True Story!

[Sunbird she/her]

Trying to think of some of mine I can share. Most of the longer ones are just kind of a bummer, and the better ones are a lot shorter. Like the time I was in Science Olympiad and one of the senior members said he knew the mating dance of the blue-footed booby, so all of us freshman begged him to do it, and he refused. 

 

Come to think of it, that one's kind of a bummer too. We never did get to see him do the mating dance of the blue-footed booby. 

 

Aw, man, that would've been awesome. He shouldn't have said anything if he was just going to refuse to show you guys.

[Kaymyth she/her]

Aw, man, that would've been awesome. He shouldn't have said anything if he was just going to refuse to show you guys.

 

It sounds to me like a standard case of A Senior Being Full of Crem. 

[Zathoth]

D&D story from like 10 minutes ago:

 

Our sorcerer decides to buy an eagle, even if he doesnt have any money. He also gets ripped off and pays 60G for it, when it is usually 30G When it is time to roll its health (1d6) he rolls a 1, because of course he does. DM is nice enough to let him re roll it, he rolls a 2. I, as the kind and magical Bard I am convinces the DM to rewind time just a moment. He says that I shall roll a D100 for the amount of time that shall be rewinded. 32. We are back to the moment right before the second roll and I ask if I can give our Sorcerer my Bardic inspiration (an additional D6) for the health roll of the eagle. Sure DM says, if you can roll high enough on a D100.

 

83.

 

I give the Sorcerer my Bardic inspiration. He rolls the second roll again and he gets..........................................

 

1+3. I storming tried.

 

In another "If you roll high enough on a d100 I'll let you do stuff that you shouldnt be able to" case. Last dungeon crawl we found.... The Trident of Fish Command! Obviously no one wanted it. It is not that it is a terrible weapon or anything, it is just that everyone had better weapons. Even if they couldnt control fish. The trident was however as good as my rapier, only problem being of course that my attacks are dexterity based, trident was strength based. I ask the DM if I can roll to convince him to make it dexterity based instead. Sure he says, just roll a d100 high enough. 93. I am now AquaBard!

[Quiver he/him]

Alright, roleplaying stories. I have one, from my only experience at the table a few years ago.

We were playing mortal Exalted. If you don't know what Exalted is, the way it was described to us was that the characters were typically (basically) demigods. We were playing as mortals...so we were warned "You're gonna die".

Spoiler: we died. That's not the story. The story is the circumstances of the death, in particular my death.

So, during this adventure, our party of four were trekking through a jungle. Naturally, this being a fantasy game, we ended up being attacked by the local inhabitants.

I say " attacked". We never stood a chance; they his in the bushes and started during blowdarts at us. The blowdarts were tipped with hallucinogens and some kind of sleeping poison.

I should add here, we all rolled openly, DM included. I don't know if he hoped for us to be captured or if it was just bad luck, but it wasn't a railroad track. Myself and two others got captured.

We woke up, still woozy from the effects of the drugs, in a cage made out of bones. Which was, you know, less than promising in that it was a cage, but hey- we woke up! Plus, during the scuffle, our fourth party member (the Rogue) escaped and had followed the trail, and was currently hiding in the bushes.

The Rogue decided they didn't feel like running across the open ground to pick the lock of a cage. Understandable.

"Can I throw my dagger to try and break the lock?"

GM says yes. Rogue throws. Misses.

GM tells us he's going to roll to see where the knife goes. Straight towards the cage.

GM rolls to see if it hits the bars or goes through them. It goes through them.

You probably get where this story is going. My poor Ranger woke up in a cage made of bones, still pumped full of drugs, and got a knife to the chest.

The story doesn't end there.

See, the knife wound? Not necessarily fatal (though I did pass out). The Rogue started being pursued by the natives again, so we were left alone. The Mage started trying to break the lock.

The Druid decided he would try to heal me. And here's the thing: he's still high on drugs. And the knife? Inside my chest. And the druid? Rolls a 1.

My very first roleplay character died because a stoned hippy decided to perform impromptu open heart surgery (without anaesthetic) in the middle of a jungle.

[Kaymyth she/her]

So, 2003 is basically thought of in my immediate family as the Year of Hell. 

 

There are a few bright spots here and there, because real life just can't manage to be quite that awful, but mostly this is a pretty sad story.  People die.  So I'm putting it under a spoiler cut to make it easy to skip if you don't want to read it.

 

 

So, a lot of the lead-up really started in 2002.  My Grandpa Charlie (who was my mom's stepdad) had gone to the doctor complaining of back pain and came home with a diagnosis of bone cancer.  It had already spread enough that his ribcage had grown brittle and ribs were cracking under the strain.  He decided to fight, because gorram it, he was a rusting Marine and he wasn't going to give up without a fight.  Thus began the rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

 

Around Thanksgiving, we started noticing some strange behavior in my stepdad (Don).  I don't really remember exactly what the argument was; I think I was trying to compliment him on his cooking and he randomly took it as an insult and went off on me over it, which righteously pissed me off.  During that same time period, he said something else that sent my aunt into tears.  We were completely baffled, and Mom was rightfully upset and angry.  The erratic behavior continued through the holidays, and completely at a loss, she quietly started having divorce papers drawn up.

 

Christmas: I'm visiting for the holidays, and my grandmother shows up at the door.  She makes it about three feet in before she collapses into my arms, sobbing.  The nurses have just told her that Grandpa Charlie is dying; the cancer had metastasized and at that point, it was only a matter of time.  They estimated that he had maybe weeks.  (They kept saying this every week for months, and he still kept holding on, so they eventually threw up their hands and gave up trying to predict it.  Grandpa Charlie was a...stubborn man.)

 

In January, I was back in my apartment in St. Louis when I got a call from my mom.  Don was in the hospital.  He'd had an incident at work where he'd temporarily lost control of his left hand and had nearly collapsed.  His coworkers believed that he was having a stroke and called an ambulance.  But at the hospital, the scans revealed something else - brain cancer.

 

It was a high stage glioma (basically the exact same cancer that killed Ted Kennedy) and was pushing on the emotional center of his brain.  Suddenly his weird behavior of the past few months made sense.  It was going to be fatal, they said - they could do surgery, but the way the cancer grew in tiny tendrils, it was impossible to remove all of it.  You can't just cut into healthy brain tissue.  By the same token, there were a limited number of treatments for the cancer that wouldn't cause damage to the surrounding tissue.  The best they could do, they said, was buy him an extra six months or so.

 

Mom shredded the divorce papers just as quietly as she'd had them drawn up.

 

I remember visiting him in the hospital just after the surgery; his roommate and his family were being kind of loud and obnoxious, and at one point he asked them to keep it down.  One of the other family members (rather snottily) asked, "What, did you have brain surgery or something?"  And Don said, "Yes," and pointed to the bandaging on his head.  They shut up.

 

The winter and early spring were sort of a blur.  I was in my second round of college working on a music performance degree, so I wasn't all that much help to them.  Mom was busy taking care of Don, and Grandma had her hands full taking care of Grandpa Charlie.  They both had some hospice assistance, but mostly they were trying to handle it on their own.  I was pretty stressed by the whole thing, and my grades were slipping.

 

Then in May, right about when my classes were over for the term, the entire left side of Don's body gave out.  His cancer had grown back bigger than before and was either pushing on or taking over his motor control.  At that point I knew - I wasn't finishing my degree anytime soon. (And I never did complete my music degree; I eventually did finish up college, but with a BA in elementary education.)  I dropped my life and moved in with my mom to help.  My brother was planning to come home for the summer to help, too, though he was waiting a few more weeks before coming home from college.

