We’ve all had them of course: a complete stranger will do something or say something that takes your breath away for its sheer audacity or stupidity.
My daughter was shopping with her little boy this week when she noticed a middle-aged couple staring at them. FTR, my daughter is tall, dark-haired, slim, and very attractive (no, it’s not just mother-pride saying this) and the grandson is quite dashing too, with thick dark hair, long eyelashes and a smile to kill. He has light olive skin, and whilst my daughter has fair skin, having been through summer is quite tanned. My daugter is of Anglo Saxon stock and the little bloke’s daddy is South American.
So this couple continued to stare, then finally popped the question:
:eek:
Now had I been there and been quick I would have said she won him in the local raffle, he being second prize. First prize was the pure-bred kid.
But my daughter was utterly gobsmacked. Australia is a pretty multicultural society, and even in small towns like where we live, there are plenty of people who have come from different ethnic backgrounds. For starters the question was rude, secondly it was ignorant, and third it was the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time.
I was complaining to a coworker on the elevator that I was in a crabby mood for no good reason, and a random guy on the elevator said “at least you smell nice.”
I was parking in a lot for a concert, and had just put my cover on my convertible. As I walked towards the venue, a random woman asked me “how dare you?”.
Seriously, protecting my personal property in a public setting offended her.
A few weeks back I was playing outside with The Boy. It was a cold day. I was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt. A lady walked by in full on blizzard gear and said to me, “Jeez, aren’t you freezing?” I said that I wasn’t.
Her answer “Well, you’re tall.”
(I swear this made my day…I am just so glad when it is someone ELSE saying something goofy…the look on her face was a total facepalm…heh)
Old man right out of Stephen King’s Thinner sits next to me. I look at him.
“Is someone sitting here?”
I say nothing. (I can’t say “no” because he’s already occupying the seat and I can’t say “yes” because I don’t want to acknowledge him. I can’t win.)
I don’t ride public buses anymore.
On a warm summer day I walked across my front lawn to picked up my mail from my mailbox. I was standing on the edge of my lawn by the sidewalk, barefoot, flipping through the crap so I could dump the junk in the recycling bin before I went inside.
This man walked past, looked pointedly at my feet, and said “That’s not very polite!”
First, I was on my own lawn, so I don’t know why he cared. Second, I could see ‘that’s not very clean’ or even ‘that’s not very safe’, but polite? WTF?
I was in Border’s one day. Wearing jeans, t-shirt, and a baseball cap. I was at the service desk.
I heard, quite loudly, “You must be bald!” I looked to my right and saw an elderly lady in a wheelchair looking up at me with a smile. I wasn’t sure if she had said that to me.
She said, “That’s why you wear a hat.”
I removed my hat, and she was shocked to see I had a full head of hair.
Now that seems nice. You were publicly complaining about being randomly upset; he gave you an appropriately random counterpoint.
Now that is genuinely WTF. I think I would have been looking around, trying to figure out who she was talking to, and what about. (Did she say something about the car?)
Well, that’s probably a good idea. Are you still inexplicably rude to strangers in other places, though?
I hadn’t had any weird stranger interactions for years until sometime last fall…I was walking out of a building downtown and a cyclist had to swerve out of my way to avoid hitting me. He was a fairly fat, 50ish guy wearing ratty clothes and seemed honestly drunk, he also wasn’t going very fast so I doubt there would have been any injuries if he had hit me.
He says to me (while rolling past at a very slow pace), “you need to watch where you’re going.” Sometimes I’ll just ignore people that seem drunk/crazy/potentially homeless, but my immediate reaction to this guy was to say, “you need to get your bike off the fucking sidewalk.”
Sitting at a tram stop, 38 weeks pregnant, and a woman approaches me to see if I would like to feature in a movie she and some friends are filming. The catch? They want to film the birth of my baby “from your point of view”. Yeah, that’s what you want at the birth of your first child - a crew of strangers trying to get the camera positioned right in front of your face. “Ah…no.”
When you say you “put the cover on [your] convertible” do you mean you put a car cover over the whole car, or you just put the top up, or you have one of those hard-top convertibles that the top get stored in the trunk?
Assuming you meant you closed the convertible top to keep rain/people out, what else did she say that indicated to you that she was referring to that?
If you actually put a car cover over the whole car, it’s a bit unusual.*
*I did this myself once when I had to drive a partially restored '65 Mustang to work one day when my regular car was in the shop. When I got to work, it looked like rain, and the window seals had all been removed, so I got the car cover out of the trunk and covered the car. Within minutes there was 3 police cars surrounding my car. Apparently a covered car in a public place was probable cause to investigate, mostly because the license plate was concealed. Fortunately I told the cops the situation and they left it alone (the car was not street legal in any way shape or form…it was put-together enough to make the 5 mile trip to my office and that’s about it).
I was standing in line with my grocery cart, and it somehow - accidentally! - just barely touched the behind of the nicely dressed old gray-haired woman
ahead of me, standing with her husband. Maybe I was looking at the chewing gum display, maybe I was daydreaming, but somehow my cart grazed the old woman’s rump. They were paying up, she gave me a withering look as I said, ‘sorry’, and as they walked away she muttered to her husband…“some people (mutter)…goddam hurry (mutter)…I’d ram that cart right up HER ass (mutter)…” :eek: I had said ‘sorry’! No injuries were inflicted, I didn’t do it on purpose, it’s the price one pays sometimes when standing in a grocery line. …old bag must have been off her meds that day.
When I lived in Spain, my elderly neighbor cornered me one day to quiz me about my ethnicity. It kind of went like this:
Crazy vieja: Are you from Ecuador?!
Me: Um…no. I’m from North America.
Crazy vieja: Mexican?!
Me: No, not Mexican. United States.
Crazy vieja: So you’re English?
Me: I have to go now.
Last fall, I was waiting in line to get in to hear Bill Clinton speak in Ann Arbor when a woman walked up and started talking to the people in my group. No one in my group knew her, but she seemed to think she was joining us instead of going to the back of the line, which was wrapped around the building. When we finally got into a direct conversation about how she was cutting in front of all the people who’d been waiting for a while, she agreed that it wasn’t fair and told me, “Now you’ll have something to talk about at dinner.”
