Tell me, wordy Dopers - ever been rendered genuinely speechless? As in you actually could not come up with something to say in reply? What did the trick?
The guy in the elevator who asked me, “Do you swing?” took care of the rendering-speechless part nicely for me.
It turns out he was asking about my Mary Jane style shoes. It was 1998. Swing dancing was back in vogue.
So what happened to you?
Yes. Last winter, I was at my parents house during my school break and I wanted to borrow my parent’s car to go to weekday mass. The service was at noon, so I was planning on leaving around eleven-thirty or so. Both my dad and my step-mom were home, so I didn’t anticipate borrowing one of their cars as being an issue and waited until I was ready to leave to knock on their door and ask. Now, it’s a bit unusual for my parents’ bedroom door to be closed at eleven-thirty in the morning, so I should have known something was up, but I knocked anyways. They answered and I asked if it was safe to open the door. Can you see where this is going yet? They told me it was safe, which, silly me, I took to mean everyone was fully dressed. Nope! There was my dad and step-mom with an apparently ‘L’ shaped sheet draped over them covering all of the important bits. I just stood there for a moment, totally weirded out, before I was able to say anything. My mouth even did the cliched open and close thing. Then, looking carefully at the corner of their bedroom, where there weren’t any naked parents, I finally was able to ask to borrow the car.
So, to answer your question, it takes interrupting my parents having a nooner to shut me up.
I’ve found myself at a loss for words on occasion, but I have only one memory of being absolutely speechless.
Last year the manager of the store I work in was taken suddenly ill and was out for 3 weeks. As the assistant manager, I had to run the store and try to do his job and my own, as well as fill in for cashiers who decided to take advantage of the boss being out by calling in sick constantly. I worked a string of 12-14 hour shifts while being overwhelmed by the increased workload, the pressure I put on myself to prove myself competent to fill his shoes and do a good job, and being worried sick about his health. After working, if I remember correctly, something over 100 hours in 8 or 9 days, I finally got some management coverage that would allow me one night off. She was due to come in and relieve me at 5pm. At 4:45, she called out sick.
I know it was rude and unprofessional of me, but I couldn’t even say “ok”. Nothing would come out of my mouth. I slowly hung up(I could hear her on the other end saying, “hello…hello?”). The cashier asked me what was wrong, when he saw my face, and I still couldn’t even manage a squeak. Eventually I kind of stumbled to the manager’s office and burst into tears, and I was able to speak again. I won’t tell you what those first words that came out of my mouth were, though. 
Someone I grew up with, who is now a school teacher, said to me, “I feel so bad for the negro children. They’re just not capable of learning.” This wasn’t in 1960 either – this was around 2002.
Eeep. I think you win. :eek:
I was rendered speechless at work recently. One of our colleagues called in to let us know that a family member had passed away, and therefore he was going to be on bereavement leave for a few days.
The resident bitch of our company responded with “Are you sure he’s not just got an interview for another job?”
:rolleyes:
This was more of a physical sensation than an inability to think of what to say. I was in my manager’s office on a call with her manager. He was going off on a total rant about a project I had proposed, when early indications were that he would really support the project. My mouth went completely dry, to the point that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to produce coherent speech. Yeah, you hear about someone’s mouth going dry with nerves…but usually that just means licking your lips and such. My tongue was like sandpaper. Fortunately my boss had some Altoids on her desk, and I gestured for one. That seemed to reactivate my salivary glands enough that I could speak by the time he was ready to let someone else get a word in.
I think my time would have been when I had an employee who had been accused by many students in the community of not doing his job correctly or ethically. The guy was kind of a burnout, but was pretty glib, and did his paperwork, for the most part. None of his co-workers seemed to have a problem with how he did his job at the time. Lo and behold, this guy allegedly held a party on the university residences where he bought a keg for underage residents. Another employee in a department confirmed that he had heard this took place, and students made similar comments to me. We went to the “scene of the crime” and found a disposable camera fully used… so we confiscated it. I told my supervisor and her supervisor, and we were salivating over developing the photos and busting this guy if he had indeed participated in the unsavory act.
