Friday, August 19, 2005
The nutjobs in my life
My job is such that I am often a captive audience for nutjobs. I think I can fairly say that I'm very patient with them. I usually humor them, inserting "uh huh" and "really?" in the right places in their monologues. But man, am I ever happy to see the door shut behind them. Every community has them. Hell, every family has them. But I can't help doing a mental clench whenever I see one coming. I've only had one go confrontational and aggressive on me, but I was able to defuse the situation before it got really ugly. Mind you, most of these people I'm referring to are fully functioning adults who are just weird. Very few have actually been "differently-abled."

For the longest time, after I moved here, when I'd bring up some new person I'd met M. would tell me something about them, who their relatives were, what they did for a living, where they lived and then punctuate the story with "he's/she's a nut." After over a decade I can vouch for the fact that we've got a enough nuts around here to make a ton of crunchy peanut butter.