Not at all, you paid $300 bucks extra for it.
–Love, Buick.
** nods **
I went home without my little Torx screwdriver that I needed in order to work on an old laptop. “Oh, I installed remote control software, I can just remote in to the workplace desktop!”, I realize, and I start congratulating myself on how well my contingency planning has handled such situations.
Then I’m staring at the remote-session window and wondering just exactly this was going to help me get that screwdriver. “Hmm, as an email attachment, maybe? Just click the paperclip icon and navigate to the physical desktop, right? Do you figure screwdrivers are binary, or plain text?”
Here’s a minor one, tho recent. Apologies that it takes too long to describe for insufficient payoff.
We were doing x-mas cards the other day. My wife puts some effort into making them look nice, which I appreciate. She addresses/signs hers, I do mine. We sat down at the table to do it one afternoon, and she said something like, "I’ll stick on the return addresses and stamps."
So I get all huffy saying, “What, I’m too stupid to be trusted to stick on stamps?!” But if she wants to do it, fine.
After a while, she decides she’s tired of it, and tells me to do the stamps/return addresses for mine.
I can’t find the stamps online to link to them, but they were 4 winter scenes: a kid making a snow angel, someone putting a carrot nose on a snowman, 2 skaters, and I forget the 4th. Apparently my wife preferred the skaters and the other one, because the sheets I picked up were mainly snow angels with a couple of snowmen. I wasn’t sure how the snow angel was supposed to be oriented, because there was no horizon or anything as a reference. But I realized they had the word “FOREVER” printed along the side. Being brilliant, I realized they were intended to be placed so that the word “FOREVER” was upright and legible.
Fine. Then I got to the snowmen. The word “FOREVER” was along a different side. So I oriented them “landscape” as opposed to the others which were “portrait,” so you could read the word FOREVER. Then I came to a skaters stamp. When I went to stick it on in landscape orientation so the word FOREVER was correct, I realized that would have the skaters skating on their sides. Which couldn’t be right. So I looked back at the snowman - the way I oriented them would have the snowman lying on its back, with the kid reaching in from the side, as opposed to reaching up which is the only thing that would have made sense… And, yeah, the snow angel would probably look better 90 degrees from the way I had.
So after acting all insulted, I had to admit to my wife that, yes, I AM too fucking stupid to do something as simple as affix a stamp correctly. What I like is that I wasn’t simply not paying attention. I actually expended some considerable mental effort, to figure out how to do such a simple task clearly wrong. :smack:
Now that was funny!
Thanks, Johnny. I’m pretty stupid about everyday things most of the time, but this one STILL has me flummoxed.
It’s the innerseal that rests against the antiperspirant stick, under the lid. https://goo.gl/images/uWRkXh
Seasonal idiocy: I was quite deflated a few years back when I discovered only after a live Christmas tree was set up and decorated that those bags for them for clean up are supposed to be placed under them before you do anything else. It never occurred to me that they went under the tree skirt.
Ever tried to swipe to turn the page on a paper book?
'Cos, uhh… a friend of mine does that sometimes.
I’ve tapped on a word in a paper book, and then was puzzled for a moment when the definition didn’t pop up.
I’ve also spread my fingers over an actual photograph, trying to make a part of it bigger.:smack:
Then the electrician said, “They’ll be $60.05. Five cents for flipping the switch and $60.00 for knowing where it is.”
It just occurred to me this year that it would be easier to put the tree skirt on BEFORE pulling the folded-up artificial branches down.
I licked a Christmas card envelope this morning and it didn’t stick. “Friggin Hallmark cheap ass card, OK, let me go find the scotch tape…” Luckily before doing all that, I noticed the paper over the … self-adhesive strip.
Innerseal, you say?
Well, that explains why my antiperspirant stick has lasted for years without sloughing down. It may also explain why people back further and further away from me as time marches on.
I had thought of turning the dial of the deodorant to pop off the cap, but I felt the deodorant would get stuck when I tried to lower it back in, so I never tried that, thinking it was a misuse of the design.
I once rented a car, drove to my hotel, parked - and then spent the next 15 minutes trying to get the key out of the ignition! Gear set in Park. Steering wheel wiggled and clicked. Looked for a metal catch in the ignition slot, everything! Even tried to set the manual parking brake. I finally found that I had to press in a plastic cylinder on the underside of the steering column to release the key! How is that obvious?