 

I was trying to maintain some semblance of normality and communication with my friends via the internet, but this was in the days when all Mom had was dialup.  So I couldn't really hop onto chat during the day.  I'd wait until late, when everyone was in bed and nobody cared if I tied up the phone line for an hour or two talking to friends online.

 

So it was just after midnight on Friday, June 13 when the local sheriff came to knock on our door.  There had been an accident, he said.  My brother was going in for emergency surgery.  He had broken his neck.

 

I woke up my mom, and on about 2 hours' sleep she made the 3-hour drive to St. Joseph alone.  I couldn't go; someone had to stay with Don.  That was probably the worst night of my life; I had no idea whether my little brother was going to walk again, or even if he was going to survive.  That was also the last time I cried that year.  I hit some sort of overload threshold that caused my deeper emotional centers to just...switch off for a while.  They would come back, eventually, but it wouldn't be until well into the next calendar year before I would feel normal again.

 

This link sort of gives you a map of the severity of injuries per vertebra:  http://www.spinalinjury101.org/details/levels-of-injury

 

My brother had broken his C5 vertebra.  (We found out later that he broke it by diving into a 4-foot-deep swimming pool.  He hit his head on the bottom.  The idiot.)  He was extraordinarily lucky - the spinal cord itself wasn't severed, but it was pretty badly bruised and his entire nervous system had gone into shock.  The doctors wired the vertebra back together and reinforced it with metal plating, but they couldn't say for sure how much movement he was going to be able to regain.  He stayed in the hospital for a week, with Mom and I switching out who stayed with him.  He was scared, of course - he didn't want to be alone.  But we couldn't both be there all the time because of Don, so we finagled it as best we could.

 

(Incidentally - and we didn't find this out until years later, because CJ was afraid that we'd want to take legal action - his friends had panicked after they pulled him out of the pool.  They were all drinking underage, you see, and they were afraid of getting into trouble.  So instead of calling an ambulance, the worthless little cretins loaded him into the back of a pickup truck and drove him to the hospital.  Words cannot express how much this still enrages me.  Nobody knows how much more damage that did to him.  I wish that he'd told us sooner, so that we could have taken that pack of morons to court.  Though it's probably good that I didn't know it then, or else this story might have also featured me facing assault charges.)

 

One thing that stands out - I remember one of the nurses quietly took me aside and told me how absolutely wonderful my brother was.  Most young men his age facing this kind of injury, she said, would be angry and lash out at anyone nearby.  Instead, CJ would joke around with everyone and generally managed to stay more upbeat than anyone could have expected.  The entire hospital staffed adored him.

 

The other thing that happened while he was in the hospital was a reconnection with his estranged father.  (Yeah, we're half-sibs.  And yeah, Don was the stepdad to both of us.)  He had thought long and hard about notifying family members, and finally decided that his paternal grandparents deserved to know.  As it happened, his father had been seriously ill himself, and was living with them, so it was kind of unavoidable that he found out, too.  So, for better or worse, contact was established.

 

After a week in the hospital, CJ was transferred to a spinal cord rehabilitation center in Columbia, MO.  The day of the transfer was the first day he was able to start moving his left big toe just the slightest bit.  He was going to spend a month there healing and undergoing intensive physical therapy to try and bring back as much motor function as possible.

 

In the meantime, Mom and I worked out a general schedule of how to handle things.  I'd be with her during the week, making sure Don was OK while she was at work.  Then on the weekends, when the therapy schedule was truncated and he would be bored, I'd travel down to Columbia to keep CJ company.  We really never got along as kids - we had a kind of crappy age gap and personalities that are complete opposites, so those weekends were the most intense bonding we've ever had, before or since.  And I got to watch him improve by leaps and bounds.

 

One month after being able to twitch a single toe, he was discharged able to walk with assistance.  I took him back home to Mom's, where he kept doing daily physical therapy, but still needed a lot of care.  I was the one providing that care.  (Yeah, some of those tasks were really, really weird things to have to do for one's sibling.  And I learned that nursing was definitely NOT the career for me.)  Slowly, he needed less and less help, until about two months after discharge he was using the electric wheelchair as sort of a glorified recliner.

 

But he never did recover 100%.  He can walk, yes, but there's a slight limp, particularly noticeable just after he'd woken up.  He's lost a lot of the grip and fine motor skills in his right hand; he's weak on his right side.  His left is stronger, but he has patches of partial numbness there.  Some of the cross-dominance with spinal cord injuries map weirdly.  And now that it's been over a decade since the accident, he's starting to develop arthritis in his spine.  He's only 32.

 

In September of 2003, Grandpa Charlie and Don passed away within a week of each other.  Yeah, all those months of fighting, and they both decide to go at almost the same time.  So we had funerals two weekends in a row.  I don't remember what I played at Grandpa Charlie's funeral; I know Grandma asked me to play something, though.  But Don's I do remember - Smaointe by Enya.  I remember my mom hearing me practice it on my oboe, and she go a bit upset.  It was beautiful, she said, but the oboe was too sad.  But no, I had to play the oboe, because reasons - so could I just take the piano interlude as an opportunity to switch the flute?  That way the end would sound "happier".  I shrugged and complied, but I still had the entire church in tears with that piece at the service.

 

The holidays were rolling around again, and CJ wanted to go visit his long-estranged family in Chicago.  Problem - his reflexes weren't up to long-distance driving yet, so I wound up driving him up there.  It was...kind of awkward, actually.  His grandparents are lovely people, and his aunt told stories about what a delightfully rambunctious child I was (CJ and I exchanged odd looks at that; I only remember being painfully shy as a youngling).  But his father was there, too, and that grated on my nerves.  I did eventually plead my escape to go to the hotel room I'd booked myself before I headed back home the next day.  I wasn't staying under the same roof as that man.

 

I don't really want to go into too much detail, but there are very few people on this planet that I actively loathe.  CJ's father was one of them.  Let's just say that I have darn good reason to do so, and that my mom left him primarily to get me away.  So when the man followed me out of the house as I tried to leave and peppered me with questions about what my brother's plans were, I was pretty short with him.  "Ask him yourself."

 

"I know it's going to be awkward..."

 

"Well, you don't call, you don't write, you dodge child support.  You kind of earned it."

 

That left him spluttering about not wanting to make excuses (and then he proceeded to try and do exactly that) and I wasn't having any of it.  I disengaged myself and left.

 

(It was only a couple of months later that he went and torpedoed his relationship with CJ again by acting like a cremhole.  Some people don't change.)

 

I wish I could say that I'm proud of myself for only hitting him on the subject of his own son.  But the truth is that I actually regret not verbally tearing him to shreds for what he did to me when I had the chance.  We're supposed to try and be better than the people who hurt us, we're supposed to forgive.  But I'm just not that good a person.  Some people don't get forgiveness.

 

And some people don't get mourned when they pass.  It was a few years later that he actually died of complications of his long-term illness.  I am sorry - I'm sorry that my brother lost his father.  But I'm a lot more sorry that he never really got to have a proper father in the first place.  Don was more of a dad to him than his bio-father ever tried to be.

 

So there you have it - it's a pretty disjointed narrative.  It doesn't flow well, it's not nicely structured.  Just a regurgitation of the worst year of my life.

 

[Delightful]

[Kaymyth she/her]

 

Well, you can't say I didn't warn you. 

