The Judge Joke Real life funny story
Here goes: The Judge Joke
Background: In December of 2015 I had to take a small business trip and befriended a parking lot attendant at the hotel. We were watching videos on his phone within the toll booth when a late middle-aged, somewhat rounded man began hobbling from the hotel restaurant towards his car. His whole body was lax, and all four of his limbs were swinging slowly.
At this time, the attendant informed me that that man was a regular at the hotel so he'd have to leave to clear his parking-cone reserved spot. Then he leaned in and whispered very conspiratorially: "That man's a New York State Supreme Court Judge!" That's the lowest level of trial judges in NYS, so I wasn't too surprised by that, but I did worry a little about how the man was swaying.
I looked between the attendant and the approaching man, and slowly asked "So...are you..just going to let him drive like that?"
My new friend, the parking lot attendant, looked at me with his mouth agape for a moment before replying: "....Oh, you're a bad girl...That man's disabled!"
Real Life Funny Stories relayed by Antimony
These stories were relayed to us in my Conflict Management class years ago. The professor had served as a Biologist Level III and a manager of several different federal wildlife refuges. He had accrued some colorful stories in his 45 plus years serving in public land management. These are some of them that I recall him having shared with us:
Taxpayer Money
A belligerent man came into his refuge's nature center one day and was yelling at a clerk. At one point, the man said to the bureaucrat: "I PAY YOUR SALARY!"
The clerk calmly reached into his pocket, put 3 cents onto the counter, and said "There. You don't have to worry about that part of my salary anymore."
The man was furious and the refuge director had to arbitrate.
A Manager "Who couldn't even SPELL Biology."
There once was an upper level administrative employee who the director insisted could not even spell "Biology," let alone understand it. It had come to his attention that she had directed the Army Core of Engineers to use their levees to manipulate the water levels in his wetlands to unnaturally long duration of flooding, with the explicit intent of killing a batch of several decade old trees beside a raised walkway that the director and his staff would use for educational bird walks when school groups visited. When he discovered the water levels were artificially high due to the Army CORE's manipulations, he brought to her attention that no study had been conducted and that there was no certainty that killing the trees would produce good Black duck nesting habitat (which hunters desired and which she believed would surely result if the trees died). He ultimately had to go over her head to get the water levels put back down and save the stand off trees from an arbitrary death.
Illegally Farming on Public Lands
The refuge director once received an unfunded directive to vegetate native grasses in the preserve. He solved the problem by networking with area farmers. He told the cooperating farmers that if they bought native grass-seed mixes he directed them towards, they could farm some corners of the preserve, so long as each year for three years they sowed native seeds as well. After the three years, they were no longer to farm on the marsh. In this manner, he achieved the mandate he hadn't the funding to perform himself.
When it was discovered that this was occurring, he feel back on his country roots defense and remarked "Really? I didn't know this wasn't allowed. I'm just a duck farmer." (He refers to himself as a duck farmer in reference to the gun clubs and hunters huge influence on his role in the preserve.-- The joke is that he exists to maximize the duck production in the marsh).