I think the COVID thing might be getting to me.  Not that I was ever right, but now I feel like I’m on the fringe more than ever.

Since I don’t watch the mainstream news and have sworn off Facebook because people make it such a negative environment, I have a lot of time on my hands and one of the long put off things I chose to do was clean out my bookmark pages.  You would think it would be simple, but like cleaning out anything, you come across things that you forgot or want to keep, and that’s where we’re at today. Things that I saved that I thought I might use someday and today is the day.

The first story is from Chicago a couple years ago.  This fine young man decided to rob a hot dog stand.  His first mistake was robbing it early in the morning because most people don’t buy hot dogs early in the morning so there was no money in the till.

But, there were two people working, they had wallets and the young man had a gun.  At the time of the “alleged” robbery, one of the men was carrying a large tub of grease when the young man put a gun to his head.  That sort of thing can make one nervous and while trying to get his wallet, he dropped the grease.

That caused some problems and the money from the wallets went flying, it was chaos. 

While trying to gather himself up from the grease and gather the money, the young man was challenged by only having one hand available since he was holding the gun. 

Needing both hands, he stuck the gun in his pants as he was trying to get away and one of the employees tackled him at the very instant that he was putting the gun away.  He shot himself in the penis.

After making his way across the street, he called 911 reporting that he had been shot, but not mentioning who shot him or where.

The authorities and EMS arrived, and it was determined that his injuries were not life threatening, but he was held without bail as he couldn’t appear at his hearing since he was in the hospital. It was a wiener hold up that went bad resulting in a wiener injury.  No wiener in this story.

The next item that I couldn’t delete was an article about a study that appears to show that our brains function long enough after we die, that we know we are dead. 

Well, how would the researchers find that out, you ask. 

They talked to people that had been declared dead but were revived.  Thirty nine percent of them thought they were aware of something when they were dead. 

I know people who are clearly alive and not aware of anything.

Since the people were revived thanks to wonderful people that were in the right place at the right time, they’re now not dead, so that sort of leaves me wondering about the rest of the story.

The lead cat that was doing this study was asked the reason behind doing this sort of study.  His reply I had to read twice.  Actually, three times. 

I’ll share it here and move on: “In the same way that a group of researchers might be studying the qualitative nature of the human experience of ‘love,’ for instance, we're trying to understand the exact features that people experience when they go through death, because we understand that this is going to reflect the universal experience we're all going to have when we die.”

Lastly let me share a customer service story that went south. 

Early in the morning in Indianapolis, two women ordered McNuggets at a McDonalds drive-thru. When they got their order, there was a problem. The women were not happy. They showed their displeasure by crawling through the drive thru window and starting a fight. There’s a video. 

What would cause someone to be so angry to crawl through a drive thru window, you might ask.  I know I did. 

It appears that the women thought they ordered 10 McNuggets, but only got four. The manager showed them the receipt for their order, but when they offered to pay for the other six McNuggets, he told them they had to drive around and get back in line and order.

They raised a ruckus, and his last words were, “Have a nice day, ladies.”

That’s when they went in through the window.

I have more, but there’s no need to overwhelm you during this holiday season.  You Facebook fact checkers that may be going through a slow period are welcome to check these stories out.

Consider this my Christmas gift to you.  Yes.  I know.  It wasn’t necessary, but believe me, it’s the least I could do. 

If I could have done any less, I would have.

Bill Packard lives in Union and is the founder of BPackard.com. He is a speaker, author, small business coach and consultant.