I delivered my own child. Wife went for a snooze and somehow woke up deep in labour. No way we were going to make the hospital. Young and very nervous sounding lad talked me through it on the phone. I was glad it wasn’t my first time experiencing the birthing process because that took a lot of stress out of it.

There were no complications and it all went smoothly. She’s 16 now.

At the time I was mod of a parenting community that nearly lost it’s shit hahaha.

The fire brigade arrived about two minutes after the baby.

On the very same day my son’s best friend’s parents had to deliver their baby on the side of the road because they didn’t make the hospital!

I unwillingly rode a giant tortoise.

I was in charge of the cheese section at a major gourmet grocery store that you know the name of. When I say in charge, it was more the product curation, ordering and in-store “marketing” than the scheduling, conflict management and the more tedious stuff. But I’d do things like set the demo program throughout the store, “design” the cheese case and be the person that was called over as the “expert” when folks with too much money and too little knowledge wanted to feel like they knew what they were talking about.

There was a pleasant, young woman who was a regular customer, none of the negatives of above, but definitely seemed to have enough money to buy anything and everything I’d recommend without even a feigned concern or a cursory glance at the prices. I didn’t know it myself, but I was eventually told by others that woman was Mandy Moore (a very well known pop star and actress, but in maybe a slower point in her career).

I guess one day, my day off, someone noticed her waiting in the section, offered to help her and she politely refused and stayed where she was. They’d send other employees after a bit and she’d again politely decline help, but just stayed in the section “like she was waiting for something” and just line of half-browsing for a noticeably longer time. Eventually she went back up to the original person that tried to help her and asked if a specific employee was available to help her (with her giving a more generous description of me, as I’m told). She was told I wasn’t working that day and I guess she left without buying anything from the section.

So maybe that was a day that could have lead to a much different life had I been working? I resigned from the store pretty soon after as it was actually my 2nd job and I couldn’t sustain the hours of both anymore. But the funniest part is that other employee that Ms. Moore was asking about me would eventually become my wife years later :)

Years ago I worked in an inner city market. I had made friends with a person at one of the nearby market stalls. We spoke almost every day. She was an actress working at the market between acting jobs. I had never seen anything she was in, but it didn’t matter. She was just really sweet and easy to talk to.

For unrelated reasons, my girlfriend and I broke up and I moved to the other side of the city on very short notice, to my brother’s house, and didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to my friend.

My brother and I were watching TV a couple of months later and there’s my friend from the market, introduced on a popular TV show as the new season 2 “token annoying character” (think 2000’s, trendy, weekly drama).

“That’s name of my friend. She’s my friend. We used to chat every day!” My brother scoffed and called me a liar “just because we live out in the suburbs, don’t think you city folk can make us believe any old bullshit story!”

Two weeks later she happened to go to my brothers’ workplace for car parts and he recognised her: “My brother reckons he knows you.” Friend: “What’s your brother’s name?” Brother: “SkaraBr…” Friend: “What? Where is he? Is he okay? I’ve been so worried. Do you have his number?”

Good lad, my brother, wouldn’t give out my number, even to a TV actress, but she made him call me right then and there so that she could talk to me.

Twenty years later and I still laugh about that phone call and the sound of his voice when he said “she wants to talk to you”.

I was inside a mountain during an earthquake…

I had a lot of potential.

I have an identical mirror twin! They’re six inches shorter than me!

My mom was making a phone call then the call didn’t go though…

and for context… I was always a curious kid and want to touch everything… I messed around my parents phones alot… I mean what’s a 10 year old (approximately… forgot how old exactly I was) to do when bored?..

So my mom instantly was like “oh I can’t make phone calls now, what the fuck did you do to my phone?”

…

So I was just confused… did I touch a setting I didn’t understand? I mean I was still sort of learning the English language as a child immigrant and didn’t really understand all the words… maybe I accidentally touched a wrong setting?

But anyways I felt scared and sad, I think I started crying…

But you know what actually happened?

A FUCKING EARTHQUAKE LMFAO WHAT THE FUCK?

A very small one… so its sort of undetectable… especially when we were standing in the subway station… those over-the-ground stations built on top of the street (search “NYC Subway Brooklyn 86th Street D train” and you’ll know what I’m talking about)

I think a train just passed by as that mini-earthquake was happening… so the vibrations completely masked the earthquake…

I remember my mom literally just said “the way they build this station feels kinda unsafe, vibrates/shakes too much” like moments before making that call… so she felt the shaking, just thought it was the train passing… 🙃

So then later someone called and talked about some earth quake… and because everyone was calling each other it clogged up the phone lines (there was no 5G… so I think 4G gets overwhelmed much easier) which is why it took so long to get a call through… so then hearing that through the phone call… my crying then turned into anger…

So from then on, every time I get blamed for something, I just say “OMG it’s 紐約地震 (NYC Earthquake) again”, bascially saying that I’m being framed/wrongfully blamed…

Like its just a family joke now… it’s a special moment that my mom and I share… omg wtf was that coincidence lmfao

Edit:

So I found this image… 25th Avenue Station on the D line… that’s the exact station it happened.

There’s like one “floor” below the trains that run above it… like you go in this area, pay the fare, go through turnstiles, then go up another flight of stairs… so its like 1st floor… and the trains are on top like a “2nd floor” basically…

So I was in the turnstile area… on the “first floor” of the station… Omg I can’t ever forget that day.

Swimming in Blue Springs last summer, minding my own business, and I see a guy in a kyack. MANATEE OBSERVER was stenciled on the side of his kyack.

There was a mother and her calf just doing manatee shit around us swimmers. We didn’t touch the manatee but it was super cool swimming ten feet away.

I almost hit a whale with a tiny open boat. We were off the coast outside of brazil doing survey work, and one day I was piloting a small workboat for transferring some people and hardware between the two survey ships. After returning to my own ship I slowed down to a crawl while waiting for clearance to approach and the davit to be lowered. Suddenly a mountain surfaces right in front of me before it disappears again. Had I slowed down later than I actually did I would’ve run straight into it.

And 7 years later I almost hit a moose with a wellboat while testing a freshly installed autopilot system.

When I was in college I went on a blind date with someone who turned out to be a writer for DC comics.

I drove to NYC for the date. It was nice. We went to dinner, she gave me a tour of the DC Comics offices (I remember seeing a mannequin with the Catwoman costume that Michelle Pfeiffer wore), and we went to the movies and saw a reissue of Return of the Jedi.

It was just the one date though. We eventually lost touch.

I made the local paper when I was 8 years old. It was a cute little picture of me fixing my friend’s hair band before our may crowning. That was it.

I watched my wife (then girlfriend) fall out of a hot air balloon at a company picnic.

She’s 5’2" and when she started to disembark, some other dude got out at the same time, making the balloon lurch upwards. So she fell about 6 inches onto a grassy lawn and was fine.

Damn it lemmy I ain’t tellin’ you that, but let’s just say it includes jumping off a moving railway car.

I once amputated a man’s leg.