I put the camera on my wall unit when I was in the middle of some tasks (door was unlocked, and opened to the office area where the staff worked). I came back 30 minutes later and it was gone. Nothing else, just the camera. That was the first “speechless” part.
Well, the circumstantial evidence was enough. I called the guy in, told him the rumors were only the latest issue I’d heard from students about his conduct, and I wanted his staff keys - he was fired. He protested, but I wasn’t hearing it. He leaves.
That night, I talked to the staff about it. They were upset, but they also felt that this guy compromised their ability to do their job, and basically contradicted the very essence of the job - being a role model. I would rate their attitude as sad but relieved.
There’s more - this guy had a best buddy on the staff, and he came to me that evening. This guy was pretty clueless but got the role model part of the job, and had done a decent job. He comes to see me that evening, and tells me that he and Fired Guy had a pact that if one of them got fired, the other would resign. :eek:
So he resigns that night. I went from having a full staff to being at 60% staff in a few hours. That guy’s resignation left me speechless.
(It turns out I ended up firing the lone male left from that staff that summer. I felt bad because it involved an off-campus event where he was busted for underage drinking. He was a good guy and worked hard. To his credit, he took it like the stand-up guy he was.)
So everything worked out in the end, eh?
:rolleyes:
The actions and reasoning of Westboro Baptist consistently leave me speechless. You got WHAT from the Bible??? 
:eek:
I’ve never been speechless, but I’ve been unable to stop myself from laughing at someone before.
One was when I was a teenager in a doctor’s office waiting room. A guy had his shirt buttoned incorrectly, oblivious to how ridiculous he looked. I pointed it out to my mother, and she scolded me for making fun of disabled people. Turns out the guy only had one hand, and I didn’t even notice. I couldn’t help it! I laughed so hard that I’m sure I made a scene.
Another was with a new coworker who seemed a bit “off”. I’m no doctor, but a monkey could have diagnosed this girl with a pathological lying problem. She lied about everything. She failed high school because she wouldn’t sleep with the teacher. She’s teaching her boyfriend to read. Her mother kicked her out of the house for dating a black man (I knew her mother, and happened to know that she was living with her as she was claiming to be kicked out). One of her roommates tried to pimp her out. Our boss hated her for having red hair (this particular boss was responsible for hiring her, by the way). Literally every conversation I saw her engage in was sprinkled with such obvious attention seeking bullshit that I couldn’t help but giggle when she finished a completely unrelated sentence with “and they never found my molester!” with a very matter-of-fact sense of finality. Did I mention that this came out of nowhere? The person she was talking to had mentioned something about a friend or family member that was training to be a policeman, and that goofy response came out.
I can’t believe I laughed at someone who claimed to have been molested, but I guess I’m just a bad person.
Sitting at the downtown mall, at a table outside a restaurant, taking a breif rest.
A man (with cane, but young) and woman came by. He sat down, they got loud with each other.
A security man was walking by, heard this, and walked up and said Can you keep it down please? very nicely.
The man looked at him, and yelled Fuck you! Fuck you!
The guard said something on his radio, and then the man said I’m on crack, call the police!
The woman goes, Why you gotta be like that?
They both walk away (thank God). I hope they were kicked out.
This one still makes me giggle. The canteen at work had cheeseburgers on the menu one day. They had never done cheeseburgers before and have not done so since. As we were all sitting around a colleague came in and asked for a cheeseburger and drink. He was told it would take ten minutes or so to prepare which is normal since it is a small canteen and they don’t keep food under the lamps for hours on end on the offchance that somebody will wander in.
So he sat down and chatted to us and mentioned that he had failed to get a promotion he had gone for. We duly commiserated. After ten minutes or so he was called back and presented with his meal which seemed unusually cheap. He checked and yes, there was the drink; yes, there was the bun; yes, there was the cheese; wtf? Where’s the actual burger?!? :eek: The cook smiled and told him she’d given him a discount because one of the ingredients was missing and that seemed to be that. She showed no clue that something was very, very odd about the meal she’d just served up.