[Zathoth]

She did warn you.

 

I remembered something!

 

Ok kids so once upon a time in the early 2000s you couldnt just text your friends in class, you had to pass notes, incredibly primitive, I know, but we did what we had. Catching one of the girls notes and finding out what kind of mysterious feminine secrets they were passing around was of course something all the boys tried. Well, one day a girl missed her shot and the note landed on my desk. I promptly stuffed it in my back pocket and the entire classroom directed its attention to me as the teacher and girl hopelessly tried to make the young and stubborn Morzathoth give the note back so the precious secrets would not fall into the wrong hands. In the end I gave up, I had to give the note back and so I did.The guy behind me laments that I could have given the note to him instead. I just smiled at him, reached into my back pocket and said "This is the real note."

 

I had switched it with a fake I had made earlier that week for exactly this purpose. When the girls opened the note they were met with a   face and a battle for the lost secrets took place. In the end one of the girls got hold of it and promptly stuffed it down her bra. I was not going going to intrude on sacred mammary grounds and the girls thus won that battle.

 

I dont actually remember what was in the real note. Probably something about some guy. Might have been about the guy behind me.

 

FIN

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

So, 2003 is basically thought of in my immediate family as the Year of Hell. 

 

There are a few bright spots here and there, because real life just can't manage to be quite that awful, but mostly this is a pretty sad story.  People die.  So I'm putting it under a spoiler cut to make it easy to skip if you don't want to read it.

 

 

So, a lot of the lead-up really started in 2002.  My Grandpa Charlie (who was my mom's stepdad) had gone to the doctor complaining of back pain and came home with a diagnosis of bone cancer.  It had already spread enough that his ribcage had grown brittle and ribs were cracking under the strain.  He decided to fight, because gorram it, he was a rusting Marine and he wasn't going to give up without a fight.  Thus began the rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

 

Around Thanksgiving, we started noticing some strange behavior in my stepdad (Don).  I don't really remember exactly what the argument was; I think I was trying to compliment him on his cooking and he randomly took it as an insult and went off on me over it, which righteously pissed me off.  During that same time period, he said something else that sent my aunt into tears.  We were completely baffled, and Mom was rightfully upset and angry.  The erratic behavior continued through the holidays, and completely at a loss, she quietly started having divorce papers drawn up.

 

Christmas: I'm visiting for the holidays, and my grandmother shows up at the door.  She makes it about three feet in before she collapses into my arms, sobbing.  The nurses have just told her that Grandpa Charlie is dying; the cancer had metastasized and at that point, it was only a matter of time.  They estimated that he had maybe weeks.  (They kept saying this every week for months, and he still kept holding on, so they eventually threw up their hands and gave up trying to predict it.  Grandpa Charlie was a...stubborn man.)

 

In January, I was back in my apartment in St. Louis when I got a call from my mom.  Don was in the hospital.  He'd had an incident at work where he'd temporarily lost control of his left hand and had nearly collapsed.  His coworkers believed that he was having a stroke and called an ambulance.  But at the hospital, the scans revealed something else - brain cancer.

 

It was a high stage glioma (basically the exact same cancer that killed Ted Kennedy) and was pushing on the emotional center of his brain.  Suddenly his weird behavior of the past few months made sense.  It was going to be fatal, they said - they could do surgery, but the way the cancer grew in tiny tendrils, it was impossible to remove all of it.  You can't just cut into healthy brain tissue.  By the same token, there were a limited number of treatments for the cancer that wouldn't cause damage to the surrounding tissue.  The best they could do, they said, was buy him an extra six months or so.

 

Mom shredded the divorce papers just as quietly as she'd had them drawn up.

 

I remember visiting him in the hospital just after the surgery; his roommate and his family were being kind of loud and obnoxious, and at one point he asked them to keep it down.  One of the other family members (rather snottily) asked, "What, did you have brain surgery or something?"  And Don said, "Yes," and pointed to the bandaging on his head.  They shut up.

 

The winter and early spring were sort of a blur.  I was in my second round of college working on a music performance degree, so I wasn't all that much help to them.  Mom was busy taking care of Don, and Grandma had her hands full taking care of Grandpa Charlie.  They both had some hospice assistance, but mostly they were trying to handle it on their own.  I was pretty stressed by the whole thing, and my grades were slipping.

 

Then in May, right about when my classes were over for the term, the entire left side of Don's body gave out.  His cancer had grown back bigger than before and was either pushing on or taking over his motor control.  At that point I knew - I wasn't finishing my degree anytime soon. (And I never did complete my music degree; I eventually did finish up college, but with a BA in elementary education.)  I dropped my life and moved in with my mom to help.  My brother was planning to come home for the summer to help, too, though he was waiting a few more weeks before coming home from college.

 

I was trying to maintain some semblance of normality and communication with my friends via the internet, but this was in the days when all Mom had was dialup.  So I couldn't really hop onto chat during the day.  I'd wait until late, when everyone was in bed and nobody cared if I tied up the phone line for an hour or two talking to friends online.

 

So it was just after midnight on Friday, June 13 when the local sheriff came to knock on our door.  There had been an accident, he said.  My brother was going in for emergency surgery.  He had broken his neck.

 

I woke up my mom, and on about 2 hours' sleep she made the 3-hour drive to St. Joseph alone.  I couldn't go; someone had to stay with Don.  That was probably the worst night of my life; I had no idea whether my little brother was going to walk again, or even if he was going to survive.  That was also the last time I cried that year.  I hit some sort of overload threshold that caused my deeper emotional centers to just...switch off for a while.  They would come back, eventually, but it wouldn't be until well into the next calendar year before I would feel normal again.

 

This link sort of gives you a map of the severity of injuries per vertebra:  http://www.spinalinjury101.org/details/levels-of-injury

 

My brother had broken his C5 vertebra.  (We found out later that he broke it by diving into a 4-foot-deep swimming pool.  He hit his head on the bottom.  The idiot.)  He was extraordinarily lucky - the spinal cord itself wasn't severed, but it was pretty badly bruised and his entire nervous system had gone into shock.  The doctors wired the vertebra back together and reinforced it with metal plating, but they couldn't say for sure how much movement he was going to be able to regain.  He stayed in the hospital for a week, with Mom and I switching out who stayed with him.  He was scared, of course - he didn't want to be alone.  But we couldn't both be there all the time because of Don, so we finagled it as best we could.

 

(Incidentally - and we didn't find this out until years later, because CJ was afraid that we'd want to take legal action - his friends had panicked after they pulled him out of the pool.  They were all drinking underage, you see, and they were afraid of getting into trouble.  So instead of calling an ambulance, the worthless little cretins loaded him into the back of a pickup truck and drove him to the hospital.  Words cannot express how much this still enrages me.  Nobody knows how much more damage that did to him.  I wish that he'd told us sooner, so that we could have taken that pack of morons to court.  Though it's probably good that I didn't know it then, or else this story might have also featured me facing assault charges.)

 

One thing that stands out - I remember one of the nurses quietly took me aside and told me how absolutely wonderful my brother was.  Most young men his age facing this kind of injury, she said, would be angry and lash out at anyone nearby.  Instead, CJ would joke around with everyone and generally managed to stay more upbeat than anyone could have expected.  The entire hospital staffed adored him.

 

The other thing that happened while he was in the hospital was a reconnection with his estranged father.  (Yeah, we're half-sibs.  And yeah, Don was the stepdad to both of us.)  He had thought long and hard about notifying family members, and finally decided that his paternal grandparents deserved to know.  As it happened, his father had been seriously ill himself, and was living with them, so it was kind of unavoidable that he found out, too.  So, for better or worse, contact was established.