In the 90’s, a friend gave me a software copy of a child’s puzzle game. I was more interested in the software and graphics than the game itself. It was so cool! It had a Claymation gumby-like figure that would walk around in a cave as you pressed the arrow keys. Others keys had it jump, or grasp, etc. to play the game. When I arrowed it off the screen into the next section, a beautiful rainbow appeared. As I arrowed, the pattern of lines would thicken in some lines, thin in others, and morph - like moving through a curtain. Pretty neat for the times! I couldn’t figure out what more to do with the game, but could figure out that if I did, say, n right-arrows, I could do n left arrows and the cave scene would return. There were no instructions but I didn’t care since this was just a quick copy of a game to check out the graphics. One day, I arrowed in a pattern of lefts and rights and suddenly there was a new scene! So, if you arrowed through the curtain just right, you could get to others places in the game. Great! So I started to make a map of the pattern of thick and thin lines and their colors so that I could determine where to go when I wanted to get from scene to scene. Fun, but exhausting, writing down all those combinations. Then playing another game some months later it dawned on me – The rainbow parts were a video display using a video driver I didn’t have. I was hand writing maps of video scan lines! :smack:
Earlier in this thread, I said I’d pointed out the little arrow on the fuel gauge in her car, that indicates which side the filling port is on.
I happened to see this just now. 
When the lights went out in one of my rooms I called my sister who’s pretty handy.
She said. “Check the GFI switch.”
“The FBI switch? The who, what, why switch?”
Turned out I needed to reset my circuit breakers
My brother, a building contractor, tells me that approximately 1/3 of his work comes from repairing the work of others.
The other day, for reasons that I now find elusive, I needed to get my mailbox out of the larger brick superstructure in which it was encased. I thought that my car’s tire jack would be absolutely the correct tool for this. Rather than push the mailbox forward & out, it pushed the brick structure apart on the rear, requiring a complete re-build of nearly half of the thing. About 2 days of labor & hundreds of dollars in parts & tools.
I was really irritated, but I got it all done. Perfectly. Then, to brag, I called my brother. He was good enough to listen to the entire story before laughing at me & telling me that I could’ve just installed a new spring. He explained how to do it in moments. It would’ve probably required 5 to 10 minutes.
This is why the new rule. He stays out of my lab. I stay away from the big boy tools.
:eek:
:):p:D:):D:p
BTDT; I have a now-useless pair of wire cutters with a big melted divot in the jaws. An exciting moment!
That photo was a bit small on my computer screen, so I clicked on it trying to make it bigger. Took me to a “Lifehacks” type page, where a poster was suggesting using the nail clippers to grasp that hard-to-remove seal and yank it off. I guess s/he hasn’t found the “push up the deodorant and it will come off easily” trick. LOL!
When Celtling was about four, our truck (A GMC Envoy) died, and I had to buy a sedan. Being a Mom now, I didn’t have the extra income I’d had when I bought the truck, so had to do without a lot of the extras, like the remote trunk opening feature.
Hitting the little trunk open button before I got out of the car was something I just couldn’t seem to remember. And the sedan had no handle to open the trunk like the truck had. So one day I’m grumbling as I walk back to the driver’s seat to open the trunk. When I get back to the back of the car, Celtling points to the little round key hole on the trunk lid and asks, “But Mommy, what is this for?”
D’Oh! ! ! :smack:
I just turned 47 years old, and have an impeccable education: specialized high school, Ivy League college degree, I would even qualify (if I were to want to join for some reason) for the “Triple Nine Society” High IQ group by virtue of my long-ago SAT score.
And yet, this JUST happened to me this past weekend.
A friend of mine on Facebook posted a picture of his young daughter standing in front of their kitchen counter, with a tray full of what looked like colored sand or sugar, and the tops of candy canes poking out from it.
The text to go with the picture was something like, “having fun growing candy canes for the holidays!”
I showed it to my wife and speculated on what made the candy canes crystallize in an upwards fashion.
She looked at me to see if I was serious or not, then said, “I believe it’s done with a little overnight help from the parents.”
Oh… OH, now I see! D’OH!!!
I had never known this was A Thing, and assumed this was like those kits from when I was a kid where you could make rock candy crystallize onto sticks, but with advances gained over the past 30+ years.
No, it’s a home craft kind of thing associated with the whole “Elf on a Shelf” business, which didn’t exist when I was a kid, and we didn’t do with ours.
I told her she missed her chance to really pull one over on me. She could have told me she would get a kit and show me how it worked, and had me plant the “candy seed” in the sugar, put a UV lamp or something on it, and then over a period of a few days, swap in increasingly larger segments of candy cands in there, while videoing me checking in on the progress. Given my assumptions and the fact that my wife, as a rule, is a totally see-through liar, I would not be surprised if I literally would not have realized what was actually going on until maybe 2 or 3 days later, well after your run of the mill toddler would have rolled his or her eyes.