You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
People are crazy.
People are arbitrary and erratic and unpredictable. People sometimes piss me off
Crazy People comes with the territory but it always is shocking like a punch to the nose.
I am in a restaurant the other night and I’m talking to a waitress I know. I am standing near some guys at the bar. There are very few people in this fine dining establishment. The talk with the waitress is pleasant banter about nothing.
I sense one guy looking at me seated on a bar stool. He appears to want to talk to me.
I don’t want to be rude to the waitress so I continue talking to her.
When we conclude the conversation, the guy turns to me and says in a rough and tumble way.
“You’re that news guy right?”
“I’m that newsguy,” I respond.
“You are a F***ing A**hole!” he says his voice cold like a winter wind.
I look right into his face. It’s hard like a brillo pad that’s been scrubbing urinals.
“Sometimes I gotta be like that in my job,” I say to him laughing, thinking he’s joking.
His stare is angry, his eyes are fixed. He is not joking.
“You are a F***ing A**hole!” he says again, his voice dripping with contempt.
“What’s your problem dude?” I counter.
I realize this is one of those crazy people moments.
I am suddenly and unexpectedly confronted by a disenchanted viewer.
Is he rational? Is he a psychopath? What have I done? Do I know him? Did I walk down his momma? Everything is on the table.
“I wrote you an email, and you never responded to it,” he says as if the image of that unresponded to email is burning on the frontal load of his life.
“An email?” I say perplexed. “What email?”
“I wrote you about gospel music and you never got back to me.”
“Gospel music? Email? I Never got an email. Sorry man.”
“Yeah, your an A**hole. You can say anything you want now. It doesn’t matter now. F*** you.”
I get close to the guy. He’s not an old guy, but he’s not young. He isn’t a big guy, but he isn’t small. He’s just a storm cloud brewing on my horizon and in typical Cordan calm, I step right into his space.
This is an upscale restaurant and the aggression centering around this bar stool is palpable.
“You’re the A**hole,” I say starting to feel the rush of adrenaline.
“Yeah whatever,” he says arrogantly.
I stare at his ugly little face. I think about biting his eyes out of his skull and spitting the bloody goo all over his nice clean shirt. Crazy thoughts swirl through my head as they always do, always have. As I’ve often said, in another life, I was a pirate, or a bad mortician.
I pause as mug shots and police lights swirl through my brain. I think better of it. I think of my position and what I have to lose.
I walk away keeping my eye on him. He raises his glass and toasts me like some kind of trailer park aristocrat.
What an ass I think to myself trudging up the stairs. I am angry and pumping with adrenaline. My hand is shaking like I got a palsy.
I sit down at the upstairs bar.
“What’s wrong?” he says wiping a glass.
“Guy down there is a douche bag.”
“He’s normally pretty cool.”
“Well he lost his cool today,” I say.
I watch some ESPN, and finish my beer. I leave angry. I am reminded that life can bust you in the chops anytime anywhere so be on guard.
And then…today another crazy moment.
My 6pm story airs.
Suddenly my inbox chimes.
It’s a nasty letter from a guy who is mad that we didn’t tackle his story.
Weeks ago he sent us pictures and documents about some surgery that went wrong. There is some kind of a hole in the roof of his mouth. Perhaps it happened by the anesthetician, maybe the doctor made a mistake, maybe a squirrel got into his esophagus and began to store nuts. Who the F knows.
I’m not even sure what this guy wants to accomplish by doing a news story. Probably to enhance a legal suit later, right?
We tell him that our boss is not in favor of this story. At the time he seems to agree.
All of a sudden tonight, he sends me an email chastising me about the story I did. A story totally unrelated to his issue.
“Your boss won’t do my story about a veteran who is injured in a surgery and you do a story about cigarette butts littering the outside of a hospital because they just went to a smoke free campus. Nice Pulitzer prize winning work there. Hope you all have a nice veterans day.”
And so it goes. Another customer unhappy about something we did or didn’t do. It never ends.
I am tempted to write him back, maybe tell him to screw off, maybe send him all the numbers for all the other newsrooms and tell him to try his luck with them.
Instead I forward his email to another reporter who might be more receptive to his story.
When you report the news, sometimes you wear a big target on your back and the anger comes from an invisible enemy who can often lash out of the ether.
After 24 years, weeks like this one remind me to keep my head on a swivel because life is crazy.™