Aside from the hysterical laughter we were all pretty much speechless. Sometimes a thing is *so * wrong you just don’t know where to start.
I’m a bike messenger. A while ago, I was delivering a package a bit after 5:00. It was a snowy, wet, miserable afternoon, and there was just this one last delivery at the end of the day that I had to head well out of downtown to bring back in all by itself. Truly a shitty job by the standards of the business, but I’ve certainly done worse, so whatever.
However, when I finally got to the place it was to be delivered to, the only people left were a small group in a conference room. As one of these guys was signing for the delivery, another asked me, “so how’s the weather out there?” I really couldn’t do anything other than glare at him through the drops of melting snow falling from the hood of my raincoat, pointedly averting my eyes to the huge window where anyone could plainly see the “wintry mix” falling from the sky, then back at the guy. I think he got my basic meaning (“it’s obviously wet and snowy out”) but missed the feeling with which I was saying it (“I’m obviously cold and wet, and am not really in the mood to make lighthearted banter about the matter”), as he responded with “kinda wet out there, huh?”.
As I turned and left without comment, I did notice what seemed to be an expression on the faces of the others in the room that I would characterize as embarrassment over one’s colleague making an ass of himself in front of someone else and not noticing it, while decorum prevents one from calling out his colleague on the matter.
Either way, I was rendered speechless.
I have on occasion been rendered speechless by a particularly gorgeous woman.
I found out a bar regular gave birth. The child is a coworkers. She went out drinking up until a week before. She nor the father say they knew she was pregnant.
I am extremely white and totally anti-religion. Someone told me to send a flyer to the “Black Churches” in the area. I asked him which ones. “Oh, you know the black churches in the area.”
I couldn’t begin to tell him what was wrong with that statement.
I’ve been in some adult social situations where I’m pretty incoherent afterwards. My wife and our friends call it PCD (Post Coital Dementia).
I was working hard at my minimum-wage job. One aspect of this was clearing away dishes and carrying them in a bus tray to the dishwasher, which was behind the counter. One day while trying to do this I encountered one of my colleagues. This woman was hired several years after I had been, but she was older than me and really cocky and thinking she was management material (while I was just a student working for school money) so she acted like my manager all the time, which really pissed me off since she had no apparent idea what she was doing. But I kept my head down and did my job because what’s the point in causing trouble? I spent a lot of time at that job biting my tongue.
So when I encountered her at this time, she was standing and yapping and dogf*cking in the entryway I needed to go through to get to the dishwasher. As I was carrying a bus tray full of dishes at the time, and the entryway was quite narrow, and the colleague was not, there was quite simply no room for me and my dishes to progress through it. In other words, I was working hard, she was goofing off, and in the process of her goofing off she was actively and immediately interfering with me doing my job, which was also her job, which she was too lazy to do. So I stood there with the bus tray, only feet away from my destination (the dishwasher), and the obstacle in my path was totally oblivious. I stood there for a moment to see if maybe she would realize that she was really part of the problem; however, she didn’t notice, her conversation would not be interrupted so that I could do my/our job.
So, expecting to catch her attention and cause her to say “Oh! Sorry” and move out of the way, as any normal human would, I said “Excuse me, please.”
She laughed and said “What’d you do - fart?”
I told a colleague the reason I had to switch projects at work was because I was pregnant (again - my 2nd). (I work in a laboratory, said project involved a known teratogen)
He said, “So soon? Was it intentional?”
I had a variety of pithy responses to such a question*, and they all escaped me. All I could do was goggle at the rudeness.
*No, we don’t know how this keeps happening
No, but considering my husband and I go at it like crazed weasels, it was bound to happen sooner or later
Yes, it’s part of our plot to take over the world
Yes, I just do it for the maternity leave
No, but apparently athletic socks are terrible prophylactics
No, and since when are my reproductive plans any business of yours?
As long as you’re asking about my sex life, what’s your favorite position?