 

After a week in the hospital, CJ was transferred to a spinal cord rehabilitation center in Columbia, MO.  The day of the transfer was the first day he was able to start moving his left big toe just the slightest bit.  He was going to spend a month there healing and undergoing intensive physical therapy to try and bring back as much motor function as possible.

 

In the meantime, Mom and I worked out a general schedule of how to handle things.  I'd be with her during the week, making sure Don was OK while she was at work.  Then on the weekends, when the therapy schedule was truncated and he would be bored, I'd travel down to Columbia to keep CJ company.  We really never got along as kids - we had a kind of crappy age gap and personalities that are complete opposites, so those weekends were the most intense bonding we've ever had, before or since.  And I got to watch him improve by leaps and bounds.

 

One month after being able to twitch a single toe, he was discharged able to walk with assistance.  I took him back home to Mom's, where he kept doing daily physical therapy, but still needed a lot of care.  I was the one providing that care.  (Yeah, some of those tasks were really, really weird things to have to do for one's sibling.  And I learned that nursing was definitely NOT the career for me.)  Slowly, he needed less and less help, until about two months after discharge he was using the electric wheelchair as sort of a glorified recliner.

 

But he never did recover 100%.  He can walk, yes, but there's a slight limp, particularly noticeable just after he'd woken up.  He's lost a lot of the grip and fine motor skills in his right hand; he's weak on his right side.  His left is stronger, but he has patches of partial numbness there.  Some of the cross-dominance with spinal cord injuries map weirdly.  And now that it's been over a decade since the accident, he's starting to develop arthritis in his spine.  He's only 32.

 

In September of 2003, Grandpa Charlie and Don passed away within a week of each other.  Yeah, all those months of fighting, and they both decide to go at almost the same time.  So we had funerals two weekends in a row.  I don't remember what I played at Grandpa Charlie's funeral; I know Grandma asked me to play something, though.  But Don's I do remember - Smaointe by Enya.  I remember my mom hearing me practice it on my oboe, and she go a bit upset.  It was beautiful, she said, but the oboe was too sad.  But no, I had to play the oboe, because reasons - so could I just take the piano interlude as an opportunity to switch the flute?  That way the end would sound "happier".  I shrugged and complied, but I still had the entire church in tears with that piece at the service.

 

The holidays were rolling around again, and CJ wanted to go visit his long-estranged family in Chicago.  Problem - his reflexes weren't up to long-distance driving yet, so I wound up driving him up there.  It was...kind of awkward, actually.  His grandparents are lovely people, and his aunt told stories about what a delightfully rambunctious child I was (CJ and I exchanged odd looks at that; I only remember being painfully shy as a youngling).  But his father was there, too, and that grated on my nerves.  I did eventually plead my escape to go to the hotel room I'd booked myself before I headed back home the next day.  I wasn't staying under the same roof as that man.

 

I don't really want to go into too much detail, but there are very few people on this planet that I actively loathe.  CJ's father was one of them.  Let's just say that I have darn good reason to do so, and that my mom left him primarily to get me away.  So when the man followed me out of the house as I tried to leave and peppered me with questions about what my brother's plans were, I was pretty short with him.  "Ask him yourself."

 

"I know it's going to be awkward..."

 

"Well, you don't call, you don't write, you dodge child support.  You kind of earned it."

 

That left him spluttering about not wanting to make excuses (and then he proceeded to try and do exactly that) and I wasn't having any of it.  I disengaged myself and left.

 

(It was only a couple of months later that he went and torpedoed his relationship with CJ again by acting like a cremhole.  Some people don't change.)

 

I wish I could say that I'm proud of myself for only hitting him on the subject of his own son.  But the truth is that I actually regret not verbally tearing him to shreds for what he did to me when I had the chance.  We're supposed to try and be better than the people who hurt us, we're supposed to forgive.  But I'm just not that good a person.  Some people don't get forgiveness.

 

And some people don't get mourned when they pass.  It was a few years later that he actually died of complications of his long-term illness.  I am sorry - I'm sorry that my brother lost his father.  But I'm a lot more sorry that he never really got to have a proper father in the first place.  Don was more of a dad to him than his bio-father ever tried to be.

 

So there you have it - it's a pretty disjointed narrative.  It doesn't flow well, it's not nicely structured.  Just a regurgitation of the worst year of my life.

 

 

Wow.  

 

Just the fact you pulled through makes you one of the strongest people I know. 

[Stormgate he/him]

This is a true story.

When I was in junior high, we were doing an "experiment" so we could learn about proper graphing, measuring, and reporting techniques before we started the actual experiments. We made paper airplanes and flew them and measured how far they flew.

Now, this was on the second floor. In probably aesthetic spots, there were random openings so that things could, in theory, be dropped onto the first floor. Now, we had to do ten "trials," and on my last one, the airplane went into the gap and fell to the first floor. So I went downstairs and got the airplane.

Then, I threw it again. Like before, it was looking like it was going to go through the gap. I was thinking, "don't go through, don't go through" because I really didn't want to go back down the stairs. The plane slowed, wobbled a bit over the space, then turned around and landed on the second floor.

That was the first and so far last time I have used telekinesis.

[Curious Anamaximder he/him]

So, 2003 is basically thought of in my immediate family as the Year of Hell. 

 

There are a few bright spots here and there, because real life just can't manage to be quite that awful, but mostly this is a pretty sad story.  People die.  So I'm putting it under a spoiler cut to make it easy to skip if you don't want to read it.

 

 

So, a lot of the lead-up really started in 2002.  My Grandpa Charlie (who was my mom's stepdad) had gone to the doctor complaining of back pain and came home with a diagnosis of bone cancer.  It had already spread enough that his ribcage had grown brittle and ribs were cracking under the strain.  He decided to fight, because gorram it, he was a rusting Marine and he wasn't going to give up without a fight.  Thus began the rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

 

Around Thanksgiving, we started noticing some strange behavior in my stepdad (Don).  I don't really remember exactly what the argument was; I think I was trying to compliment him on his cooking and he randomly took it as an insult and went off on me over it, which righteously pissed me off.  During that same time period, he said something else that sent my aunt into tears.  We were completely baffled, and Mom was rightfully upset and angry.  The erratic behavior continued through the holidays, and completely at a loss, she quietly started having divorce papers drawn up.

 

Christmas: I'm visiting for the holidays, and my grandmother shows up at the door.  She makes it about three feet in before she collapses into my arms, sobbing.  The nurses have just told her that Grandpa Charlie is dying; the cancer had metastasized and at that point, it was only a matter of time.  They estimated that he had maybe weeks.  (They kept saying this every week for months, and he still kept holding on, so they eventually threw up their hands and gave up trying to predict it.  Grandpa Charlie was a...stubborn man.)

 

In January, I was back in my apartment in St. Louis when I got a call from my mom.  Don was in the hospital.  He'd had an incident at work where he'd temporarily lost control of his left hand and had nearly collapsed.  His coworkers believed that he was having a stroke and called an ambulance.  But at the hospital, the scans revealed something else - brain cancer.

