Classic mission meltdowns

[oxcoug]

Since our friends in the other place deleted it for "reflecting badly" on the reps of the Church (Heaven forbid that any missionary should ever lose his temper).
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Some of my most entertaining mission memories are of the handful of times some missionaries absolutely flipped their shit in frustrating situations. For the first year of my mission we had this complicated passport stamping Visa system that required the office elders to take everyone's passport to the US Embassy for updated documentation every six months or so.

I wasn't there but it became legendary that on one of these trips a volatile smallish elder known for his tantrums was handling the exchange. Some complication arose which led to an epic meltdown of him hurling profanities at embassy staff and when one of the other Elders tried to calm him saying that they'd get Sister T[name of mission prez's wife] down help sort things out he screamed the timeless words "f--- Sister T!!!"

The Mission Prez's wife was the sweetest woman in the world and hearing anyone - let alone a missionary - shout that phrase was a stunner and news of it spread like wildfire in the mish. That Elder wasn't a bad guy (BYU grad!) he really just had no idea how to contain his temper.

[Commando]

ha ha ha! I love it. I am a very calm guy, but I repress my anger and snap occasionally. I don't know if I am shameless enough to tell the tales just yet.. I'll see if anyone else 'fesses up to being a psycho first...

[MarkGrace]

This isn't an anger meltdown, but a meltdown nonetheless.

We had this kid from Ohio that was in the military and in some type of special forces unit prior to his mission. He was given a two-year leave or something of the sort for his mission (don't know the details of how this worked out). There were several instances in the MTC and brief stateside turn he did while waiting for a VISA that indicated this kid might not be stable, but they would take too long to recount and the important thing is that he made it to Mexico.

Anyway, kid has a family history of mental troubles, and just starts losing it in this Mexican pueblito. He's staying up all night drawing random pictures, and stacking boxes over and over. Stack them up, take them down, stake them again, repeat. At one point he tells his companion that he's going to burn him in his sleep. Dude is freaked out, and tells the Prez this kid needs to leave the mission. Prez contacts SLC and this kid's parents, and they're all saying he needs to be in the mish, give him a little more time, etc.

Meanwhile the companion is freaked the f$%^ out and not sleeping at all at night. He stays up with an eye on the kid, and then during the day goes to catch some rest at a members house while they babysit the loco one.

After a week or so the Prez gets clearance to bring him home. They bring him up to the mission home, but he still has a few days before his flight. One night an AP goes to knock on his door, and there's no response. Knocks again, no response. He opens the door and sees the window open, and runs over to the window to see crazy elder jumping from the roof of the mission home to the roof of the house next door, and then scales down a drain from the roof and takes off into the streets.

AP's and MP load up in the minivan and go racing to find this guy. At about 3 AM they call it a night and decide to get some sleep and look for him again in the morning. At about 6 AM Prez gets a call. It's the police and they tell him they have one of his guys in custody. Prez heads down to pick him up and the kid is sitting there in a jail cell in just his garments. LOL!

[Pheidippides]

For evidence of unstable missionaries, I need go no further than point to the plate in my ankle. Suffered during my tenure as an MTC teacher.

In my mish, there were two elders who were notorious for having horrible tempers. Both had burned through several companions and I heard a recording of the tirades of one of them, which was quite scary to tell you the truth. Anyway, as a last gasp effort, the MP put them together as companions in an apartment with two of the more mature and strong ZLs. Everything went fine until the ZLs went on overnight splits. They returned to find one elder locked out of the apartment in his pajamas and the other barricaded in the apartment toilet room with his scriptures, two weeks worth of food, and a butcher's knife. Never got the full story on that one.

The latter of the two was in my zone when I was ZL just before he went home. Faked (poorly) a broken arm for three weeks.

[Paperback Writer]

There was an Elder I trained from California who was a combination of Spicoli from "Fast Times at Ridgement High" and Bill from "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" (this was before either movie was released). A product of a military family and California beach culture and led a colorful life before his mission. And had a rebillious streak and a general lack of regard for rules and authority that was his downfall as a missionary. Nevertheless, he was a very good missionary...at times. Was a master at rationalization when it came to mission rules and almost had me convinced to do some things that were obvious violations.

