here on the weekends or at night?” So every month, this happens. There’s times where I’m coming in on the weekend with my daughter. I have to do just a little bit of work. I come in, do some work, and leave.

 

And then Monday morning, it’s on my chair again. At this point, it doesn’t have a smell. I’m leaning down. It doesn’t have a smell. I touch it and it has just a very mild, oily kind of residue. My coworker, he picks up the chair, puts it right to his face, smells it, and he’s like, “There is no smell.” I’m like, “I don’t smell anything either.” So, laying barriers down until they can get me a new chair. Finally, they started to just clean my chair. So they’re like, “Okay, anytime it happens, let us know right away. We’ll take your chair. We’ll steam clean it. We’ll sanitize it and you’re just going to have to sit on your plastic chair for a couple days and then we’ll give it back.”

 

I was good with that but still freaked out because I’m so afraid of germs. So I’m cleaning my desk every single day and it started to happen to a couple people around me – women. It never happened to the one guy who was in our cube zone. Then, we start to hear about other women in other areas of the building who have this weird stuff on their chair and it comes up in a meeting. It’s so random. We’re talking about it and they’re like, “Wait, we have this happening to our chair too.”

 

So it happens again And I finally tell my boss, “This is only happening to women. Something is happening.” Her boss happens to overhear this. They have a meeting. Then, within a week or two, they are doing some maintenance to the smoke alarms in the ceiling, kind of above my desk. At this point, I’m starting to have weird things being left on my desk. The most notable that I remember was a hand-drawn drawing picture that was pinned to my corkboard. It wasn’t there. Nobody I knew did it. I didn’t really know anybody else in the building, because it was such a large building, and nobody did it, and it freaked me out. I have these things happening to my chair every month. Now I’m getting weird things left on my desk, weird drawing photos, pictures pinned to my cube and I’m panicking. So they’re constantly cleaning the chairs and then I come in one morning and it’s there. At this point, I’m so angry.

 

I tell my boss, “This is unacceptable! What is happening?” And she said, “I don’t know.” And then, they go have a meeting with their boss and, within a couple hours, the police are there. There are detectives there. Lawyers are there. HR is there. They tell us that they had actually installed hidden cameras above my desk and in other areas. They caught an IT person who had been with the company for 20-plus years going and urinating and potentially pleasuring himself on these chairs. When they talked to him, he said that he had to work one weekend a month and he would go to the directory, find the women he thought were most attractive, and he would do this to their desk. They did say the urination was a sexually motivated thing for him. So lawyers are coming in. They’re making a side thing saying, “We’re not going to sue the company because it only happened to women.” I’d been complaining about it for 8-9 months. It was once I said out loud, “This is only happening to women,” that they finally did something.

 

So he’s terminated. He’s given a severance and allowed to keep his retirement, his pension, which is bizarre. He’s charged with a class D felony and his charges had nothing to do with the personal targeting or the sexual aspect. It was monetary damage to the chairs only, which felt really gross because it was more than just the chair damage.

 

Ultimately, they gave us counseling and they gave us a victim’s advocate because this was going through the courts process. They talked to all of the victims and said, “Would you like to make a victim impact statement?” I said, “Yes, please. Let me do that.” And out of the whole group, so many people– it was so disturbing that they just didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I thought I’m not going to let this guy only get away with just the monetary damage because there was so much more damage done. It was so violating. It was so disgusting. Just to have somebody urinating on your stuff, possibly sexually pleasuring themselves on your stuff but it was targeted, It was, ugh, so gross. In that whole thing, they also allow the victims to confront the person who did this.

 

I asked everybody else who this happened to. There’s maybe five women, six maybe. They said, “No, we’re not. I’m done with it. I don’t want to think about it. It’s so gross. I’m over it.” And I was so disturbed. He had flipped my world upside down because of my OCD, my germophobia, and my anxiety, and it really affected me. I just did not want to let him get away without knowing what he did. I had so many questions too. I said, “Yes, I want to confront this guy.”

 

A few months later, we went to this small room at a different location. I have the victim’s advocate. There’s lawyers there, social workers there, and he came in and I said, “Why did you do this?” And he said, “I just don’t know.” Then, he backpedals and says, “It was not sexually motivated. It was not targeted,” even though he had followed me around the building where we had moved. And I said, “Listen, I had food on my desk. Did you do that?” He said, “No.” And I said, “I had chapstick. at my desk. I’m afraid to put chapstick on my lips for fear that you have put this in places that are dangerous for me.” And he said, no. And I said, “I had photos of my child out at my desk. That is terrifying. I went there over the weekend. The building’s empty mostly for the weekend. I went there with my child over the weekend. That is terrifying. This should be a safe place for me.”

