I find beyond the pale. Saying “fucking” anything in a professional office to staff or a client? Outrageous.
I was expecting the cat to beat up the dogs too! Sorry! 
AWESOME!
This actually happened to my roommate at the time. We lived in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, the notoriously seediest part of town (hey, can’t beat the cheap rent!) Anyways, she was working as a waitress at a diner-ish place just on the periphery of where the theater district/trending shopping areas (Union Square, etc.) meet the Tenderloin.
Well, for whatever bizarre reason one night Hugh Grant came into this dump for dinner and he happened to finish and leave right as my roommate was getting off her shift. She is walking behind him and is baffled that he’s wandering straight into the gross/dangerous part of town and she thinks “I should warn him maybe that this isn’t a smart place to be.” just as he turns a corner and she loses sight of him.
Of course no one believed her until a couple months later when he was busted with that prostitute and all the pieces fell into place.
A few weeks ago, my friend Thao and I were cooking some pasta with chicken. We realized that I didn’t have enough red sauce, so she walked over to a nearby store to grab some. I’m still in the kitchen cooking the chicken on the stove. While briefly doing something else, I see the skillet shift ever so slightly in the corner of my eye…
…and then it just fell off the stove. I didn’t knock it over, there was not a gust of wind, it just decided to not be on the stove anymore. I literally jumped up onto the counter behind me to avoid getting hot oil all over me, all the while thinking “How the fuck was that even possible?” The floor isn’t perfectly level, and perhaps the bottom of the skillet wasn’t totally flat, but I didn’t think the center of mass would actually be off the stove.
I had a hard time explaining this to Thao when she returned: “What I’m about to tell you will sound very much like I’m trying to cover up my own stupid mistake with an implausible alternative, but I swear to the baby Jesus that it’s entirely true…”
The chicken! It’s making a break for it!
This thread about roofers made me think of a weird story. It’s not about me but it is someone I know and it still sounds fake.
This guy I went to church with as a kid, he grew up and married a woman that worked with my mom. We never knew what she saw in him but whatever. They did ok, even though she was like 10 years older than him. They had 2 kids. His family always seemed very prim and proper…and rich. Dad wore a fancy suit to church and everything. They were really well known in their little town, which was a little town near my little town.
Anyway, the guy was a roofer. He fell off the roof while doing a job and was out of work forever. Then he became addicted to painkillers. Then, I guess as a reaction to needing more money for painkillers, he robbed a bank.
Like flat out put on a black outfit and went into a bank and got some money with a gun and left.
They put his grainy security camera photo on the news and like 10 people called in to the cops to rat him out. Because everyone in his tiny town knew him.
So now my mom’s friend from work has her 2 kids and her husband who’s addicted to painkillers and is now a BANK ROBBER.
Actually ex-husband. I think she got rid of him after the pills but before the bank.
Just weird to think that someone I know robbed a bank. I mean who does that?! A bank! Ha!
I’m not much of a storyteller and this is not much of a story but I remember telling it to a friend who refused to believe it. My late grandfather was a New York City cab driver back in the day. One time he had Babe Ruth in his cab. My grandfather recognized him but didn’t strike up a conversation because he didn’t want to bother him. That’s the whole story. Is that so implausible? My friend reacted like I told him my grandfather had Jesus in his cab.
My brother had a female clerical co-worker in Atlanta during the late 80s or early 90s who was from the mid-west. She told him that when she was a teenager, her parents had very much wanted her to date the son of a couple of good friends who went to their church, but she had thought he was unattractive and not cool enough for her. She turned them down flat. His name was Michael Jordan.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding… Michael Jordan the basketball player is from Wilmington, NC not the Midwest.
Then I am mistaken as to where she was from. But it was definitely Michael Jordan, the basketball player. I have trouble imagining that he would have been considered unattractive during high school, since he is such a handsome man, but IIRC (which I may not), his ears stuck out or something like that.
A friend of a friend (yeah, I know…sounds made up) was married to the guy dubbed the Real Estate Rapist. It was pretty freaky for my friend to think that this guy she had known for years was the same guy committing rape.