 

It was a high stage glioma (basically the exact same cancer that killed Ted Kennedy) and was pushing on the emotional center of his brain.  Suddenly his weird behavior of the past few months made sense.  It was going to be fatal, they said - they could do surgery, but the way the cancer grew in tiny tendrils, it was impossible to remove all of it.  You can't just cut into healthy brain tissue.  By the same token, there were a limited number of treatments for the cancer that wouldn't cause damage to the surrounding tissue.  The best they could do, they said, was buy him an extra six months or so.

 

Mom shredded the divorce papers just as quietly as she'd had them drawn up.

 

I remember visiting him in the hospital just after the surgery; his roommate and his family were being kind of loud and obnoxious, and at one point he asked them to keep it down.  One of the other family members (rather snottily) asked, "What, did you have brain surgery or something?"  And Don said, "Yes," and pointed to the bandaging on his head.  They shut up.

 

The winter and early spring were sort of a blur.  I was in my second round of college working on a music performance degree, so I wasn't all that much help to them.  Mom was busy taking care of Don, and Grandma had her hands full taking care of Grandpa Charlie.  They both had some hospice assistance, but mostly they were trying to handle it on their own.  I was pretty stressed by the whole thing, and my grades were slipping.

 

Then in May, right about when my classes were over for the term, the entire left side of Don's body gave out.  His cancer had grown back bigger than before and was either pushing on or taking over his motor control.  At that point I knew - I wasn't finishing my degree anytime soon. (And I never did complete my music degree; I eventually did finish up college, but with a BA in elementary education.)  I dropped my life and moved in with my mom to help.  My brother was planning to come home for the summer to help, too, though he was waiting a few more weeks before coming home from college.

 

I was trying to maintain some semblance of normality and communication with my friends via the internet, but this was in the days when all Mom had was dialup.  So I couldn't really hop onto chat during the day.  I'd wait until late, when everyone was in bed and nobody cared if I tied up the phone line for an hour or two talking to friends online.

 

So it was just after midnight on Friday, June 13 when the local sheriff came to knock on our door.  There had been an accident, he said.  My brother was going in for emergency surgery.  He had broken his neck.

 

I woke up my mom, and on about 2 hours' sleep she made the 3-hour drive to St. Joseph alone.  I couldn't go; someone had to stay with Don.  That was probably the worst night of my life; I had no idea whether my little brother was going to walk again, or even if he was going to survive.  That was also the last time I cried that year.  I hit some sort of overload threshold that caused my deeper emotional centers to just...switch off for a while.  They would come back, eventually, but it wouldn't be until well into the next calendar year before I would feel normal again.

 

This link sort of gives you a map of the severity of injuries per vertebra:  http://www.spinalinjury101.org/details/levels-of-injury

 

My brother had broken his C5 vertebra.  (We found out later that he broke it by diving into a 4-foot-deep swimming pool.  He hit his head on the bottom.  The idiot.)  He was extraordinarily lucky - the spinal cord itself wasn't severed, but it was pretty badly bruised and his entire nervous system had gone into shock.  The doctors wired the vertebra back together and reinforced it with metal plating, but they couldn't say for sure how much movement he was going to be able to regain.  He stayed in the hospital for a week, with Mom and I switching out who stayed with him.  He was scared, of course - he didn't want to be alone.  But we couldn't both be there all the time because of Don, so we finagled it as best we could.

 

(Incidentally - and we didn't find this out until years later, because CJ was afraid that we'd want to take legal action - his friends had panicked after they pulled him out of the pool.  They were all drinking underage, you see, and they were afraid of getting into trouble.  So instead of calling an ambulance, the worthless little cretins loaded him into the back of a pickup truck and drove him to the hospital.  Words cannot express how much this still enrages me.  Nobody knows how much more damage that did to him.  I wish that he'd told us sooner, so that we could have taken that pack of morons to court.  Though it's probably good that I didn't know it then, or else this story might have also featured me facing assault charges.)

 

One thing that stands out - I remember one of the nurses quietly took me aside and told me how absolutely wonderful my brother was.  Most young men his age facing this kind of injury, she said, would be angry and lash out at anyone nearby.  Instead, CJ would joke around with everyone and generally managed to stay more upbeat than anyone could have expected.  The entire hospital staffed adored him.

 

The other thing that happened while he was in the hospital was a reconnection with his estranged father.  (Yeah, we're half-sibs.  And yeah, Don was the stepdad to both of us.)  He had thought long and hard about notifying family members, and finally decided that his paternal grandparents deserved to know.  As it happened, his father had been seriously ill himself, and was living with them, so it was kind of unavoidable that he found out, too.  So, for better or worse, contact was established.

 

After a week in the hospital, CJ was transferred to a spinal cord rehabilitation center in Columbia, MO.  The day of the transfer was the first day he was able to start moving his left big toe just the slightest bit.  He was going to spend a month there healing and undergoing intensive physical therapy to try and bring back as much motor function as possible.

 

In the meantime, Mom and I worked out a general schedule of how to handle things.  I'd be with her during the week, making sure Don was OK while she was at work.  Then on the weekends, when the therapy schedule was truncated and he would be bored, I'd travel down to Columbia to keep CJ company.  We really never got along as kids - we had a kind of crappy age gap and personalities that are complete opposites, so those weekends were the most intense bonding we've ever had, before or since.  And I got to watch him improve by leaps and bounds.

 

One month after being able to twitch a single toe, he was discharged able to walk with assistance.  I took him back home to Mom's, where he kept doing daily physical therapy, but still needed a lot of care.  I was the one providing that care.  (Yeah, some of those tasks were really, really weird things to have to do for one's sibling.  And I learned that nursing was definitely NOT the career for me.)  Slowly, he needed less and less help, until about two months after discharge he was using the electric wheelchair as sort of a glorified recliner.

 

But he never did recover 100%.  He can walk, yes, but there's a slight limp, particularly noticeable just after he'd woken up.  He's lost a lot of the grip and fine motor skills in his right hand; he's weak on his right side.  His left is stronger, but he has patches of partial numbness there.  Some of the cross-dominance with spinal cord injuries map weirdly.  And now that it's been over a decade since the accident, he's starting to develop arthritis in his spine.  He's only 32.

 

In September of 2003, Grandpa Charlie and Don passed away within a week of each other.  Yeah, all those months of fighting, and they both decide to go at almost the same time.  So we had funerals two weekends in a row.  I don't remember what I played at Grandpa Charlie's funeral; I know Grandma asked me to play something, though.  But Don's I do remember - Smaointe by Enya.  I remember my mom hearing me practice it on my oboe, and she go a bit upset.  It was beautiful, she said, but the oboe was too sad.  But no, I had to play the oboe, because reasons - so could I just take the piano interlude as an opportunity to switch the flute?  That way the end would sound "happier".  I shrugged and complied, but I still had the entire church in tears with that piece at the service.

 

The holidays were rolling around again, and CJ wanted to go visit his long-estranged family in Chicago.  Problem - his reflexes weren't up to long-distance driving yet, so I wound up driving him up there.  It was...kind of awkward, actually.  His grandparents are lovely people, and his aunt told stories about what a delightfully rambunctious child I was (CJ and I exchanged odd looks at that; I only remember being painfully shy as a youngling).  But his father was there, too, and that grated on my nerves.  I did eventually plead my escape to go to the hotel room I'd booked myself before I headed back home the next day.  I wasn't staying under the same roof as that man.

 

I don't really want to go into too much detail, but there are very few people on this planet that I actively loathe.  CJ's father was one of them.  Let's just say that I have darn good reason to do so, and that my mom left him primarily to get me away.  So when the man followed me out of the house as I tried to leave and peppered me with questions about what my brother's plans were, I was pretty short with him.  "Ask him yourself."

