Ten Tales in Ten Minutes

Hi, I'm Rob.

Episode Number 39 
10 Tales in 10 minutes

Today I have decided to challenge myself to tell you 10 tales in 10 minutes. I'm going to have to tighten things up. Occasionally I can be a little long-winded. I'm going to have to abandon that today for speed and efficiency. Okay, here we go. The 10 minutes starts now.

Tale Number One 

I was on a walk where I go out wandering around in Florida and there are some people out there that I see pretty regularly. And one of them was telling me about how they had recently invested in Iraqi Dinar, which is the currency of Iraq, and they were telling me I should do it too. The idea is you can exchange your dollars for Dinar, so you have a pile of Iraqi currency.

You really get the currency. And then unbeknownst to most of the world, the US government is about to reevaluate the dinar, so it'll be worth way more. So this dinar that you've bought for very little will now be worth a ton of money, so you make a huge return on your investment. You're rich. You retire. Yay. 

This person that I was walking around talking to, he was making the argument it would be dumb for you not to invest. And he said that his understanding was that for every dollar you invested, you would get between a thousand and $10,000 back. And then he told me how all these, you know, wealthy people in America had already invested.

And that like Elon Musk had already exchanged over a billion dollars. So if Elon Musk invests a billion dollars and his return is 10,000 times that, I don't even know what number that is, but I think it's more money than all the money on Earth. And so that's what I said. I said, wouldn't that mean that he would have more money than the rest of the money on Earth combined?

And he was like, yeah, I know. That's why you need to invest. I'm telling you how you can become a billionaire overnight and you're just gonna ignore me. Obviously this is a scam. It's a very old scam. And the way the scam works is there are these like podcasts and conference calls that talk about how, you know, tomorrow's the day that the reevaluation will occur.

You need to get dinar now. And then they tell you how to buy it and then you know, they make money when you buy it. Wow, that took way too long. We're gonna have to speed it up. 

Tale Number Two

A couple years after high school. My friends and I went to see the movie Terminator 3 and I had been friends with these people for like five or six years. It was my main friend group, and we went and saw every movie together. I love movies, you know that if you listen to this. Terminator 3 is known as a terrible movie, and Terminator 2 is kind of accepted as a masterpiece. And so after the movie on the drive home, Two of my friends kind of got into it because one of them made the declaration that Terminator 3 was better than Terminator 2.

And they got into this huge argument, you know, neither of them would drop it and the next day they still weren't talking. They just didn't wanna be around each other anymore. So they never talked to each other ever again. And we never gathered as a friend group ever again. Okay. Better, better, um,

Tale Number Three.

I have a friend that worked at an animal clinic and he said one day they got a call and someone said their dog had been attacked by a copperhead and they were heading in and they said, okay, we'll be ready. And so they got a room ready for the dog, uh, ready to treat it for a snake bite. And when the person showed up, they just had this little cardboard box and they, you know, put it on the table and opened it and there was a copperhead that was bleeding and they were like, oh, it, it didn't really bite our dog.

It kind of went at 'em, but our dog grabbed it and shook it and, you know, bit the snake. And you can see it's like bleeding. They had been prepared to treat a dog that had been bitten by a snake, but they ended up treating a snake that had been bitten by a dog. 

Tale Number Four

I had these neighbors, Darren and Jen, and Jen loved hiking. She was like a mountaineer, and she would go on these trips every year by herself. That was not Darren's thing. He didn't like to go. So one day Jen is going on one of these trips, she loads up her car and she leaves. And then a little while later, Darren goes out to do something and he's driving around and he notices her car parked at like a cheap motel.

And he sees her walk out of the motel room, get in her car and leave, and so he goes to the motel and he's somehow able to convince them to let him in the room. He says he's her husband and he knows what room it is, so they give him a key. Again, her car is not there. She's driven away. And so he goes into this motel room and all of her camping gear, like her tent and her backpack and all of her camping food.

It's all sitting there in the motel room. And it turns out she wasn't going on these big camping trips every year. She was going to see her boyfriend and she was renting a motel and just like dumping off her camping equipment so her car wasn't full of stuff. 

Tale Number Five

My friend used to always go to this open mic comedy night, and she invited me a few times, and one of those times I was sitting in the audience and a comedian who had like, driven from South Carolina or something to Georgia to do his standup routine, um, was doing his thing. And, at a comedy show, I'm always worried they're gonna like talk to me. And this was the night that they talked to me. And so the guy was like, hey, you and the blue sweater.

And I was like, yeah, who's your favorite band? And I was like, Benji Hughes. And Benji Hughes is a musician from Charlotte, North Carolina that I had only just heard about him on NPR a few hours before. I really love his music and I still listen to it, but he's not very well known. It's the only thing that came to my mind.

I couldn't think of anyone else for some reason, because I was like, put on the spot. And the comedian just gives like a long pause and then he says, well, I guess I won't do my joke then. And then he just goes on with his routine. After the show, as we were walking away, I hear someone shouting, blue sweater! Blue sweater! And it's the comedian, and he's like walking up to me.

He's like, Hey, next time someone asks you a question like that, just give a general answer that we can play off of. You weren't being a good audience member. And I said, you're right. I'm sorry 

If I wanted to make them a minute long each. We would be starting tale number seven right now, but instead we're starting 

Tale Number Six

I used to work at this place in the middle of nowhere and they gave me a cabin to live in and they also let me use like this industrial kitchen to cook my meals in. They rarely use the kitchen, but they let me use it and I would go there like in the middle of the night and cook myself dinner. 

One night, it was winter, it was very cold. I walk into this kitchen and it's pitch black and all you can see is like the pilot light under the eyes on the stove, which is just a small flame. I'm about to turn the stove on and cook myself food, and I hear this sound coming from just below the burner that I want to use, and I'm like, I better not turn it on.