Anyway, his misssion got off to a good start but about half-way through got into trouble with the MP and on several occasions. Towards the end of my mission the MP asked me to be companions with him again as he was on his final strike before being sent home. During that time I sensed things had turned around for him and he was back on the straight-and-narrow as far as obeying mission rules. But it didn't last long. Four months after I returned home, he called me on New Year's Day from Times Square in NYC (outside our mission bounderies by a couple of missions). Told me how "crazy great" Times Square was on New Year's Eve but really it was to apologize for "letting me down". He only had about 3 more months left on his mission and he had promised me before I left that he would "endure to the end" of his mission. Needless to say, he was put on a plane home soon thereafter. At least the guy went out in style.

[oxcoug]

This isn't an anger meltdown, but a meltdown nonetheless.

We had this kid from Ohio that was in the military and in some type of special forces unit prior to his mission. He was given a two-year leave or something of the sort for his mission (don't know the details of how this worked out). There were several instances in the MTC and brief stateside turn he did while waiting for a VISA that indicated this kid might not be stable, but they would take too long to recount and the important thing is that he made it to Mexico.

Anyway, kid has a family history of mental troubles, and just starts losing it in this Mexican pueblito. He's staying up all night drawing random pictures, and stacking boxes over and over. Stack them up, take them down, stake them again, repeat. At one point he tells his companion that he's going to burn him in his sleep. Dude is freaked out, and tells the Prez this kid needs to leave the mission. Prez contacts SLC and this kid's parents, and they're all saying he needs to be in the mish, give him a little more time, etc.

Meanwhile the companion is freaked the f$%^ out and not sleeping at all at night. He stays up with an eye on the kid, and then during the day goes to catch some rest at a members house while they babysit the loco one.

After a week or so the Prez gets clearance to bring him home. They bring him up to the mission home, but he still has a few days before his flight. One night an AP goes to knock on his door, and there's no response. Knocks again, no response. He opens the door and sees the window open, and runs over to the window to see crazy elder jumping from the roof of the mission home to the roof of the house next door, and then scales down a drain from the roof and takes off into the streets.

AP's and MP load up in the minivan and go racing to find this guy. At about 3 AM they call it a night and decide to get some sleep and look for him again in the morning. At about 6 AM Prez gets a call. It's the police and they tell him they have one of his guys in custody. Prez heads down to pick him up and the kid is sitting there in a jail cell in just his garments. LOL!

That's epic.

I've got another.

I'm teaching in the MTC probably in 1998 at the same time that one of my mission buddy's/housemates is in MTC security. We would drive up and back together and when we're leaving one day walking to the parking lot south of the gym we hear two elders, one speaking calmly one shouting. The one shouting is saying:

"I always have to be the dick!!! I'm tired of being the dick!!!"

The other elder speaks in calm tones and we hear him saying something about prayer. Angry elder drops to his knees and shout-prays "Heavenly Father, help me to stop being the dick!!"

Me and my buddy are having a hard time not cracking up but we figure we have some responsibility to maintain order. We go over and say "uh, hey you know, we're sure it's not fun being the dick, but you need to keep it down." To which the guy shouts "ooooh...teachers!! I bet you have ALL the answers!!"

Some part of me sympathizes with having a meltdown in the MTC. And some part of me wonders which one of you guys that was.

[TripletDaddy]

I have no personal mission meltdown tale, but I was witness to several while on the mish and teaching in the MTC.

On the mish:

Two sisters getting into fight because one used the other's shampoo. That same sister also purchased a monkey and kept it as a pet.

Two Elders fight, one stabs the other in the arm with a plastic utensil.

One Elder leaving the mission after a night of drinking. While in the mission home, he tells the President that he is gay. He boards a bus for home.

