The Regiment of Losers Marches On

SOME THINGS ARE WORSE THAN ANTS
I am a medical student currently doing a rotation in toxicology at the poison control center. Today, this woman called in very upset because she caught her little daughter eating ants. I quickly reassured her that the ants are not harmful and there would be no need to bring her daughter into the hospital. She calmed down, and at the end of the conversation happened to mention that she gave her daughter some ant poison to eat in order to kill the ants. I told her that she better bring her daughter in to the ER right away.

PLEASE DON’T RESCUE ME
Seems that a year ago, some Boeing employees on the field decided to steal a life raft from one of the 747s. They were successful in getting it out of the plant and home. When they took it for a float on the Stilliguamish River, they were quite surprised by a coast guard helicopter homing in on the emergency locator that is activated when the raft is inflated.

SMOKING IS BAD FOR PETS
A carpet layer had just finished installing carpet for a lady. He stepped out for a smoke, only to realize he’d lost his cigarettes. In the middle of the room, under the carpet, was a bump. “No sense pulling up the entire floor for one pack of smokes,” he said to himself. He proceeded to get out his hammer and flattened the hump. As he was cleaning up, the lady came in. “Here,” she said, handing him his pack of cigarettes. “I found them in the hallway.” “Now,” she said, “if only I could find my hamster.”

YEAH, THAT WOULD BE A PROBLEM
Steve Thompson, wildlife biologist at Yosemite National Park, telling the New York Times in November that the cause of the 600 car break-ins by bears in 1997 mostly was food left in the seat: “My problems start when the smarter bears and the dumber visitors intersect.”

KEEP YOUR HAT ON
In March, a 24-year-old man was struck and killed in the fast lane of I-80 in Vallejo, Calif., when he ran across the highway to retrieve a baseball cap that had blown off his head. Two weeks earlier, a 20-year-old Guatemalan sailor, riding on a crewboat on the Mississippi River near New Orleans, drowned after jumping into treacherous waters to retrieve his baseball cap.

NOT A PERFECT DISGUISE
At Ft. Bragg, NC, a soldier decided to rob a mobile pizza truck. As part of his disguise, he wore a nylon stocking over his face – and his army field jacket – complete with his last name embroidered in big, black letters across the top of his pocket.

DON’T CALL ME, I’LL CALL YOU
In Hampden County, Massachusetts, a person was tried and convicted for bank robbery. He had written his hold-up note on the back of his phone bill.

BAD TIMING IS TWELVE YEARS
A fourth-year dental student and his friends decided to rob a bank. When they arrived at the bank with their masks and guns, the police and FBI were already there. Someone had tried to rob the same bank a half hour earlier. He did twelve years in Walpole, Massachusetts’ maximum security pen.

LUCY RICARDO LIVES
In November, it took rescuers an hour to cut through the fangs in the statue of the Jaguar at Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville, Fla., to free Andy Wilkinson, 9, who had stuck his head in the statue’s mouth and couldn’t get it out.

IT MUST BE YOURS, IT DOESN’T BELONG TO US
When Virginia Broache got home from the Bon Secours St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, Va., in January, just after having had her cancerous bladder removed, her nurse was unpacking for her and discovered that among the “personal effects” the hospital had sent home with her was the actual bag-encased, just-removed bladder. Said a hospital staffer, “We apologize.”

BUT IT FELT SO GOOD
In December 1996, Phillip Johnson, then 32, of Johnson Bottom, Ky., shot himself in the left shoulder with his .22-caliber rifle, “to see how it felt,” he told ambulance personnel. On October 2, 1997, an ambulance crew was again called to Johnson’s home, where Johnson was bleeding from another left-shoulder shot fired by a .22-caliber rifle. A source told the Inez Mountain Citizen newspaper that Johnson said the December shooting “felt so good,” he had to do it again.