 

"I know it's going to be awkward..."

 

"Well, you don't call, you don't write, you dodge child support.  You kind of earned it."

 

That left him spluttering about not wanting to make excuses (and then he proceeded to try and do exactly that) and I wasn't having any of it.  I disengaged myself and left.

 

(It was only a couple of months later that he went and torpedoed his relationship with CJ again by acting like a cremhole.  Some people don't change.)

 

I wish I could say that I'm proud of myself for only hitting him on the subject of his own son.  But the truth is that I actually regret not verbally tearing him to shreds for what he did to me when I had the chance.  We're supposed to try and be better than the people who hurt us, we're supposed to forgive.  But I'm just not that good a person.  Some people don't get forgiveness.

 

And some people don't get mourned when they pass.  It was a few years later that he actually died of complications of his long-term illness.  I am sorry - I'm sorry that my brother lost his father.  But I'm a lot more sorry that he never really got to have a proper father in the first place.  Don was more of a dad to him than his bio-father ever tried to be.

 

So there you have it - it's a pretty disjointed narrative.  It doesn't flow well, it's not nicely structured.  Just a regurgitation of the worst year of my life.

 

Dang. That is harsh.

[Kaymyth she/her]

Wow.

 

Just the fact you pulled through makes you one of the strongest people I know. 

Dang. That is harsh.

 

It was a rough year.  But...I don't really know what else I was gonna do *but* get through it.  Life throws stuff at you, and sometimes it's crappy, and occasionally it sucks beyond the telling of it, but pushing through it is really the only thing you can do.

[Orlion Blight he/him]

It was a rough year. But...I don't really know what else I was gonna do *but* get through it. Life throws stuff at you, and sometimes it's crappy, and occasionally it sucks beyond the telling of it, but pushing through it is really the only thing you can do.

Pretty much. As Dory may say, you got to keep swimming.

On the subject of forgiveness, we are pretty much in agreement, you and I...Except I don't believe it has any moral value (good or bad). It might help you, it might not...there are plenty of times I would say it is impossible. Sometimes, not forgiving is the best thing you can do for yourself and others.

[Delightful]

Well, you can't say I didn't warn you.

You did. And you left me speechless. So was the best I could communicate.

I'm sorry you had such a crappy year, and I'm glad you're on the other side of it hanging out with us here now.

Morzathoth, for some reason the phrase "sacred mammary grounds" makes me think of elephant graveyard.

Maybe I'm thinking mammoth?

Edited March 8, 2016 by Delightful

[Claincy he/him]

@Kaymyth

(But thanks for sharing.)

 

I'm going to keep this story somewhat vague, there's a very low chance that any of my players will read this (well, any of the ones involved in this particular story anyway), but just in case

 

As I've mentioned in the past I run a mistborn adventure game campaign with multiple crews. It's been running for a little over 3 years now (on and off) and I've had a number of players come and go. Anyway, the campaign is set a couple of years after a house war that resulted in the destruction of all but 4 of the great houses. 3 of the crews (yes, there were more than 3 total, cos I'm foolish) who have existed in the campaign are part of various noble houses and their sessions have focused largely on their houses quest to become one of the new great houses. (There are another 17 NPC houses aspiring to become major houses so it's not easy for them to guess which ones are the other players )

 

There have been far more crossovers,interactions and effects between the various crews than any of them are aware of which is a source of great amusement to me. I let each crew choose the name of their house as well as their primary focus and, by chance, 2 of the 3 house crews chose the same thing. A fairly short time into the campaign the two houses exchanged a short series of raids and attacks of various types, all done covertly without directly linking it to themselves. To make things interesting I decided to add a major contract that neither of the houses could hope to fill on their own but they could manage together. If neither of them took the contract then the other NPC houses that were in the same business almost certainly would have. Now one of them could have chosen to work with one of the NPC houses which they hadn't been subtly fighting with, but they didn't. Partly through the involvement of a third party, (a kandra from another crew who did a bit of crew hopping to help me out and to prepare in case I needed a backup Narrator at some point) both crews decided it would be in their best interests to work together on the contract.

 

The best part is that throughout their fighting and making the deal neither crew realised that the house the way fighting, and then working, with was another player house XD

Edited March 8, 2016 by lord Claincy Ffnord

[Young Bard he/him]

True story:

 

When I'd just first started playing my instrument, my conductor... well, long story short, he could act like a piece of crem sometimes. His chief interest in conducting the band seemed to be so he could show off how much better than everybody else he was, and he frequently showed favouritism and/or picked on instruments he doesn't like (Honestly, I don't know what a percussionist ever did to him, but he could have at least pretended to be utterly biased). We had about 40-50 people in the new Training Band at the beginning. After a term and a bit with him, the number had dropped to about 25. I remember one time when I had absolutely no idea how to play a note. He practically marched over to prove how much better he was, flipped to the back of the book, looked at the gibbering mess that was the bassoon fingering charts (which illustrated every single one of about 40 odd keys in a tiny little space - about the size of profile pic's on this site.) Seeing that he had absolutely no clue either, he trounced something about how it wasn't his job to teach me fingering anyway (so why did you just come over?) and trounced back to the conductor's spot. So yeah. Nobody liked him very much. I was genuinely considering quitting if something didn't change.

 

Then, one day, he announced that we'd have someone who'd been studying to become a conductor was going to take over for "a couple weeks" to gain experience. That week, our regular conductor was in the background, making the odd suggestion here and there, but generally hanging back.

 

The next week, our regular conductor didn't show up. The studying conductor was doing fine, and was more popular by everyone, because he had less of an ego, had a sense of humour, and basically didn't shove the message of "I am superior" down everyone's throats.

 

The week after that, the "couple week" arrangement had been extended slightly, as our regular conductor didn't show up again. Or, for that matter any of the following weeks until the end of term. In fact, by the time it swapped back over again, we'd had our 'student conductor' for a longer time than we'd had our regular conductor.

 

And, at the end of the year, he left for a job offer at a private school. And, while we didn't get that student conductor to take over, who was still doing his studies, we did get someone who was a much better conductor/person than his absentee predecessor.

 

(Fun fact: The full time replacement conductor maintains to this day that he got the job because he happened to make a Yoda joke in the trial practice session that he took over for. After the old guy, I think everyone thought someone with a sense of humour would make a refreshing change.)

[Eagle of the Forest Path he/him]

This story is funny, but maybe a bit disgusting too.

 

So about a decade ago, my class (and the other classes in the year) went on a week-long school trip.

We stayed in a youth hostel type place that felt like it was designed by M.C. Escher on one of his less inspired days. There as a big hall with some corridors leading off it, a staircase up to a balcony which had another staircase on it leading to some rooms. Now, some of the rooms had bathrooms and toilets attached, but some didn't, so the people staying in those had to go to the communal bathroom on the ground floor. Some of my friends were sleeping in one of the rooms upstairs from the balcony, which didn't have a bathroom. One of them must have had a very healthy digestive system, because he had already been down to the communal bathroom about a dozen times that evening. Him tromping up and down the stairs bothered one of the teachers so much that he threatened the guy would have to sleep in the bathroom if he came out of his room one more time.

Did I mention the healthy digestive system yet?

The guy must have eaten an ox at dinner, because he still had to poo.

Knowing the teacher in question, he might have been serious with his threat, so my friend didn't dare leave his room again, even with his colon about to burst.

There might not have been a toilet in his room, but he did have...