In the MTC I taught one elder that had some sort of bi-polar disorder as well as OCD. He would start crying in class because he thought he left the iron on in his room, that sort of stuff. He wound up going home because he was suffering from severe hallucinations. He wrote me a letter telling me about them....they involved different colored rabbits hopping around his room and speaking to him, as well as the walls of the MTC stretching out like rubber.

These things are sad, not funny, but they are definitely meltdowns of various sorts.

[oxcoug]

For evidence of unstable missionaries, I need go no further than point to the plate in my ankle. Suffered during my tenure as an MTC teacher.

In my mish, there were two elders who were notorious for having horrible tempers. Both had burned through several companions and I heard a recording of the tirades of one of them, which was quite scary to tell you the truth. Anyway, as a last gasp effort, the MP put them together as companions in an apartment with two of the more mature and strong ZLs. Everything went fine until the ZLs went on overnight splits. They returned to find one elder locked out of the apartment in his pajamas and the other barricaded in the apartment toilet room with his scriptures, two weeks worth of food, and a butcher's knife. Never got the full story on that one.

The latter of the two was in my zone when I was ZL just before he went home. Faked (poorly) a broken arm for three weeks.

Oh my.

And faking a broken arm for three weeks - that takes some ambition.

[oxcoug]

I have no personal mission meltdown tale, but I was witness to several while on the mish and teaching in the MTC.

On the mish:

Two sisters getting into fight because one used the other's shampoo. That same sister also purchased a monkey and kept it as a pet.

Two Elders fight, one stabs the other in the arm with a plastic utensil.

One Elder leaving the mission after a night of drinking. While in the mission home, he tells the President that he is gay. He boards a bus for home.

In the MTC I taught one elder that had some sort of bi-polar disorder as well as OCD. He would start crying in class because he thought he left the iron on in his room, that sort of stuff. He wound up going home because he was suffering from severe hallucinations. He wrote me a letter telling me about them....they involved different colored rabbits hopping around his room and speaking to him, as well as the walls of the MTC stretching out like rubber.

These things are sad, not funny, but they are definitely meltdowns of various sorts.

No none of that sounds funny - shame on you for not putting a more comedic spin on it.

But for real, that category of stuff is terrible and kind of terrifying how little we understand about that sort of affliction.

[SteelBlue]

Western Europe is prime melt down territory. There is little to no change in result whether you go out and work hard or stay in bed and that fact is not lost on anybody out there. It's an easy place to feel disappointed and if one is prone to instability, well, it can be the match to the gasoline. We had some big meltdowns and some minor ones. I'll list a few here in no particular order.

1) Mission finance clerk decided he didn't want to be a missionary anymore and moved himself from Hilversum, Netherlands where the office was to Amsterdam. He called the MP from his new place (moved in with some folks he'd met while working there) and told him he'd quit the mission. Pres. told him he was going home and to come back for the flight. Elder told MP that he wasn't going home anytime soon and that he no longer had any authority over him. MP asked him where he got the funds for an apartment and elder told him it was none of his business. It turned out that he had stolen at least some of the funds from the mission (I never heard how much). As his legend grew, it morphed into him using the funds for a visit to the red light district etc... But really, he just quit and didn't want to go back to the states anytime soon.

2) An elder who from day one let everyone know he was only on a mission because his parents were buying him a BMW when he got home was starting to really struggle. As we all know, a mission is tough enough when you actually want to be there. He had several run ins with the MP (a saint of man who had a goal not to send anyone home) and was on his final strike when he decided to go out in style. He left his apartment and comp and attended Monsters of Rock somewhere in Belgium that night (around 1991). While there he decided to partake of some good Belgian weed. He came home late the next morning to find the ZL's waiting at his door and said "oh good, my ride is already here". He was one of just 2 that went home under that Pres.

3) Got a call from MP telling us to go and look for Elder X in downtown Brussel at about midnight. Told us to stay out of red light districts but anything else was open season. If we found him we were to bring him straight to mission office. Never saw him. He apparently snapped, ditched his comp and went "sight seeing" for a couple nights. Came back on his own.