No one ever believes this story, but I swear every single part is true.
I live in a smallish subdivision (sort of an offshoot of a really big subdivision) on the top of a hill. It’s essentially one long street, houses on both sides, and past everybody’s back fence, it drops into nothingness. Well, the homeowner’s association has to mow the common area (the hillsides) every summer or else it turns into a giant fire hazard. As you can imagine, mowing is a PITA and a bunch of guys with weed-wackers are expensive so they experimented with goats and sheep.
So one day I hear persistant, REALLY LOUD bleating and find five or six sheep and lambs stuck in my backyard, along with decimated rosebushes, and the rest of the herd moving off. I yell to my daughter, “Hey, there are sheep in the backyard!” and we run outside just as two of the neighbor kids jump the fence to help out. What followed was:
The kids chasing them so they scattered, me yelling that we had to herd them like sheepdogs would, my daughter running around barking (like a sheepdog :smack:), all of us barefoot and dodging sheep pellets (which they produce in alarming quantities when chased by barking children), one falling into the deep end of the pool and doing circles until I used the skimmer to force it to the stairs, and having to carry the two smallest ones out because their moms had abandoned them.
The four of us are bent over laughing and panting and my husband walks out, neatly dressed in a suit and tie and says, “What are you guys doing out here? And what is all this crap all over?”
The next summer was goats. I had to call twice to have their heads removed from my back fence. The went after the rosebushes and got their horns stuck. Are roses like crack or something?
My favorite story to tell about my brother - because it’s funny, and it illustrates his personality so beautifully:
Several years ago, my brother (who is a full-timer with the National Guard,) worked out of an armory located quite a distance from his home. Since his commute was long, with heavy traffic, and through some pretty dicey neighborhoods in a major metro area, he drove an old, crappy beater of a pickup truck to and from work - a few extra dings weren’t going to hurt it, no one was tempted to steal it, etc.
One of my brother’s work friends, who was also a good personal friend, bought himself a brand new truck, about which he couldn’t shut up. That truck could do anything, go anywhere, heal the sick, and raise the dead. Bless him, my brother got tired of hearing about his buddy’s truck finally, and figured out how to get him to zip it.
He told his friend Tracy he could do one thing with his truck that Tracy’s shiny new truck just couldn’t match. After much incredulous "no way, dude"ing and "you’re full of shit"ism, my brother finally offered a bet: a six pack of the winner’s choice. So, out the door they go after work, and my brother reaches behind the seat of his truck, grabs his 9mm handgun, and blasts a hole in the tailgate of his crappy old truck. (Remember, National Guard armory. Guns and gunfire aren’t out of place.) Hands the gun to Tracy and says “Your turn.” I don’t know what kind of beer he requested…
If I heard this story about most people, I might think there was some exaggeration going on. But about my brother? Nope. Absolutely in character.
i was in africa and had a night tour …the van picked me up and there were two muslim women in the van …they were very nice and we chatted a bit while the van went to another hotel and picked up three hindu women …we were all sharing where we lived …as it turned out the three hindu women and the two muslim women lived on the same street in the UK …it gave me chicken skin and i couldn’t think of anything else the rest of the evening …it was kind of creepy realizing the world gets smaller everday …
Ever read Blood And Money?
It’s the story of Houston’s biggest society scandal/murder/hijinks back in 1969. In a nutshell, socialiate Joan Robinson Hill dies under mysterious circumstances. Her stepdaddy who is rolling in oil money pressures the DA to indict her husband for her murder. The first trial ends in a mistrial and while waiting for the second trial, the husband, Dr. John Hill, is murdered on the front porch of his house.
A nice, juicy murder plot unfurls and a local madam names Lilla Paulus is arrested for setting up the hit. The star witness against her at the trial was her daughter, Mary Jo.
I went to high school with Mary Jo and knew her quite well.
Well, there was the one time Bill Murray… nah, I won’t bother, nobody believes it anyway.
Tease.