... a plastic bag.

 

This might have been an amusing enough story by itself, but it's not finished yet.

 

So, his business done, my friend was left with a bag of poo in his room. Even if he had been willing to weather it, his bunk-mates surely weren't, so they had to get rid of the bag somehow.

Out of the room's window they had a view of the hostel's trash cans and they decided to throw the bag next to them.

Ever try throwing a volleyball out of a window at night?

Apparently a bag of poo is nothing like that.

A gust of wind, a miscalculation of the trajectory, it doesn't really matter why, what matters is that instead of landing next to the bins, the excrement projectile made touchdown on the flat roof one floor down.

By lucky happenstance, a window gave out onto that roof.

By unlucky happenstance the window belonged to the teacher who'd been bothered by the bathroom trips.

So when he looked out the window the next morning, he saw a plastic bag fluttering in the breeze...

 

My friend didn't get punished for that, probably because the teacher couldn't catch his breath from laughing, but he did have to go out onto the roof to retrieve his... leavings.

 

True story!

Edited March 8, 2016 by EagleOfTheForestPath

[Kaymyth she/her]

True story:

 

When I'd just first started playing my instrument, my conductor... well, long story short, he could act like a piece of crem sometimes. His chief interest in conducting the band seemed to be so he could show off how much better than everybody else he was, and he frequently showed favouritism and/or picked on instruments he doesn't like (Honestly, I don't know what a percussionist ever did to him, but he could have at least pretended to be utterly biased). We had about 40-50 people in the new Training Band at the beginning. After a term and a bit with him, the number had dropped to about 25. I remember one time when I had absolutely no idea how to play a note. He practically marched over to prove how much better he was, flipped to the back of the book, looked at the gibbering mess that was the bassoon fingering charts (which illustrated every single one of about 40 odd keys in a tiny little space - about the size of profile pic's on this site.) Seeing that he had absolutely no clue either, he trounced something about how it wasn't his job to teach me fingering anyway (so why did you just come over?) and trounced back to the conductor's spot. So yeah. Nobody liked him very much. I was genuinely considering quitting if something didn't change.

 

Then, one day, he announced that we'd have someone who'd been studying to become a conductor was going to take over for "a couple weeks" to gain experience. That week, our regular conductor was in the background, making the odd suggestion here and there, but generally hanging back.

 

The next week, our regular conductor didn't show up. The studying conductor was doing fine, and was more popular by everyone, because he had less of an ego, had a sense of humour, and basically didn't shove the message of "I am superior" down everyone's throats.

 

The week after that, the "couple week" arrangement had been extended slightly, as our regular conductor didn't show up again. Or, for that matter any of the following weeks until the end of term. In fact, by the time it swapped back over again, we'd had our 'student conductor' for a longer time than we'd had our regular conductor.

 

And, at the end of the year, he left for a job offer at a private school. And, while we didn't get that student conductor to take over, who was still doing his studies, we did get someone who was a much better conductor/person than his absentee predecessor.

 

(Fun fact: The full time replacement conductor maintains to this day that he got the job because he happened to make a Yoda joke in the trial practice session that he took over for. After the old guy, I think everyone thought someone with a sense of humour would make a refreshing change.)

 

 

What kind of madman starts a beginning band kid on bassoon?

[Delightful]

True story:

When I'd just first started playing my instrument, my conductor... well, long story short, he could act like a piece of crem sometimes. His chief interest in conducting the band seemed to be so he could show off how much better than everybody else he was, and he frequently showed favouritism and/or picked on instruments he doesn't like (Honestly, I don't know what a percussionist ever did to him, but he could have at least pretended to be utterly biased). We had about 40-50 people in the new Training Band at the beginning. After a term and a bit with him, the number had dropped to about 25. I remember one time when I had absolutely no idea how to play a note. He practically marched over to prove how much better he was, flipped to the back of the book, looked at the gibbering mess that was the bassoon fingering charts (which illustrated every single one of about 40 odd keys in a tiny little space - about the size of profile pic's on this site.) Seeing that he had absolutely no clue either, he trounced something about how it wasn't his job to teach me fingering anyway (so why did you just come over?) and trounced back to the conductor's spot. So yeah. Nobody liked him very much. I was genuinely considering quitting if something didn't change.

Then, one day, he announced that we'd have someone who'd been studying to become a conductor was going to take over for "a couple weeks" to gain experience. That week, our regular conductor was in the background, making the odd suggestion here and there, but generally hanging back.

The next week, our regular conductor didn't show up. The studying conductor was doing fine, and was more popular by everyone, because he had less of an ego, had a sense of humour, and basically didn't shove the message of "I am superior" down everyone's throats.

The week after that, the "couple week" arrangement had been extended slightly, as our regular conductor didn't show up again. Or, for that matter any of the following weeks until the end of term. In fact, by the time it swapped back over again, we'd had our 'student conductor' for a longer time than we'd had our regular conductor.

And, at the end of the year, he left for a job offer at a private school. And, while we didn't get that student conductor to take over, who was still doing his studies, we did get someone who was a much better conductor/person than his absentee predecessor.

(Fun fact: The full time replacement conductor maintains to this day that he got the job because he happened to make a Yoda joke in the trial practice session that he took over for. After the old guy, I think everyone thought someone with a sense of humour would make a refreshing change.)

I once had a music teacher who was far more interested in telling us about how he played for the queen and exactly how close to her he was, than in actually teaching. And then he got super offended when someone who like, actually understood the circle of 5ths tried explaining it quietly to us confused folk in the back of the room.

[Eagle of the Forest Path he/him]

I once had a music teacher who was far more interested in telling us about how he played for the queen and exactly how close to her he was, than in actually teaching. And then he got super offended when someone who like, actually understood the circle of 5ths tried explaining it quietly to us confused folk in the back of the room.

 

I am offend! Flutes!

[Kaymyth she/her]

I am offend! Flutes!

 

You no can has my flutes!

[kaellok he/him]

True story:

 

I was in the Army.  I drove tanks.  In OSUT (Basic Training + Advanced training squished together into 4 months of Hell) I broke tanks.  I broke more tanks myself than everyone else in the company combined.  This is one of those stories.

 

So, we were at the Basic Driving Course day run.  Large open area with a number of tracks criss-crossing over some limited and carefully prepared cross-country ground.  The entire point is to get new drivers comfortable with the idea of guiding a 50 ton beast of death and destruction from Point A to Point B.  

 

The driver has the best seat in the tank--it's a real seat.  And it leans back.  Like, allll the way back.  We're literally lying down, and it's padded, and pretty great.  I loved it.  The steering column is a T-bar that we adjust that ends up sitting basically in our laps.  And we look through periscope blocks that let us see through the hatch and all the terrain and stuff.  Three separate blocks, that are not connected, and only have limited adjustability.  So, we can't see a whole lot.

 

A tank crew has 4 people in it, and so our tanks had 3 raw scrubs like me plus a Tank Commander (TC).  These were Sergeants or Staff Sergeants whose job was to turn us into barely competent at our job.  We rotated through being the driver, so we'd all get a chance to play and have fun (gunner and loader had nothing to shoot that day, and so it was a bit boring for them.)  

 

I drew last driver, so sat through the first two guys.  Finally, it was my turn.  There was no real defined beginning or end to the course, we just drove when and as the TC told us.  So, when it was time to swap drivers, we just pulled off to the side, popped it in park, and then switched.  Finally, it was my turn.  So, I hop into the driver's hole, get everything all adjusted and set up.  We're atop this road thing that's raised up and curved a bit in the middle, and has shallow ditches on either side of it.  TC tells me to hold the left track and reverse, 'cuz we were gonna turn around go back the way we came from.  