[Green Monstah]

There was an Elder in my mish (I'll call him Elder J) who was a hard-nosed scriptorian. If you had doctrinal questions, apologetics question or questions on rules, Elder J was your man. He was famous for being a difficult companion due to his love of rules and intolerance for those who disregarded them (unfortunately, I suppose, I was a lot like him).

One day his comp wakes up and Elder J is gone. They live in the zone where the MP lives, so they call the office and tell them to be on the lookout. A few hours later, Elder J shows up at the mission home and Sister B (MP's wife) was there alone. She's shocked to see him, but relieved because he's been missing. He tells her that he's been saving his support money for months to fly home and he drove to the airport and bought a ticket to SLC, but before he went home he would really appreciate ending his mission on a good note and requested that Sister B make him a pie (apple, preferrably, but any pie would do). Sister B realizes he obviously distressed and pretends to oblige (while calling the MP and APs in another room). Poor guy was just so wound up he finally cracked. He was released as ZL and finished his mission as a normal, hard-working, fun-loving missionary.

My personal meltdown came when I was serving with a comp with severe OCD. He was OCD about sin. Examples: came home from dinner and said, "I molested one of the family's kids." I flip out and get ready to call the cops, then I realize he was never out of my sight. I ask him to tell me what happened. One of the kids jumped into his arms and he put his arm under the kid's butt to hold her up (like you do when you hold kids). When he put the girl down, his hand make contact with her butt. He was scared to death it was molesting. He also claimed to have sinned against the Holy Ghost for questioning God's existence and to have masturbated when he leaned against the bathroom counter and he felt a tingling sensation. Anyway, he was a weird dude. One day we had a really awesome investigator and this elder refused to leave the apartment to teach her because it was a "waste of time" (sidenote: one of the few people I baptized who is still active is this lady). After weeks of putting up with his shit, I was ready to put my fist through his face. I literally wanted to beat the living hell out of this kid. Instead, I refrained and just started to cry. Then the bastard looked at me and said, "I guess we're all crazy, aren't we Elder RedSox?" Although he was probably right, it took everything in me not to flatten this punk. Meltdown.

[wuapinmon]

I'll relate my own.

I was district leader in Alajuela, Costa Rica in about October, 1993. The phones back then would only stay on until about 10PM, and then they'd shut off until the morning. We lived in an area called El Roble, and the sister missionaries in our district were in Villa Bonita.

We get home at 9:30PM one night with a message to call the sisters. Since our doña wouldn't allow outgoing phone calls, after we went to the bathroom, we hurried to the closest payphone at the plaza to call them back. I spend a good 10 minutes on the phone listening to the sisters tell me that they're fighting and just can't get along, and that they need blessings, tonight, to be able to work. These were the same sisters who had had us bless their apartment a month before to cast out evil spirits that they claimed had actually moved stuff around.

Anyway, while I'm talking to them, telling them no way, I hear the sister say something like, it's your priesthood duty to get over here and help us, and then the phones shut off. Since I had watched the last bus leave for the centro while I was on the phone, I was pissed. Like, madder than a volcano pissed. I told my companion that I was sorry, and that if a taxi came along, I'd spring for it. So, we started walking. Here's a map:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Unknown+road&daddr=Unknown+road&hl=en&geocode=FTWbmAAdX-f6-g%3BFcximAAdAIn6-g&mra=me&mrcr=0&mrsp=1,0&sz=17&sll=9.987775,-84.242166&sspn=0.007808,0.009645&ie=UTF8&ll=9.99514,-84.231749&spn=0.031233,0.038581&t=h&z=15

It wasn't hot out, but we walked it quickly. No taxis, hardly any cars. Just lots of dogs who didn't like us walking past their haunts. It took us a good 35-40 mins to get there at a brisk walk (it's an uphill walk). We arrive, knock on their bars, and nothing. Nothing at all. I keep knocking until their landlord comes out of the main apartment and politely tells me to drop dead, in so many words. So, we walk home, and the entire way home, I let loose a tsunami of English cusswords that, when I was done, so vast and detailed in their use were they that my companion had to ask me to define several of them for him.