 

I confronted him and told him everything I thought about what he did and the impact that it had on me, and he was crying. I was crying and that was sort of it. I didn’t believe a lot of the things he said, but I did not want to let him walk away with only a monetary charge. He needed to know what he did and how it impacted real humans, and I was the only person who did that.

 

Unfortunately. It made national news. It was on all the late-night talk shows. They made jokes about it. It was in all the papers across the country and the comment section was awful. Of course, we, the people who he targeted were responsible– how are they dumb enough that they didn’t know? Just every horrible thing you can think of, these people said– even coworkers. When I was talking about it, I mean, it is so jarring. The response I got even from women was, “Oh, boo hoo. I’m so pretty. Somebody targeted me because I’m so pretty. Oh, it must be rough.” Oh my gosh.

 

Ultimately, I changed desks. This person was banned, never allowed in or near the building. There was a restraining order. All of that has died down but it has stuck with me forever. I no longer leave photos of my family, I no longer leave food or any of the personal items at my desk. And I clean, clean, clean, still. I’m better with my OCD and my anxiety through lots of therapy, but it was a very jarring experience and I hope nobody ever has to go through that. I also never allow my photo to be put in a company directory ever again.

 

Back in 2019, I was on a London ferry and I took a certified nursing assistant course at a local career center where I first stayed, as well as infant and adult CPR. I didn’t continue down that career path but it still stuck with me. I had a few jobs at the high school and I currently work at the housekeeping department at our local hotel. I’m a lobby attendant and I’m the only person in the housekeeping department at night. I take care of the public areas as well as the public restrooms. On December 27th, 2022, at 2.30 PM, I got a call from the front desk asking me to check on Rusty, our head of maintenance. His wife was talking to him on the phone and he suddenly stopped talking. Worried, her granddaughter convinced her to call the hotel and have him checked on.

 

He answered back over the radio that I could head down and check on him. I then walked down to the maintenance department. I walked into the room. It’s a larger room with a smaller room inside, and that smaller room is Rusty’s office. I called his name as I walked in and I got an answer. I walked in further and I found him slumped over his desk, blue and not breathing. I ran down to the front desk and had the front desk attendant call 911. Then, I ran back. In hindsight, I should’ve used my radio to call but, in a panic, I ran instead.

 

I lifted him up and I got him onto the ground. Then, I called the front desk to send me somebody else who knew CPR just in case I had to stop. Then, I started. I don’t know if anybody listening has ever performed CPR, but it’s horrific. It’s graphic. The noises that come from a person’s chest as you’re pressing your body weight on their rib cage is terrible, but I did it and I continue to do it. The paramedics walked in and they talked to me as I was doing CPR. Then, as they were, when they finished getting their stuff ready, I stopped CPR. They pulled him from the room into the larger room to work on him. I stood up in shock and I just watched as the paramedics started administering drugs and continuing CPR.

 

Then, I heard screaming and it snapped me out of it. It was his granddaughter who I found out later I knew personally from high school. She was coming in and out of the room, screaming and crying. They wanted to shut the door so they could work on him in peace. So, I picked up his belongings and I left their room, and they shut the door behind me.

 

I made my way down to the laundry where I had a bit of a breakdown. I was coming down from the adrenaline and I was shaking uncontrollably. So, I called my sister and she talked me through it. Then, I had to go about the rest of my night as normal. I worked till 11 o’clock that night, so I still had a couple of hours left. I took his stuff to security, filled out an incident report, and finished my shift.

 

The next morning, I was awoken by a call from his daughter who got my number from our boss. She called me and thanked me. Sorry if I get a little emotional. She called me and thanked me and let me know that I broke his sternum, that the doctors said I did amazing CPR and that, without me, he wouldn’t have made it. I think about that a lot – how he could have just passed alone. I did get to meet his wife. We had a little get-together. The news was there. Friends and family and coworkers all gathered at the hotel to listen to the story. That’s where I met his daughter in person and his wife and his son. I met his son and realized I knew him. I served him previously at my old job.