 

I...may have been a little excited, 'cuz I gunned it.  Only for a second or two.  So the TC yells at me to be more gentle, so I'm thinking, "right, right.  Cool.  You got this."  I say stupid mantras like that to myself all the time, especially when learning a new skill.  So anyway, there we are, and he tells me to move out--gently.  So, I just give it a little bit of gas, and nothing happens.  So I give it more, and we move like an inch.  TC's now yelling at me, telling me to take it out of park, and blah blah blah.  I look down, and it's not in park at all, so I try saying it must be stuck in back.  It's not like I can see anything, but all that makes sense to me.  I don't hear anything back from him, but he didn't tell me to stop, so I try again.

 

This time, though, I turned the T-bar so that we'd make a hard left and gunned it full throttle.  There was an immediate *POP* sound from behind to my left as the tank shot forward and then began immediately rattling horrifically (instead of the pleasant rattling that happens when the track is actually on the road wheels and everything is working fine.)

 

TC is yelling at me more now, so I do what he basically says, which is to lock down the tank (park, power down, etc.) and then hop out.  When I get out, I see how ridiculous it all is.  The left-side track has come off the road-wheels entirely, and is all twisted up inside of them and down.  And I can see where we'd been parked, it's just a super shallow little culvert thing; I'm pretty sure that my car at the time (an '88 Beretta) would have had no problem getting in and out of it.  There was nothing for the tank to have been stuck on--I still don't know what happened.

 

So, anyway, TC is cussing up a storm.  The others are laughing, 'til they learn that to fix this problem, we'd have to pull track.  This is hard to explain why it's so terrible, but basically we'd have to manually pull apart sections of the track and then put them back together on the tank.  Track is heavy.  Each side weighs a ton.  Literally.  And the stuff is always rusted on, broken bolts, fused down tight in some places, so it's nearly impossible to get apart.  A storming nightmare.

 

Five minutes after this started, another tank drove by and stopped to help.  They were still early in their rotation for the day, and had just had one guy finish driving, but other two still to go.  When they found out that I hadn't got my driving time in yet, I got swapped with the guy who had.  So, I broke the tank, in the most annoying and painful way to fix in the field that is still possible to do so, and then was ordered to leave and have fun instead of staying to fix it.

 

That was the first tank I broke that day...but not the last.  

[Young Bard he/him]

True story:

 

I was in the Army.  I drove tanks.  In OSUT (Basic Training + Advanced training squished together into 4 months of Hell) I broke tanks.  I broke more tanks myself than everyone else in the company combined.  This is one of those stories.

 

So, we were at the Basic Driving Course day run.  Large open area with a number of tracks criss-crossing over some limited and carefully prepared cross-country ground.  The entire point is to get new drivers comfortable with the idea of guiding a 50 ton beast of death and destruction from Point A to Point B.  

 

The driver has the best seat in the tank--it's a real seat.  And it leans back.  Like, allll the way back.  We're literally lying down, and it's padded, and pretty great.  I loved it.  The steering column is a T-bar that we adjust that ends up sitting basically in our laps.  And we look through periscope blocks that let us see through the hatch and all the terrain and stuff.  Three separate blocks, that are not connected, and only have limited adjustability.  So, we can't see a whole lot.

 

A tank crew has 4 people in it, and so our tanks had 3 raw scrubs like me plus a Tank Commander (TC).  These were Sergeants or Staff Sergeants whose job was to turn us into barely competent at our job.  We rotated through being the driver, so we'd all get a chance to play and have fun (gunner and loader had nothing to shoot that day, and so it was a bit boring for them.)  

 

I drew last driver, so sat through the first two guys.  Finally, it was my turn.  There was no real defined beginning or end to the course, we just drove when and as the TC told us.  So, when it was time to swap drivers, we just pulled off to the side, popped it in park, and then switched.  Finally, it was my turn.  So, I hop into the driver's hole, get everything all adjusted and set up.  We're atop this road thing that's raised up and curved a bit in the middle, and has shallow ditches on either side of it.  TC tells me to hold the left track and reverse, 'cuz we were gonna turn around go back the way we came from.  

 

I...may have been a little excited, 'cuz I gunned it.  Only for a second or two.  So the TC yells at me to be more gentle, so I'm thinking, "right, right.  Cool.  You got this."  I say stupid mantras like that to myself all the time, especially when learning a new skill.  So anyway, there we are, and he tells me to move out--gently.  So, I just give it a little bit of gas, and nothing happens.  So I give it more, and we move like an inch.  TC's now yelling at me, telling me to take it out of park, and blah blah blah.  I look down, and it's not in park at all, so I try saying it must be stuck in back.  It's not like I can see anything, but all that makes sense to me.  I don't hear anything back from him, but he didn't tell me to stop, so I try again.

 

This time, though, I turned the T-bar so that we'd make a hard left and gunned it full throttle.  There was an immediate *POP* sound from behind to my left as the tank shot forward and then began immediately rattling horrifically (instead of the pleasant rattling that happens when the track is actually on the road wheels and everything is working fine.)

 

TC is yelling at me more now, so I do what he basically says, which is to lock down the tank (park, power down, etc.) and then hop out.  When I get out, I see how ridiculous it all is.  The left-side track has come off the road-wheels entirely, and is all twisted up inside of them and down.  And I can see where we'd been parked, it's just a super shallow little culvert thing; I'm pretty sure that my car at the time (an '88 Beretta) would have had no problem getting in and out of it.  There was nothing for the tank to have been stuck on--I still don't know what happened.

 

So, anyway, TC is cussing up a storm.  The others are laughing, 'til they learn that to fix this problem, we'd have to pull track.  This is hard to explain why it's so terrible, but basically we'd have to manually pull apart sections of the track and then put them back together on the tank.  Track is heavy.  Each side weighs a ton.  Literally.  And the stuff is always rusted on, broken bolts, fused down tight in some places, so it's nearly impossible to get apart.  A storming nightmare.

 

Five minutes after this started, another tank drove by and stopped to help.  They were still early in their rotation for the day, and had just had one guy finish driving, but other two still to go.  When they found out that I hadn't got my driving time in yet, I got swapped with the guy who had.  So, I broke the tank, in the most annoying and painful way to fix in the field that is still possible to do so, and then was ordered to leave and have fun instead of staying to fix it.

 

That was the first tank I broke that day...but not the last.  

 

Ummm... I thought the point of tanks were that they were virtually indestructible...

Edited March 13, 2016 by The Young Bard

[Kaymyth she/her]

Ummm... I can't of thought the point of tanks were that they were virtually indestructible...

 

Never underestimate the destructive power of basic training babies.

[kaellok he/him]

Ummm... I can't of thought the point of tanks were that they were virtually indestructible...

 

 

Never underestimate the destructive power of basic training babies.

 

They are--from enemy fire and weapons coming at them.  From the user?  Well, generally that, too, but less so.  At least I'm not the guy that shot his own tank (also a true story...we were doing a familiarization fire with the loader's 240 machine gun.  He'd forgotten to lock the mount before firing, and wasn't prepared for the recoil.  Since it was completely loose, it fired a bit wildly, and hit the tank several times.  You could see where it happened afterwards, from the scoring in the paint.)

 

And what Kaymyth said.  A thousand times over.