The sisters' tepid apology the next day was, "sorry, we fell asleep after we prayed. We're fine now."

[Surfah]

We had a couple in my mission.

One kid flipped out and took the car out while his companion was sleeping. He got a tattoo about the size of a nickel of a spade with the number 13 in the middle. It looked like a prison tat it was so bad. He then drove to a convenience store and bought some cigarettes and then went to the mission home. He ended up finishing his mission but I always felt bad for his companions.

Another kid went nuts. Literally. His companion and ZLs thought he was possessed because the kid was going ape shit kind of like the kid in Gracie's story. Finally the kid got a bit violent while waiting for the APs and MP. So one of the ZL's a big ass Tongan kid beat the shit out of him and then sat on him until they arrived.

My favorite meltdown though was when a ZL and his companion went to a club one night. They got drunk and the ZL came home with a girl. The ZL is banging the girl and the companion is pissed he isn't getting any. After stewing about it he calls the MP at like 3am complains to the MP that his companion always gets laid and he doesn't. Mission lore has it that the MP told him "Pack your shit you're going home." And they did.

[Green Monstah]

We had a couple in my mission.

One kid flipped out and took the car out while his companion was sleeping. He got a tattoo about the size of a nickel of a spade with the number 13 in the middle. It looked like a prison tat it was so bad. He then drove to a convenience store and bought some cigarettes and then went to the mission home. He ended up finishing his mission but I always felt bad for his companions.

Another kid went nuts. Literally. His companion and ZLs thought he was possessed because the kid was going ape shit kind of like the kid in Gracie's story. Finally the kid got a bit violent while waiting for the APs and MP. So one of the ZL's a big ass Tongan kid beat the shit out of him and then sat on him until they arrived.

My favorite meltdown though was when a ZL and his companion went to a club one night. They got drunk and the ZL came home with a girl. The ZL is banging the girl and the companion is pissed he isn't getting any. After stewing about it he calls the MP at like 3am complains to the MP that his companion always gets laid and he doesn't. Mission lore has it that the MP told him "Pack your shit you're going home." And they did.

Sounds eerily familiar...you weren't in a mission in AZ were you?

[KillerDog]

My companion and I lived in a house with some members. The members' 23 year old daughter moved home for the summer. I saw her in her garments one morning (she was sharing a bathroom with us) and I called the president to work out a new apartment. He had us switch with some sisters in the same basic area who lived in a killer mansion with an elderly couple of members.

A week or two after changing apartments, I got a call at around 8:00 one morning. The person on the phone was the member we had been living with. All she said was "Elder K-dog, you need to get over hear right now. We have a big problem." We hopped in the car and cruised over there immediately.

When we arrived, we found one sister missionary locked in the bathroom. This sister was from Taiwan. The bathroom door had a number of holes in it and the other sister missionary was (from Tonga) was in the process of trying to knock the door down. I did my best impression of a polynesian father calling his kid on the carpet (I had served in the Samoan ward for 3 months) and got this sister to stop hitting the door. Once everyone was calmed down this was the story (as near as I can tell).

Chinese sister was constantly pushing Tongan sister to get out of bed and start study etc. Chinese sister was senior companion and used standard Chinese culture "big sister" approach to this which included calling Tongan sister "lazy, fat, stupid, garbage, worthless etc." Tongan sister prayed day after day for God to help her not kill Chinese sister. God didn't show up to help one morning and Tongan sister got out of bed and tried to kill Chinese sister. The members they lived with were just down the hall and tried to stop the fight only to be manhandled by Tongan sister while Chinese sister locked herself in the bathroom while yelling at the members to "call someone." Members called us because we had been in their house just a few weeks before.

The funny part in all of this was the Tongan sister's parting words after we had calmed everyone down and agreed that no one was reporting anyone over this "minor" clash of cultures. The Tongan sister said, "If she does report me to the President and I get sent home, I'll come back and cut her throat." She smiled while she said it so I convinced Chinese sister not to worry. I always could lie with the best of them.