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If you are at Medical City of Dallas, and you see someone in a navy blue truck shooting off fireworks and blowing an air horn right outside the hospital around 5:00pm, don't call the police. He's not just being a nuisance. He's not trying to get arrested to make some kind of point. He's just doing his job. The hospital pays him to scare off the birds in this manner. He will not bother to let you know this, or at least not in time to stop you from calling the police.
Guess how I know?
My dad recently had heart surgery (around Thanksgiving). He's been having an awful time with an infection, and just this weekend went back in for more surgery to cut out the infection. I was visiting him on Saturday.
Around 5:00pm I was fixing to head back home. As I walked through the maze of hallways to get back to where I parked, I heard a loud noise outside. I looked but didn't see anything, so I kept going.
When I got outside I saw a guy driving a truck real slowly outside the front of the hospital. He was shooting firecrackers out the window of his truck toward the hospital. He also had an airhorn (like you hear at football games a lot) and was sounding it. I thought maybe it was just some jerk making a nuisance of himself, driving around the hospital.
But then he turned around and did it again. And again.
At this point I was convinced that something strange was going on. I thought maybe there was someone staying in the hospital that he was trying to annoy. I wasn't real sure what was going on. He didn't look like the kind of guy who would just go shooting fireworks off to be annoying - he was a clean-cut man in his early 40's driving a reasonably nice Ford truck.
During this time I'd gotten to the parking garage, intending to just head home. But I thought I ought to do something, so I stepped to the edge of the parking garage and wrote down his license plate number. When he didn't leave after a minute or two, I called 911 (not having the non-emergence Dallas police number) to tell them what was going on, and gave them a description of the truck and the man in it.
While I was still on the phone with 911, the man in the truck stopped in front of me and (confrontationally) said "What, you think I'm part of al-Qaeda or something?" I said "No, I think you're being obnoxious." I didn't catch the very first part of his reply, but he ended with "They know I'm here!"
At that point, the most logical explanation that I could come up with was that he was trying to get arrested. I speculated maybe he had some sort of complaint against the hospital and thought being arrested would give him some kind of platform to air his greivances.
The 911 operator told me she'd send the information to the police and we hung up.
Some other visitors walked out of the parking garage and watched this man drive up and down the street a couple of times, making a racket. They looked at me and shrugged. "Maybe he just had a baby?" one of them suggested.
A couple of minutes later, the guy drove away, just as a hospital security truck came around around the other corner. I flagged the security guard down.
"Are you looking for the guy shooting off the firecrackers?"
"Naw, that's the bird guy!"
"The what?"
"The bird guy. We hire him to come around and scare off all the birds so they don't damage the property."
When the police officer called me later, I explained my mistake. Oops.
In retrospect, I guess I could have gone to hospital security instead of calling the police, but I wanted to make sure I got all the details before the man left. And I didn't have any idea how to call hospital security on my phone, or even where in the 4 hospital buildings I could find security.
It would have been really nice if "the bird guy" had his vehicle marked in some way, or at least bothered to identify himself and explain what he was doing.
My siblings also ran into "the bird guy" when Dad was having his last surgery. But that time, he did deign to identify himself to them. They thought my mistake was really funny.
It's things like this that help me understand why people just don't want to get involved sometimes.
Yeah, I saw somebody trying to do that at Vista Ridge mall once. Kinda scared me until I realized what she was doing. They should put a "bird patrol" sign on their car or something.
I didn't know that about your dad. He's in our prayers.
Posted by: Barry on January 18, 2003 07:22 AM