As a companion thread to Tales of clumsiness, here’s a thread where you admit to being a complete idiot. A boob. A dimwit. A knucklehead. A nincompoop. You get the idea.
I’ve been eating Trader Joe’s French Onion Soup for at least 20 years. Probably longer. It comes frozen into little cylindrical pucks. Just pop the cylinder into an oven-safe bowl and heat in a 400ºF oven for 40 minutes. Yum. But I’ve always hated the packaging. I have to dirty a sharp knife to cut the cylinders out of their plastic pouches. Grrr! :mad:
So a few weeks ago I bought some spinach and artichoke dip from Trader Joe’s. It’s packaged in the same manner as the soup. Mrs. L.A. decided to heat it up. She removed the plastic pouch with the cylinder in it from the box. And then… She peeled the flat part of the plastic off!
:eek:
I’m making the French Onion Soup for dinner tonight. Sure enough, the flat part of the plastic pouch peels right off.
:smack:
Two decades or more, and I’ve been opening the soup wrong all these years! :smack: :smack: :smack:
I never bothered to read the box, which has the ‘how to open’ instructions on it. :rolleyes:
My husband and I owned a car for two years before we learned how to turn the radio on and off. You had to hold down the power button for a couple of seconds. If you just briefly pressed the power button, all that happened was that the power antenna went on or off, but the radio itself remained on. If we wanted no sound, we just turned the volume down.
In fairness to us, it was a used car with a post-market radio, so the user’s manual was of no help (and there was no user’s manual for the radio). Still, we could have looked it up online or something. It just never seemed that important. Then once, the dog’s butt hit the button for a prolonged period, and we were sort of “Oh.” Why didn’t we think of that?
I used scissors to cut the end off a package of tissue paper just this afternoon (managing to nick my finger in the attempt) and then discovered that the OTHER end of the package was folded over and sealed with sticky tape which could be peeled open easily. Without cutting yourself.
When first resetting the clock in my car, I tried a lot of things: push the “clock” button, set the time, push “clock” again. No luck; returns to the prior time. Push something else. Hold something down while setting time. Many things. Finally looked it up. You set the time by pressing “clock” and typing in the time. That is all. Push nothing else. Just wait. Done! Wow, that is way too easy.
Men and instructions, what can I say?
Mr.Wrekker has never read the first line of any instruction book. I have, but I am not allowed to correct him during said diy project. I have been married long enough to know to just leave when these things happen. I have no idea how he proceeds or gets by. Sometimes things just go away, never to be seen again.
And, as far as cooking, well let’s say he would get lost trying to get to the kitchen.
A rather dotty woman I know moved house. Her son dismantled many items of furniture, cupboards, etc … carefully labelling the bolts and screws and so on. Everything was easily transported to the new address in an afternoon. However … she’d thrown away the box the fittings were in … to her it was just a box of junk.
I switched to decaf some time ago, but the Ms drinks regular. I make her coffee in a drip maker and I make mine in the espresso machine. But it means grinding beans separately. So for several weeks, I would dump out the caf beans from the burr grinder, then dump in some of my beans, and grind away. Problem was that the burr grinder’s strength is not in espresso grind, so I kept ending up with coffee grounds that were too coarse. Then dump out any leftover beans, pour hers back in, then repeat all of this a few days later when I ran low again.
Then I opened a cupboard to get out the vacuum sealer, glanced to the left and there sat my coffee/spice grinder looking at me like “Really, dumbass?”
When we arrived in Vietnam hubby got a SIM card for his phone, because that’s what you do apparently. I don’t really understand, but whatever. Three weeks later we discover it can be used as a personal hotspot to give my iPad access wherever we are. Doh! That 24hr train ride out of Saigon could have been so, so much more pleasant. Ditto all the times I couldn’t use my translator because I lacked wifi! At the beach, every hotel with lousy wifi, etc, etc.
Apparently we are both knuckleheads when it comes to this internet stuff!
I go to buy a V-neck sweater (that’s not the silly part :D). In the store they had many colors, and I thought I’d better buy a color I don’t already own, to get maximum utility from it. Light gray really seemed to suit me, so I bought it.
Well, you know where this story is going…I hang it in my wardrobe, and then notice the item right behind it is an identical light gray V-neck sweater.
Borrowed a friend’s car. I couldn’t get the electric windows to wind down, and being as it was an old car, I figured the mechanism was just broken.
I actually almost got into an accident, because the inside of the car started to fog up (titanic style) and I couldn’t get the air to circulate either.