Not me, but a friend of mine:
Time: Late 70s. She walked to a local store in the very late afternoon, took longer than expected, and darkness ensued. She was fearful of walking home alone because there was a serial killer in the city who targeted young women of her age and hair color. A neighbor offered to walk her home after she told him of her anxiety. He laughed and said she was certainly very safe from that killer. The “nice” neighbor was David Berkowitz, later revealed as “Son of Sam.” His very next victim after the incident when he walked his neighbor safely home was blonde, unlike the dark-haired women he had killed before.
Man, Tommy Flanagan has a lot of sock accounts here.
A strange fishing story (and 100% true): my dad and I used to fly in to camp on remote lakes in northern Quebec. Often, we would fish for our food, from a canoe.
The fishing was often good, because the lakes were very remote and hard to get to - so rarely visited.
One day, I was fishing and I hooked something large - probably a sizable walleye. We never saw it though, because it managed to wind the line around something underwater & break it.
I was pulling on the line, which still had resistence to it - indicating whatever it was snagged on, was still attached - when up from the depths came the end of a rope. The fishing line was wrapped around the rope.
We then pulled on the rope. It was attached to something really heavy. We pulled it up, wondering what was attached - a cinder block? A dead body? - when what came up from the depths was … a big bucket. Opened, this proved to be full of bottles - beer and white wine. It was impossible to say how old, as the labels had all disintegrated.
Seems that what happened was this: someone wanted to keep their drinks cold by lowering them in the water - but somehow lost the end of the rope.
Sadly, I was too young to test whether they were any good, and my dad wasn’t a drinker, so I have no idea if they were still good.
When I first moved to San Francisco, I was young and eager and didn’t know shit about big cities. About a month after I arrived, I was coming home late from a co-workers house on the bus and a drunk guy got on. Not a homeless drunk guy; a really drunk ‘regular’ guy in his late 20’s, dressed up in nice clothes. REALLY drunk. Obnoxiously so. He’d peed himself. That’s how drunk he was. I’m English and I’ve rarely seen anyone walking around who was this drunk.
So I’m near the front of the bus and he’s staggering around in the bus hassling all of us and leering at all the girls and bemoaning his lot in life (it sounded like he’d broken up with his girlfriend) and everyone was moving away from him toward the back of the bus. He wasn’t dangerous, just obnoxious and smelly and loud.
Eventually the driver paid attention and in the middle of Chinatown, he stopped and told the guy that he had to get off. So as the guys stepping out of the door, he misses a step, falls out and cracks his head on the curb and is out cold, with his legs slid under the bus.
Everyone else on the bus is telling the driver to “Go, go!”, but I (stupidly) decide to check on the guy and I see that if the driver does go, he’ll drive straight over the guys legs, so I get off and try to move him out of the way, but he’s too heavy (and his head is bleeding a bit), so I get the driver to help me, and everyone’s pissed at me for wasting their time and being a good Samaritan or whatever.
Anyway, we’ve moved him onto the sidewalk and the driver is back in the bus and I’m just finishing leaning him up against a hydrant and all of a sudden, two plainclothes cops run across the street, holding out their shields (on chains round their necks) and guns drawn and pointed AT ME and shouting at me. I freak out and try to get back on the bus, but they pull me out and start questioning me. they can’t believe that I wasn’t a friend of the drunk guy (who, of course, is now unconscious and bleeding, but no-one’s paying attention to him). Then they tell the bus driver that he can’t go anywhere, so all the other passengers are even more mad.
After maybe 10 minutes of me explaining that, no, I really didn’t know the guy, they say I can go (an ambulance has shown up by this point). But then the bus driver says that he has to call in and get a new driver, as his shift has ended. No-one on the bus wants me on there, since I’ve wasted all their time, so I walk about a mile home.
The kicker: I get a letter from the guy’s lawyer saying that he wants me to reimburse him for the cost of his leather jacket, which was ripped (either by him falling off the bus or from me dragging him out from under it). I tell him to go fuck himself (but nicely) and never hear any more about it.