Strange day here at the office.
For starters, for whatever reason, not many people are here today, so it's eerily quiet. The crazy kooks are also out in full force, too. We get a lot of strange, non-sensical emails – often letters – from older folks who are off their meds (seriously) or just plain crazy, and today is no exception... there've been two garden-variety nutso submissions so far, and also one phone call I just overheard. I know the phone call was from a crazy person because my colleague spent the whole conversation politely saying, "uh huh... uh huh... uh huh," followed by "OK, I'm hanging up now... thank you for calling... I'm hanging up... I'm hanging up–" Then click.
All things considered though, this letter from a local high school student was the weirdest thing we came across today. I'm paraphrasing, but here was the gist of it:
"I have done the physically impossible, and thought you would be interested. I am not double-jointed nor do I have a separated shoulder, but I am able to lick the centre of my own elbow (The outside of it)."
"This is something that cannot be done by anyone, and thought you would like to know."
The letter-writer is right, of course. It is all but impossible to lick the outside of your elbow. Go ahead, try it. (We all did). Impossible.
Just to see what would happen, we emailed back and, in a serious tone, said, "We will need photographic proof of this feat before we consider it newsworthy."
Sure enough, not 10 minutes later we received a camera-phone photo of a teenage high-school girl doing exactly what she said she could do. Of course, this is about the least-newsworthy thing imaginable, so we won't be following up. But the question remains: What in the hell possessed this girl to think this qualified as "news"?
"Must be a full moon tonight," I suggested. "You know, when all the weirdos go crazy."
"Either that," someone else countered. "Or kids have really run out of things to do on Spring Break."
See what happens, school districts? You extend Spring Break by an extra week, and this is what your gifted children spend their time doing. When I was a kid, we had one week off in March and one week only, and never once that I can remember did we ever play the "Let's see what part of my body can touch another part."
Just sayin', is all.
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