Let me open it up and see what's under there. So I like pull the top off of the burner so I can look under it. And there's four huge rats gathered around this pilot light. And it's cold and so they're keeping warm by the heat. I mean, it looks like they're gathered around a small campfire basically. And they just look at me.

They don't go anywhere. They don't run away. So I just, you know, put the cover back down and I didn't have the heart to do anything about it. So I just ate cereal that night. And after that, I cooked my meals in the microwave and never told anyone. 

I felt like I did that one pretty fast. But we still lost time.

Tale Number Seven

This next one takes place when I was working at the same place. I was living in this cabin in the middle of nowhere. It was just me and my dog. We would go walking a lot. There were a lot of established hiking trails. And one afternoon, I decided to go on a walk on a trail I had never been on. And my plan is to do like an out and back. I'll walk out for an hour and then turn around and come back, and that should take an hour as well. So that's what we do. But the problem is, after I turn around and walk back for an hour, I should be at my cabin and I'm not there. I'm in a place that I'm completely unfamiliar with. I've never seen it. And so I'm wandering around, kind of panicking. It gets dark. I'm very disoriented. Depending on how turned around I got, I could be, you know, maybe a two hour walk back to my cabin, which is probably like four or five miles in this terrain. And you know, I really start to freak out because I've had some uncomfortable encounters with people when I had accidentally walked onto land that I didn't know was theirs.

I didn't know I had walked onto private land. I'm getting really, really worried. Then it occurs to me, hey, maybe my dog knows the way back. He's just a little chihuahua guy, but he's outside all the time. It's past his dinner time. And so I say, Brody, you hungry? And he like looks at me and he starts running and I just follow him and he ran all the way back to my cabin and all was well.

Oh boy. I gotta catch up. 

Tale Number Eight

I heard this next tale from a guy named Jim who was fixing my car. The dealership wanted to charge 3000 bucks and Jim fixed it for 60 and maybe it's not true, but he told me this story and you know, this is Rob tells tales and not Rob does journalism. So here we go.

Jim lived in Alabama about an hour from the Gulf of Mexico, which will become relevant. And he was driving home one night, it's like two in the morning after a night on the town, like a typical desolate Alabama back road. He's the only one out there and he's driving and then out of nowhere there's just something large in the middle of the road that he has to avoid and he like turns the steering wheel to the right really quickly and goes off road and is able to like get control of his truck and then pops back on the road again.

And he knows that what he thinks he saw in the road that he had to avoid was very strange, impossible, even. Unimaginable. So strange in fact that he stops, turns around and goes back to look at it, and there in the middle of the road is a dead dolphin. Jim had no idea how it got there. He called the police. They never figured out how this dolphin got from the Gulf to this road. 

Uh, yeah, so I definitely failed my mission. We're past 10 minutes and I'm just starting 

Tale Number Nine

I was working in a restaurant and this restaurant served breakfast, and each night before the chef would leave, he would cook like two pounds of bacon that we would use for breakfast the next day.

He would cook it, put it on a plate, wrap it in saran wrap, and just like leave it on this table at room temperature, which seemed odd to me, but I don't know, maybe other restaurants do it that way too. Anyway, there was a problem when he would show up in the morning, he noticed that a lot of the bacon was missing.

Someone was eating a lot of bacon between the time he left and the time he got there the next morning. So the chef told the manager, the manager held a meeting, said, this is unacceptable. Whoever's doing this is stealing. We make a lot of money off of bacon. So you're literally eating our profit. And he hoped it wasn't a staff member.

Maybe someone was breaking in to eat the. So he was introducing this idea of a bacon thief breaking in, in the middle of the night and grabbing a giant handful of bacon. And after that meeting, the chef wasn't talking about missing bacon anymore. It seemed to kind of solve the problem. But a few weeks later, I got to work a little early and I walked in and the only one there was the manager.

And I walked back into his office to ask if I could clock in early, and he was chowing down on a gigantic plate of bacon. He was actually wrapping the bacon and slices of cheddar cheese and eating. It turns out there was a bacon thief and it was him. 

Okay, the final tale, 

Tale Number Ten

When I was 15, I got a job at a golf course, and some of my coworkers that were my age and also some adults, they loved killing snakes.

Groups of water snakes would bask and you could like look down on them from this bridge. And so people would take giant rocks out onto this bridge and throw them down onto the snakes and smash them. And it bothered me because I like animals. And so, you know, I talked to some people there and tried to get them to stop doing it and they wouldn't do it.

And I was just a kid, and so I decided to call the police and report them to the police. When I called the police, they said that's not really what they do, but they would pass it along to DNR, which is the Department of Natural Resources, which handles like wildlife and things like. And then nothing happened.

And you know, people were still killing snakes and it was disappointing. But what can you do? And then one day I showed up to work and there was like a state trooper there and a state wildlife officer there, and I walked in and they're like, hey, we have to have a meeting really quick. They just told all of us, nobody can kill snakes anymore.

It's against the law. Some stupid member called the police on us. And so if any of you are seen killing snakes, they'll probably call the police again. So don't do it. And people stopped killing snakes for the most part. My secret phone call had worked and I was very pleased. 

So definitely did not tell 10 tales in 10 minutes. More like 10 tales in 13 minutes, plus all the credits and intro music and all that. I hope you enjoyed that. It was a lot of fun. And you know, maybe I'll do another one like this in the.

Rob Tells Tales is produced by me, Rob Tiffin. I had some additional editing help from Ben. The cover art is by Marcella. She also came up with the title of the podcast. Our theme music is by Mitchell Hardage. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and at robtellstales.com. This podcast would've not been possible without Ben, Marcella, and Melanie.

Thank you and thanks for listening.