Later I realized (thank god I realized on my own and didn’t complain to my friend), that I had been pressing the *close *window button.
Everytime (nearly) I go to the gas station, instead of pushing the gas cap lock opener, I unlock the back glass, I get out of the car can’t get the little door open to pump gas in, doh!! Get back in the car start it up and press the right button. And…half the time I forget to reclose the back glass. I notice it when I hear air whooshing behind me. So stop the car get out and reclose the glass.
Don’t get me started on how many things I have been locked out of or into (really, it happens)! I am just a mess.
I have Windows 10, and I use iTunes. Sometimes when I want to see what’s going on sonically in a track, I access the MP3 within the iTunes directory and open it with Audacity. I bring up the track’s info window with ctl-i and click on the “file” tab. Using a trick I discovered earlier on my own, I highlight the file location, including the directory (this works in numerous places, not just iTunes). I then right-click and select “copy”. In a Windows Explorer window, I then paste the location into the address bar, and voila! I’m now in the track’s directory and can do whatever I want.
Today I went into iTunes help to look up a keyboard shortcut for something. As I was scrolling, I saw that “ctl-R” did something I didn’t understand. So I tried it and voila! A Windows Explorer window pops up, showing the track’s directory! :smack::smack::smack:
(Well, actually, first I tried “ctl-r” (lowercase “r”) and that didn’t do anything. Then I tried “ctl-shift-r” to get the uppercase “R”, and that worked.)
I had been pretty proud of myself for discovering the highlighting trick, and it has come in handy. But in this case it kept me from discovering something even easier.
My brother was having trouble with his computer. For some reason the background color for his IM’s had gone from white to gray. He was trying to switch it back. We found the window that was supposed to set the colors and he reset what he thought was the right selection back to white. But it had no effect; the color was still gray. So he tried a different selection and switched that to white. But still no change. So he tried another selection and the gray was still there. Finally, in frustration he just began hitting everything and turning it white to see what was wrong. But no effect; everything stayed the same color. Then he noticed there was a small button on the bottom of the screen that said “Apply” and he clicked that…
Last week, I nearly got smashed by one or more cars in traffic. Why? Because not only did I run a red light - I stopped my car in the middle of the intersection. I was wearing sunglasses which somewhat obscured my vision, but more importantly, I had misjudged the distance and thought I was stopped at the pedestrian walkway. No, I was in the middle of the intersection and had only mere seconds to continue driving on before incoming cars smacked me. My car and I escaped intact, barely.
Oh, and around a month ago, I once walked around in public one day with a pair of underpants stuffed into the back of the neck of my polo shirt. I was fortunate that for the most time it was partially hidden by my jacket.
One bright summer day I stopped to get gas and discovered the LCD display on the pump to be completely blank. I reported the problem to the person on duty and he came out to check the pump with me and said it looked fine to him. It still looked blank to me so I pushed up my sun glasses for a closer look. Then it looked fine to me too.
Apparently the polarization on my new sunglasses was 90° different to the mask on the pump.
Okay, here goes. One of my most embarrassing moments. True story.
Marine Corps Boot Camp, MCRD San Diego, early in 1980. I’m a young stud of 19 back then. Lean and mean. Yes, truly a legend in my own mind. We’re in a classroom, all four platoons in the series, so that’s about 240 recruits. Plus our drill instructors.
The class instructors like to begin with a joke or a story, so the instructor asks us, “Good morning, privates. I’m curious, who here is a virgin?”
Suddenly my right arm, disconnected from my brain and all on its own, thinking it knows what it’s doing, starts rising into the air. I look up and sure enough, that fucking right arm of mine is up in the air. Why the hell did it do that?!?!
I look around the entire room, and there’s only one arm up in the air. Mine.
Shit.
Oh well, too late, it’s up there. I hold it up, high and proud. The instructor, fully expecting nobody to raise his arm, couldn’t believe it and he lost his momentum — he couldn’t deliver his next line.
I once had a loaner car for a few days while mine was in the shop. That first day, I had a few packages I had to retrieve from the back seat. I got out, leaned the driver’s seat forward as much as possible, and cursed the automaker because there was so little room to access the rear.
I then moved the seat forward as much as possible and was still amazed how tight it was. What a shitty design, I thought as I squoze myself in to reach my stuff; I’ll *never *buy a Chrysler.
It wasn’t until later that day that I realized the car was a four-door.
mmm
