At the time, I was a bank teller, and was fomenting an interest in learning conducting. The bank was accross the street from a music school, and a lot of students had accounts with us. One student left a baton at my window one day. I had no idea who, and after a week of no one claiming it, I decided to keep it.
When the idiot assistant manager saw it, he comment was “What do you use that to pinch girls up the butt?”
Twenty years later, I still have no idea how to answer that.
About 30 years ago, when I was single and most assuredly unattached, I went out one night with 3 friends. None of us were dating, in fact, the man who silenced me was married, but we were all in the Navy, undergoing training at the same school, and this was a night of decompression.
The married guy was literally softspoken - you had to pay attention when conversing with him - whereas I was just a *wee bit * of a smartass. As we sat there goofing on each other, I landed a particularly stinging joke at his expense. I smiled angelically as he sat quietly, playing with the stemmed marischino cherry in his drink. Then he held up the cherry, looked at me, and said “Trade ya?”
I had no response, although when my disbelief passed, I laughed myself silly.
I guess all was forgiven - when he and his wife joined a bowling league, he trusted me to ride herd on his 2 sons. I believe he eventually made Admiral before he retired.
I spent a long time wondering if I should ask a girl I knew for a date. I finally came to a firm decision:- it would be a bad idea.
Literally 10 minutes later she phones me up out of the blue.
Her - “how would you like to go for a drink sometime?”
Me - “er, yes, er, no, er…”
At my last office I worked with a Syrian guy, Mark in his late 50’s. One day he was stood talking to one of the Server guys when a fairly large woman walked past, he turned to the guy and said loud enough even for the girl to hear: “who would go out with that fat bitch, she’s fucking ugly, fat, disgusting etc etc…” the guy turned to Mark “that’s my wife”.
Not just Mark but the entire office was speechless. How Mark wasn’t punched in the face I don’t know, he did go back later and offer to buy them dinner at a restaurant but unsurprisingly it wasn’t accepted.
Just goes to show; if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.
This was more of a rendered completely mentally dead:
Through a few channels I came across a site that pokes fun at parents who name their children terrible things.
One in particular was the little girl named Vienna. That made me shake my head. The speechless part came when people commented that it was a beautiful name reminiscent of Italy and at some point, Switzerland. The fact that someone named their child Vienna had me agog. That so many people thought it was Italian had me dead in the water.
I’m pretty fiesty about giving kids bad names to begin with but I nearly died right then and there.
A few years ago, in a debate between a couple of mayoral candidates, one guy hit the other with a bit of a zinger, somewhat of a low blow, if I recall correctly, and the zingee froze. Just absolutely froze. For ages. Didn’t say a word. Finally the crowd began to chuckle. The press began laughing. The candidate who lobbed the zinger began to snicker and make little gestures, as though coaxing a shy child to go ahead and speak. It was excruciating. It went on forever. I couldn’t watch anymore. Later, the guy lamely claimed he’d been waiting for an apology, given that the other candidate had made a very questionable remark. Anyway, the zingee won the election. I think many felt bad for him.
When I was in the Navy, at nuclear power school in Orlando, one day I was walking to the mess hall for lunch, and the area was a sea of young sailors in dress whites, hundreds of guys coming and going. At the time, the program was male-only, but there were women on base for other schools.
As I got closer to the mess hall, an absolutely stunning blond girl came out and walked towards me. When she was about 100 feet away, I turned to the nearest random guy and said “Wow, would you check out the tits on that one.”
Of course, I watched in horror as she kept coming closer, until she linked arms with the guy who was at my side. :eek:
I learned my lesson about crude guy talk with strangers.
Now from the other side:
One day I needed to drop off my wife’s car at the garage for an oil change and some minor repairs. We drove in separate cars, but I went first because I needed to get gas too.
The attendant came over and started pumping (no self serve in NJ). As he filled the tank, my wife pulled up and parked her car off by the garage. She started walking in our direction. While she was fifty feet away, the attendant glanced up and said, “Helllloooo…” in sort of a leering way, as if to say “Check out what’s coming this way”
I watched his expression change as she walked up and opened the passenger door and climbed in. He quickly walked into the gas station, never to appear again. One of his co-workers came over and finished fillign the tank.
What is so wrong with the name Vienna? I get that they were mixing up two similarly sounding cities on a continent half way around the world that they have probably never been to… this is not something that would leave me speechless, but to each his own. But you said the name Vienna in itself had you shaking your head. Why?