 

They set it up for me. They got the community to donate things to me as a thank you, but I would have been happy with just their personal thank yous. I do think everybody should know CPR. Everybody should know how to spot the signs of a heart attack or a stroke. Everybody should know the Heimlich maneuver. Everybody should be teaching their children that these classes are inexpensive and the Good Samaritan laws exist for a reason. Yeah, I broke a bone. I broke the bones in his chest, but he’s still alive and he’s thankful he’s still alive, and I’m thankful he’s still alive.

 

I got to save a father, a brother, a husband, a grandfather. I got to save him. I had the privilege of using my skills to bring this man back to life, and I’m thankful for it every day. I see him all the time at work. He thanks me all the time. Every time somebody new starts in the maintenance department, he always introduces me as the girl who saved his life. We make lots of jokes about me being his guardian angel. You can be like me. You don’t have to be this huge, selfless person to save somebody. I barely even remembered how to do CPR – I learned it three years earlier – but I saw him on the floor, laying there, and it just clicked for me. Everything came rushing back and it’s great. I’m happy he’s still here. I’m gonna include the news clip from our little gathering just so you can see Rusty and his beautiful family, and thanks for the privilege of letting me tell my story.

 

I’m from Manitoba. It’s the prairies, harsh, long winters. My husband, Byron, and I were in Phoenix, Arizona and we were there just for a long weekend, a little getaway, in fall, before things got really cold in winter. We decided to go on a hike and the hike was so much different than the landscape that we’re used to. It was hilly and “deserty” and hot. And you know what? Let’s just face it. I’m not a very athletic person. I don’t mind hiking. I really don’t like being hot. So it was fine enough.

 

We got to the park where the hike is and there’s an office where you check in, so we checked in and we got our little map. We did see one or two other hikers, and one of the hikers that we saw was a woman – an older woman than us and very petite, very slender, had a cane – and she was walking with a sort of an odd gait to her. We both noticed that just because it was different and we were curious how a hike on the hills and the rocks like that would be for her, but we didn’t pay any more attention to that. I would say the hike probably would have taken us about an hour walking at a really average pace, nothing too fancy.

 

We were, like, three-quarters of the way done and we turned a corner and we saw this woman that we had seen in the beginning with the odd gait to her and she had fallen into a little culvert, into a hole, and there were rocks there. She had fallen and she was sitting there. She was bleeding from the head and we went up to her, “Are you okay?” And she goes, “Yeah, I’m fine. I don’t need help.” And we’re like, “Well, let’s just get you up. Let’s just get you standing.” She just really didn’t want us to help her, but we’re not going to leave her there. So she got up. “Well, I’m fine. You can go now.” “Well, let’s just walk together. Let’s walk back to the office together.” She couldn’t even take one step. She fell over again and, like I said, there was blood coming from her head. My husband, Byron, was just like, “Okay. Why don’t you lean on me? Let’s just start walking.”

 

It was very clear very quickly that she was not going to be walking back to the office on her own and that we would be accompanying her the whole way, which was completely fine, and we ended up chatting. When she had a career, she was a nurse and she’s like, “Don’t worry about my head bleeding. Head wounds bleed more than other parts of the body, so you don’t really need to be concerned,” which is a fact that I’ve retained to this day. “Oh. Don’t be too concerned about a head wound right away necessarily.” We talked about our life in Canada and she talked about her life in Phoenix and it took us over twice as long, very small steps all the way back with some rest. It was hot.

 

Finally, we got to the office. “Okay, I’m fine. You can go now.”

 

“Well, let’s just make sure that you’re okay. You’re going to get home okay.”

 

“I don’t want an ambulance.”

 

And the staff has said, “Well, we can’t force her to, so she’s on her own.” Well, there was no way after “nursing” this hike that we were going to let her drive home if we could help it. She just said, “I’m fine. I don’t have a phone. I’m just going to drive home.” And we’re just like, “Oh, this is not safe.” And we came up with the idea, “How about if my husband drives her car home with her in the front seat? I will drive home right behind.” And this is before Ubers, taxis, and stuff. There were taxis of course, but she would not hear of taking a taxi. She wanted to do things on her own. She agreed that we could drive her home together, so we did that. It was, like, a half hour drive or so.

 

As I’m driving, I’m like, “Okay, her husband is home. Wow, how is this going to be when she gets home? Is he going to be, like, happy to see her? Or is he going to be, like, worried about her and want to hear all about what happened from us?” Not that it mattered. I was just curious. So we got to her house. We drove up the driveway. He’s outside. He’s kind of scowling at us and he’s kind of glaring at us. He doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t say hello. He doesn’t say goodbye. She mumbled goodbye and left her vehicle and we left her vehicle, got into our vehicle. And we had returned her to her home. That was it. Kind of a funny story, but I’m going to remember it always, I think.

