I’ve done this a hundred times but I’m drawing a blank right now. All this talk about pregnant women made me think of this though:
Talking to a coworker (and friend) of mine. It was her and about three other all gathered around her cubicle. The topic of conversation was her soon to be baby. I say to her: “So has your innie turned into an outtie yet? That’s when you know they’re about done.”
Well, this being her first baby she didn’t know what the hell I was talking about and neither did the other guys in the cubicle. So after an awkward silence I explained that bit with the belly button. To which she responds with “Oh yeah! Um… no.”
My biggie was calling my gay niece a “Jack of all trades”, which would have been okay, but then I backed up, put that foot right back into my mouth and corrected myself with, “I mean a Jill of all trades!”
I probably do this on a regular basis, but the OP brought to mind an amusing anecdote. Ther was a blind student in my college-major classes when I was in school. He had a seeing-eye dog (who was awesome despite having terrible gas in class), and it was pretty obvious the kid was blind. One day, he raised his hand and asked for clarification on a point the professor had made. The professor went over to the board and started to write/draw to illustrate his point. An awkward silence settled over the room. The rest of us could see what was on the board, but none of us had that question. He was illustrating with visual aids for the one guy who couldn’t see the damn visual aid. One of the guys in back of the room piped up, “Can you see that okay, Jim*?” The blind kid laughed, the professor face palmed, and the rest of us laughed at the prof, who then attempted to stumble through a verbal explanation for Jim.
Sorry, I guess that was a “Did I just do that?” example.
I said something terrible that is still haunting me to this day…
This happened about 15 years ago. My boss, a wonderful, kind man was the MIS Director for the billion dollar company we both worked for. I was the lead programmer/analyst for our sales system amongst other things. A junior programmer made some changes that caused the entire sales department to grind to a halt and it was up to me to get it going again ASAP. I was answering call after call from people screaming at me to get everything going again. After a while, the phone call abuse started getting to me.
I walked into my boss’s office and jokingly said “They’re driving me crazy! I can’t take it any more!” And then I mimed shooting myself in the head…
The exact second that my finger pointed at my temple, I remembered way,way too late… The Mother of the sweet, kind man sitting in front of me had committed suicide by … Yep, you guessed it… shooting herself in the head!
The shame I felt at that moment I still feel today.
A close friend’s son committed suicide last year by this same method. Naturally, we’ve talked a lot about it, and how people react.
Short answer: It’s OK. Really. It was an honest goof.
Long answer: We got to talking about people saying similar things to her and her husband, accidentally of course. “This project is so annoying I could kill myself!” I myself am fond of saying “I need like a hole in the head” and have found myself curtailing myself or finding other metaphors around her. But really, these sayings exist. Black humor exists. No one is making fun of the suicide, or making light of her pain, or “reminding” her of it. (Believe me, she remembers it every day.)
In fact, she has used similar sayings to get people off her back about unrelated things. Somebody giving her grief about a procedure at work: “Well, if I COULD, I’d give you my firstborn . . .” DEAD silence.
So I’ve seen both sides. I’ve felt like a complete shitheel for putting my foot in it, and yet my friend tells me that really, she understands that these sayings exist, and people will say them, and it’s OK. Really.
I was at a car maintenance class and the guy in charge pulled out a hydrometer, one of those battery testers with a glass tube and a rubber bulb at one end and a rubber tube at the other, and asked if anyone knew what it was. I jokingly said," Isn’t that one of those things lesbians use to get pregnant?" The girl sitting next to me went mental, she pulled out a knife and started screaming, “Why do guys always make fun of me just because i’m a lesbian?” I said, “Steady on, I didn’t even know you were a lesbian, and I was just joking anyway”. The whole thing was eventually laughed off and we went on to become friends. I suppose in the US she would have got 20 years in the slammer.
I was at an alumni event and was chatting with my old journal editor who I hadn’t seen in a couple years. I always despised his wife, and I gathered from a few things he said they had gotten divorced.
Me So, it sounds like you and C divorced huh
him: yep, it was final a couple months ago.
Me: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. (pause) sort of.
:smack:
He actually laughed uproariously but damn, you ca’t unring that bell. :eek:
Don’t mind him, somebody’s just super proud he learned something new from his Urban Dictionary word-of-the-day email! Plus, you know, he not only has a woman sleeping with him, he’s got more than one necessitating a *favorite *one. You’re impressed, right?