This reminded me of another story - I wasn’t exactly speechless, since my reaction did involve sound.
When I was in college, a classmate of mine was an attractive guy who decided to try out that new-fangled computer dating thing and personal ads, and all that, despite my subtle hints at interest in him. I was *too * subtle!!!
Anyway, for a variety of reasons, he got kicked out of college, and I went on the graduate and eventually buy a house. He happened to be living not too far away and I invited him to come visit me. At this point, it had been about 2 years since I’d seen him. Shortly after he got to the house, I was showing him around the place, chattering away, when out of the blue he said: “Would you like to have sex with me sometime?”
:eek:
So, I started laughing. I thought he was kidding. Then I saw that he wasn’t. I mean, come on - for almost 3 years in college, I practically threw myself at him, hoping we could maybe date and stuff, but he was more interested in finding strangers from classified ads. Then barely an hour after renewing our acquaintance, he asks me that?!?!?
Well, that pretty much killed any feelings I might have had for him. I don’t recall how the rest of the day went, but the next day, he left and I never heard from him again.
A woman I once worked with was listening to a conversation about evolution and how skin color might well be a function of environment, i.e., natives of Africa needed black skin because it was too hot for a lot of clothing and black skin prevented the more serious sunburns whereas people in the cold northern climes developed white skin because they wore more clothes and thus didn’t need black skin. At that point the woman in question stopped the conversation cold by stating it was all a damn lie; she personally knew plenty of black people who lived in New York and not a single one of them ever turned white. Up to that point, the conversation had been pure conjecture but no one seemed able to even explain that much. One by one, people just drifted away.
At the job I recently left, I was working on a brochure when my coworker pointed at the photo of a black child on my computer screen and said, in a mock-child voice, “When I grow up, I’m gonna rob people.” Me: speechless.
I had reported many of his racist and sexist comments, and the coworker had been reading the emails I had been sending to the boss. So, one day, he confronted me on it. He said, “you rat me out again, I’ll kill ya.” I managed to say, “What?” But he wouldn’t repeat it. Which was fine because I was speechless that a 42-year-old would say something like that.
My sister’s husband is that guy’s clone. He is an abusive personality, always insulting and/or yelling if things don’t go how he wants and it’s no secret that my brother and I don’t like him. One day, while our whole family was visiting my grandparents, his toddler son threw a ball that hit me square in the face. Everyone laughed, but I just kind of shook my head because I was suffering from a headache. My sister said, “Ben, we don’t hit people in the face.” Her husband picks up the ball and says, “Yeah, Ben, we don’t do this.” Then he threw the ball, hard as he could, and hit me square in the face. I remember locking eyes with my brother, and I managed to say, “I’m not saying anything.” It was my way of letting my brother know that I was too speechless and shocked to speak. Also, I was hoping my brother would get my telepathic message, “I have a headache, you strangle him.”
I thought of another one that makes me burn with rage when I recall it. I like to go into movies with as little knowledge about them as possible, except that they’re generally good or I have some reason to go. So my father was mentioning a movie he recommended and I said, “OK, but don’t tell me anything about it.” “Well, her father dies and then she kills herself”. --> cue me, speechless, not even able to sputter. What I really wanted to say was, “WHAT PART OF ‘DON’T TELL ME ANYTHING ABOUT IT’ WASN’T CLEAR???”
Time has given me the perspective to realize he thought maybe I knew the general facts of this obscure person’s life (it was biographical) and he wasn’t spoiling that, but in fact I didn’t. Strangely enough, I don’t memorize the life story of every vaguely public persona.
OK, one experience leaps to mind.
Many years ago, I had an office job. I had a buddy that was a salesman for another company. We would chat on the phone 1-2X per week just to keep up.
My buddy being a salesman was not always at his desk, so I talked to his secretary a lot. We go to be pretty fair phone friends (knew each other by name, chatted briefly when we talked). Anyway, here is how one of those conversations went:
Me: Hi is Bob there?
Her: Hi Rick, you know he is never here.
Me: Yeah I know, but hope springs eternal, can you take a message?
Her: Sure I do that better than almost anything else in the world.
Me: (laughing) OK, I’ll bite. What do you do better than anything else in the whole world?
Her: Give head.
Me: :eek:
Speechless, I was totally without a comeback. It was hours before I could even start to think of a good comeback to that line.
Was the movie Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, was it about the life of the poet Sylvia Plath? She’s the only person I can of who had a biopic recently who had father issues and killed herself.
