Now That's A Surprise

At work, I get to answer several different lines of various types. One of those lines is Employee Assistance for a certain company. This lends itself to many fun stories here and there. Here's one that comes to my mind often ...

I get a call from a fellow we'll call Vince. He called saying he was pulled from service pending a psychological evaluation, which he felt was unwarranted. So I take all his information, the whole time with him telling me how stupid this whole psych eval idea is. "There's nothing wrong with me," he'd say. And "This incident didn't even happen at work. It was my time off!"

Finally I got to the part where I needed to type in his story. So I invited him to tell me what happened, from beginning to end. I couldn't wait to see why he had to have this unwarranted psych eval.

My friends took me out for my birthday and we were driving around just being dumb. We had taken my pistol with me so we could shoot rabbits.

I could see where this was going. So I asked, "Were you drinking?"

No! We were just driving around having some fun. One of my friends asked me if I could shoot my gun at my hand and move my hand away before it got shot.

He paused. So I asked the logical question, "Did you?"

Well, no. Of course not. So we drove around some more and just got more and more stupid. So we got out of the truck and were just standing around talking and stuff, when they asked me again to see if my reflexes were good enough to shoot my gun at my hand but move it fast enough to not get shot.

He paused again. "But you didn't, right?"

Well, no.

[pause]

Not then.

"Not then? But you did later?"

Yeah. So I took out my gun, pointed it at my hand, and shot.

"And?"

And the bullet was faster than I could move.

"And this is why they want you to have a psych eval? Because you shot yourself in the hand, thinking you could move faster than a bullet?"

Yeah. Can you believe that?

"Uh ... well, let's just say I'm not surprised. "