People are strange (thanks, Doors!)

By Pat Fule Random Thoughts

There was a TV show in the ’80s produced by Steven Spielberg called Amazing Stories. It had a short run but did have some memorable episodes. One featured a high school guy who suddenly became magnetic. This character had spent most of the episode avoiding a girl who had a major crush on him. That’s not the amazing part… at the end of this episode, his increasing magnetic powers were drawing many metal things to him, so that he was entangled and covered with them. Finally, the very last thing pulled to his body was (you guessed it) the girl he was avoiding. It turned out that when the viewer finally saw her face in full, she had a full set of metal braces and was pulled into a final lip lock with our hero.
Years ago, I was in Calgary and I happened to be looking out a window to see a goofy sight that always stuck with me. Two maintenance workers were using a ride-on mower to fertilize the grass they’d just cut. They’d jury-rigged a small fertilizer spreader on wheels and had attached it to pull behind the mower. The older guy must’ve been the boss because he got to sit on the mower. The other poor sap had to walk alongside the spreader, carrying the 50-pound fertilizer bag, keeping the spreader constantly full. Did I mention that it was a scorching hot day? He’d stagger and try (God love him), but he couldn’t keep a straight walking line under that load. Now and then, you could almost hear the fat boss giving the other guy crap for not keeping up. I always wondered how the poor guy would explain his thrown out back to the WCB. But I guess this story is a great example of seniority at work.
Here’s a little thing I like to do when I’m put on hold on a phone call to a company or a bank. If there’s no music and I feel I’ve waited awhile, I like to pick the worst song I know and play it for them. This really works when they’ve announced that the call is being “monitored for quality purposes.”
Any crappy song will do, but my favourites are Macarena or Barbie Girl.
It’s okay, if you want to pause this column and listen to the songs, I’ll wait.
OK, you’re back… great! There is nothing like the sound of a phone person who has just come back from that kind of hold. “How d’ya like them apples?”
Like the Amazing Stories episode, I think I also have a magnetic personality. Now before you accuse me of bragging, my magnetic power seems to involve “strange”. For whatever reason, I seem to be around, or in, some weird events. Case in point: a few years ago, I was gassing up at the Co-Op on the 817. A vehicle accident had just happened, and the police were sorting it out and trying to clear the intersection. Now, one of my university degrees is PE, so I know that what I saw was dumb! One guy in the accident had decided he would drive his car slowly, turning left through the intersection to try and park his wreck on the side of the road. He chose to drive alright, with his driver door open, one leg out, while he talked on his cell phone! I was stunned (more so than usual) and wondered what the cop would do. To me, if you just got in a fender bender and you and the other car are crunched, wouldn’t a good idea be to not drive distracted in front of the cop at the scene?
I never did find out the end result, but this was definitely a time I actually hoped there was a RCMP ticket for being dumb. Maybe that driver was on hold with the Macarena?
Many years ago, I moved to a new English classroom in the portables of what is now Crowther Memorial. If I have a spare class, I like to mark or prepare in my room, and I always lock the door. It’s not that I don’t like high school kids, but sometimes they want to hang out, and let’s face it, four classes with teens and then a spare is something you have to protect. However, every time I unlocked my door and turned the new knob to lock, I’d go in and discover that I’d also be locked in the room. So, I’d have to call the office, get someone with a key and that person would release me. Finally, one of my colleagues said, “I’m coming down with you and you show me what you’re doing.”
We got to the door. I wanted to prove I wasn’t nuts and that this door knob needed to be fixed. So, I explained as I unlocked the door: “OK, here’s what I do. I turn the knob to unlock… then I turn it again to set it to lock, and I go in and I close the door.”
I went in and closed the door. Simple, eh? I had closed the door and locked myself in again! The teacher pal loudly laughed through the door’s window as I was once again trapped in my own jail.
At that same school, I had badminton games going on in Grade 10 PE. When the kids had breaks in games, I asked them to go up in the gallery area and watch through the railing. For a laugh, one girl decided she’d see if her head would fit through the bars of that railing. It did. However, her head did not want to return out of the railing as easily as it went in. She began to panic, and although I was chuckling, we worked to get her melon out of its prison. I sent a pal of hers to get some margarine from the Foods Lab, and we dabbed some on her ears. OK, it was “slopping” more than “dabbing”… but in my defense, a lesson needed to be learned. We tucked in her well-basted ears and after a prolonged time (can’t rush these things!), we freed her head. A crisis averted and the class continued. I’ve learned that strange and dumb can happen to anyone, especially me (“your honour, I’d like to offer the waterbed story as Exhibit A …”) so take that, Steven Spielberg… Strathmore has its own Amazing Stories!
(Random Thoughts is a slice of life humorous column that appears in the Strathmore Times, written by long-time resident, current mayor, husband, father and grandfather – Pat Fule. He is also a former town councillor, high school teacher and coach. If you would like to get in touch with Pat, you can send him an e-mail at Pat.fule@shaw.ca)