I wrote about getting gas and dropping my keys.

 and wrote about how they got under the pickup and when I was crawling to get them someone asked me what I was looking for. I told them I was looking for a reason to live and wound up getting information on counseling, suicide hotline etc. etc. from some idiot that doesn't understand sarcasm.

This isn't the first time it's happened to me. 

Early in my career I was assigned to a huge tug and barge with about 10 men manning her. It actually had an assigned cook. I was low man on the totem pole. 

The cook had a dry board in the galley labeled 'crew wants'. It was pertaining to grub. Most of the requests were small things, say a box of certain type of cookie,  maybe a certain brand of hot sauce, little things. He'd read the list, add the items to his paper shopping list and erase it.

One day for the hell of it I wrote 'a truck stop meat loaf dinner'. It was promptly erased and a day or two later a truck stop meatloaf dinner appeared at lunch!  

The cook must have recognized my handwriting because at lunch he said to me, "I used the same recipe I learned at a diner I worked at years ago. I even used waxed green beans to duplicate it." It was a damned good meal.

Anyway, I was passing by the now empty dry board and on a whim scrawled 'a reason to live' on the dry board. The cook laughed and left it there and the rest of the crew appreciated the sarcasm. 

The skipper who was somewhat of a stiff necked company man grinned and said, "Leave it there.  Let's see what the office does."

A couple of days later we pulled into the company dock light tugboat. One of the women from the office boarded, looking for me to see if I would extend my tour. Cheerfully I agreed to. I was fairly new and already had figured out how the game was played. I also knew that she 'was one of us' and generally repaid favors done for her in spades. She saw the note, smirked and shook her head. "Good one."

Shortly afterwards a new middle management type boarded for some reason or another. He already had a reputation of creating problems out of thin air. He saw the board and started babbling about how the company had mental health programs and counseling available and so on and so forth. He carried on and on. It was really annoying.

Finally the skipper, TOTALLY out of character snapped, "If you don't shut up I'm going to the Ben Franklin bridge and jump off of it! Now stop it! Take care of your business and get off or get put off!

All present were stunned. He was totally out of character. They said nothing until he said to the crew, "The beatings will continue until morale improves" The whole crew cracked up and the middle management type fled.

Then he looked at the board and simply said, "Leave that up."

It stayed there at least until after my tour was up and someone told me it lasted a few months.