 

In 2010, my stepbrother – I’ll call him Terry – was convicted of attempted rape, actual sexual intercourse with a person under the age of 11. It was his toddler daughter. He spent about 7 years in prison in New York State. Terry has mild mental retardation. Also, his grandfather was a convicted incestuous pedo. My family of origin is blended due to death and divorce with steps, halves, fulls, etc. So there were a lot of complicated feelings when Terry was arrested. It was pretty hard for us all to process. The family split into groups like haters, disbelievers, sympathizers, etc.

 

For a while, one of my sisters hated me because I couldn’t hate him. One of his full sisters thought she wanted to become his legal guardian but that feeling didn’t last for long. I felt deep sadness for the little girl. At the same time, I was one of the few siblings who didn’t disconnect from Terry. I wrote him letters in prison. Once I visited when I lived in Minnesota, I think I was his only visitor for his whole time in prison. Prison is its own weird world with its own rules and logic.

 

I had to strong arm Terry’s other full sister to help out when he got out of prison because I lived far – three hours away. She did step up with me pushing her. Terry calls me on the phone almost every day. We’re both in our late 60s now. I listen to him when he stresses out and try to remind him he will make it through whatever worries him. But for the most part, he’s like a 10 year old and I guess we’re friends. I’m in contact with the daughter, his victim. I see her every few months. Her guardian will not talk to her about anything in her past. She hears it from her babysitter and her stepbrothers. I’m afraid to say anything for fear of being shut out, but I maintain the connection with her guardian in case the daughter might need me for anything in the future.

 

I can’t put into words exactly why I couldn’t abandon my stepbrother. Maybe because his dad – my stepfather – and I didn’t have a good relationship until the end of his life, and I feel I have to watch over Terry for him. It’s almost like a mysterious grace that connects us. I’ve helped find him places to live – not an easy thing. We usually don’t talk about his past. I think I’ve sorted out everything I need to feel and I can’t put that in words either.

 

Have you ever had something you thought was a childhood memory, but it turned out to be a memory of a scene in a movie or of a story someone once told you, but not something that actually happened to you? Or maybe it could have just been a dream you once had and you thought it was a memory? Or maybe, conversely, you found out something you thought was one of those was something that actually happened that you just barely remembered.

 

Most of us grew up in a town where there was a spooky house in the neighborhood, right? An abandoned overgrown house, a burned down house that was just left like that since time immemorial or at least longer than the 5 years or so of working memory the average 8-year-old kid has. Usually the kids have legends about it. “An axe murderer is in there. If you go on the property you’ll fall into the sealed basement and be lost forever.” “It’s a drug den. The old man killed his entire family and is in a loony bin somewhere, but don’t go in there because some say their ghosts will take their revenge on you.”

 

In our cookie-cutter suburb on Long Island, New York in the 1980s, that house was three doors down from me. Since I can remember, it was known simply as the burnt-down house. One day, visiting home in my early twenties, I brought up the burnt-down house. I wanted to ask my mother if she knew when it burnt down because of this little nagging memory that I wasn’t really sure was a memory. Was it from a movie? A dream? Or did I really wake up one night as a little kid to see an orange glow dancing on my bedroom wall and peer out the window to see a column of flames just up the street? Did I actually toddle my little feet downstairs to tell a grown-up that I had seen a big fire, only to see my parents walking in the front door, surprised to see me, but assuring me that they had seen it too, and had already called the fire department?

 

“Well, funny you should ask.” My mother may have said, or something like that anyway. Me being old enough now not to blab, she told me that was a real memory I had, but it turned out that the burnt-down house had already been so years before that. It had been abandoned since my mother was a teenager. Back then, a family of squatters had been living there with no power or water for years, during which time the home had originally burned. It then sat moldering away and occasionally losing pieces until I was a small child.

 

I remember that local kids were very interested in the scorched structure hidden behind overgrown bushes and its debris-strewn property. Parents were worried about their kids daring each other to go in there, which happened. The town wouldn’t do anything about it. So one night, two parents who were young and wild decided to take matters into their own hands. At such a tender age, I wouldn’t have noticed that when my mother and father walked back into the house late that night, they smelled of kerosene.

 

They had made sure I was asleep and then headed over there. They made sure no one was inside and then made sure the burnt-down house burnt all the way down this time. Afterward, the property was finally cleaned up. No ghosts, druggies, monsters. No hapless children inadvertently entombed alive. But I am told our end of the street did have a major rat problem for a little while after that. Finally, we heard that someone had bought it but, to this day, it still sits fenced, overgrown because they discovered that the lot was never large enough to have a house on it after all. And that’s the story of how I found out who burnt down the burnt-down house.

 

 

Hey, Scott, my name is Ashley and I’ve been listening to your podcast for years now. I love listening to other people’s stories and how they persevere through tragic events. I never thought I’d have a story worthy enough to submit until my husband and I had accidents that involved some pretty surprising coincidences.

 

In early December of last year, we bought a private-sale used Suzuki GSX-R1000 sport bike. The seller had neck surgery and the bike had been sitting for years. He put a lot of hard work into it. He loved that thing, but ultimately needed the cash since he was barely making ends meet and it was nearing the holidays. Since the bike sat for so long, it developed a rotting spot on the front tire that needed changing, and I was willing to overlook that issue since the bike was so well-priced.

 

On December 18th, we received the new tire. So we had to drive the bike to get them balanced and mounted. Since my husband has been riding longer and has more experience, we decided it would be better for him to ride the bike to the tire shop while I followed in the car with the new tires in the trunk. I kissed him and said, “Ride safe.” we do this before any ride.

 

As we came up to the intersection, both of us made the green left-hand turn, and my husband cruised through the turn and began to sand the bike up, but I watched in horror as the bike went out from under him, sliding on its left side, heading right, while my husband rolled at least six times. He gets up. He’s clearly going into shock. All he could repeat was, “I don’t know what happened.” I was running back and forth between getting the bike out of the road. This was around 8 AM. Morning rush hour was starting to accumulate.

 

Tending to my husband, who was clearly in pain but the man is just too stubborn to sit down, he looked at me all of a sudden, white in the face, and said, “I can’t breathe.” Well, that won him an instant call for an ambulance. They pick him up and rush him to the local large trauma center here in our city. Turns out he broke his left collarbone, his left scapula, three ribs, and had a minor pneumothorax in his left lung.

 

After one night, he was released from the hospital to recover at home. With physical therapy and plenty of rest, he recovered fairly quickly. We also got the bike fixed up since she only had minor damage and everything that was broken was pretty easy to replace.

 

Exactly one month later, down to the day on January 18th, Brad decides he wants to take his first ride. It was a get back up on the horse kind of thing. He really missed riding. He really wanted to start working on his fear and get back on the road. Anyone who rides motorcycles will understand that need to just feel the wind in your face. He was too nervous to ride the GSX-R that he crashed. So, I took that bike and he rode my Honda CBR. The plan was a small two-mile ride to the gas station down the street, fill up the bikes, and come home. Nothing crazy, nothing adventurous.

 

While pulling into the gas station, I engaged the clutch and the bike stopped instantly. I thought it was strange. I chalked it up to, “Well, maybe I accidentally engaged the brakes. Maybe I did something wrong.” I shrugged it off and I filled the tank. As we pulled out, Brad was in front of me. At the time, we didn’t have any comms because his unit was damaged in his accident, so we couldn’t talk to each other. I wanted to be behind him in case he was having any issues. I could see what was going on.

 

I pulled the clutch lever to slow down and, again, the bike instantly stopped. At this point, I knew something was terribly wrong, so I tried to catch up to Brad to signal I was having issues. As I got to around 35 miles an hour, the bike started bucking like a Bronco. We’re leaping down the street and the last thing I remember was the engine making this high redding noise and seeing asphalt coming at my face. Thank God I had my helmet, but I didn’t have my gloves or my rain jacket. The bike slid on its left side, heading right, while I rolled probably twice before coming to a stop. I’d never broken a bone before, but I instantly knew something was wrong and I couldn’t move my left arm. Also, going head first gave me neck pain, which won me a one-way trip in the ambulance to, you guessed it, the same trauma center as Brad.

 

I had broken my left collarbone and had bruising on my left hip that we initially thought was broken but, thankfully ,the x-rays came back that it was fine. After being in the ER for nine hours, I was moved upstairs to room 301 – ironically, the same room we had just been in the previous month. I stayed in the hospital for three days because every time I stood to use the restroom, I fainted from the pain. Eventually, I was discharged and had to learn how to use only one arm. It took tons of therapy, both mental and physical, to work through the trauma, but slowly I was able to touch the bike, sit on it, and then start it, and then finally enough courage to make my first maiden voyage around the neighborhood.

 

While I was down and out and recovering, a mechanical engineer friend of ours took the bike apart and discovered the brake return valve had malfunctioned causing the brakes to be constantly engaged. But since it’s a 1,000cc bike, the engine was able to push through the brakes, but when you would pull the clutch to disengage the engine power, the brakes would instantly take hold. For both of us, it was a pure mechanical failure of the bike. It had nothing to do with faulty tires. It had nothing to do with operator error, strictly mechanical failure.

 

Well, it’s been over eight months for Brad and seven for me, but we’re both 100% recovered. I credit the amazing nurses who took care of us. Yes, they did lecture us during my visit because we had just been there and apparently hadn’t learned our lesson. If I could give one piece of advice, it would be to always wear your helmet. I typically wear all my gear, but that day it was so brutally hot that I decided to leave my jacket and gloves at home. Initially, I was also going to ride without my helmet, but I had this nagging feeling that I needed it, and thank God I listened to that intuition. I still ride with the same helmet that has scratches on the left side and on the top. It’s my constant reminder that not even once will I ever ride a bike without my helmet.

 

I never thought my husband and I would crash the same motorcycle exactly one month apart down the day, break the same major bone, stay in the same room at the hospital while being attended by the same trauma nursing staff. I guess this just shows we are destined to be together.

 

Thanks for the amazing podcast. I love what you’re doing. It’s awesome. Keep up the great work and I cannot wait to hear what you come out with in the future. Thanks, Scott. Bye.

 

I went to school at Florida state in Tallahassee. One summer, while I was staying up there, it was probably the summer of maybe 2017, I was going to go to the beach with some friends and I was just stopping at a Walgreens to pick up some sunscreen. I had my dog in the car and I was just running in and out. As soon as I got out of my car, this guy started yelling at me saying, “Oh, I recognize you. I met you at the club!” And I was like, “No, I don’t even go to the club. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And he then pulls out a giant knife and starts pretending to slash my tires. I even knew he was pretending at the time cause I saw he had a can of air or whatever that he was using to make it look or sound like air was coming out. Anyway, I was freaking out.

 

I’d left my phone in the car. I went into the Walgreens and was just trying to kill time because there was nobody else in the Walgreens besides the cashier. I just, for some reason, didn’t say anything so I grabbed a sunscreen, started checking out, and thank God the cashier asked me like, “Are you okay? You look like something’s wrong.” And I told him, “Oh, there’s this crazy guy in the parking lot with a knife, threatening me. I didn’t know what to do.” So the cashier walked me out. He told me to stay closer to the Walgreens, and he walked me out to my car. He walked out to the car. Crouched on the other side of my driver’s door was the same guy holding his giant knife – like a butcher knife. He had been hiding on the other side where I couldn’t see him.

 

They started yelling at each other. The cashier kind of baits him away from my car. And then he’s just like, “Go! Get in the car and go!” So I get in the car and drive away. Thankfully, I’m safe. My dog’s safe. I was worried about her in the car. I didn’t even call the police. My boyfriend did at the time to report it. When he did, he said, “Oh, the cashier had already called and reported it, and they investigated it.” I don’t think the guy was caught but, basically, the cops were pretty sure it was a thing that they do in gangs where you’re supposed to kidnap a girl and gang rape her and then murder her. That’s my near death experience. I thank God for that cashier for asking me if something is wrong because, if he didn’t, I would be dead.

 

 

Scott

Well, that wraps up another year. 2024 was a good year for me.

 

I don’t do new year resolutions, but if I did, it would pretty much be the same each year. Try to be kind to people. Everyone is dealing with some kind of stress, and we just don’t know what other people are going through. So give everyone a little bit of grace – including yourself.

 

I’ll be back in January and we’ll have all new What Was That Like episodes, Tuesday Question episodes, and Raw Audio episodes. I hope you stick around to see what’s in store!

 

And in the Facebook group this week, our Tuesday Question was this:

What under-$100 item has been the best thing you have bought? For me, I have a $99 thing I bought recently that has been a game changer. If you have something like that, come on over and let us know at WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook

 

Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.

 

No Listener Story for this episode, since we just heard over 3 hours of Listener Stories. Stay safe, and I’ll see you next time.