My all time worst story but it shows the environment of my upbringing:
I grew up in South Dakota was at my first week at college - I was playing on the football team in a far away city. One of my teammates came up to me and he was always joking around says, “I bet I’m the first black guy you’ve ever seen after growing up in the Dakota!”
My response: “Well actually no, we actually have a federal prison in town.”
He says, “Oh right!” [or something as equally in agreement with my statement]
One of the other guys on the team says, “You can’t say that!”
I shout, “No that’s not what I meant. See the federal prison brings a lot of people from around the country as employees! So I had the warden’s son and 3 or 4 other black guys in my school… [and then I couldn’t just keep my mouth shut] Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen a black prisoner. It’s a minimum prison so it’s mostly a bunch of rich white guys who embezzled or money laundered.”
So in my naivete, I didn’t associate blacks with prison, but I also apparently didn’t associate them with white collar crimes either. The original question asker had to leave practice as he was laughing so hard at me and couldn’t respond to the coach.
Not my greatest moment. My future wife heard about this two+ years later from someone who still thought it was a hilarious story.
A friend of mine called me one day and asked if I wanted to go see a local band that was playing that night.
I reply, “No way, they fucking suck.” There’s a click noise from the phone and a long pause before he starts talking again, this time in kind of an angry whisper. “Dude, I had you on speakerphone! I’m at the bar and was standing right beside one of the guys in the band!”
Oops. He’d met the guy and was talking to him and for some reason assumed I was a fan so he called me up.
Sorry local band guy, if I’d known you were there I’d have been nicer about it.
In high school, a girl and I were teasing a teacher about thinking she was pregnant.
It turned out she had recently suffered a miscarriage. I’ve never made a pregnant joke since.
In college, for some reason I came up with a very stereotypical Jewish surname - “Greenberg-owitzsky-stein” or something similar. A guy I had just met (who was Jewish) got offended by it. My high school had been about 50% Jewish, and I learned quickly that things that are OK when a minority isn’t a minority are not OK where the minority really is a minority.
Another one who probably does this on a daily basis. I’m like a bull in a china shop. Makes it worse that the circumstances are usually such that the Thais are left thinking: “Geez, stupid foreigners.”
Oddly enough, if I try to offend someone, I never seem to pull it off quite.
My best friend and I have known each other for 14 years (we lived in the same dorm when she was a freshman and I was a junior), but about a month after we met I made her so upset that a mutual friend’s intervention was the only reason she ever spoke to me again. Remember those electronic pets that were popular back in the mid to late 90s? She had one, it was a cat.
One day she tells me that her cat died, so I shrugged and said, “Why don’t you just start over?” Her response was to burst into tears and leave the room, which I found very very odd. It was only later that night that I talked to another friend, and she explained that the “cat” in question was a real cat at home, not the toy our friend had in the dorm. Oh damn.
The other friend immediately told her that I clearly had no idea that she was talking about a real cat, and she said that she thought it over and realized that she never actually had mentioned the fact that she had a real cat too.
We laugh about it now, but back then I was horrified to have come off so insensitive.
I was visiting my dad about a month ago. We were watching Antique Road Show and someone had inherited some ugly jewelry that ended up being worth $50,000.00 or more. Joking, I asked my dad why we didn’t inherit anything like that. He told me, “well, you’re going to get some of the instruments (guitars, banjos).”
I reply, “Well, I won’t be able to sell those.” Meaning, that they would mean something to me as they came from him and I would keep them for sentimental reasons.
He took it as, “They’re not worth anything.” He says after a minute, “They’re actually worth quite a bit. More than a couple thousand each.”
I felt so bad. After a while I clarified and he seemed to be okay with it then.
I think I may have mentioned this here before. I still wonder about this.
I shared a work-station with a coworker who had a young son. The coworker had a second job at a camera shop and was an avid amateur photographer, and was constantly showing me pictures of his kid (which I enjoyed). We had an easy, casual, jokey relationship.
His wife had a second baby, and for maybe about a week I was pestering the guy to bring in some pics of the new baby, but for some reason he didn’t. Finally one day, I jokingly referred to the new baby as “the alleged baby” or something like that, sort of an early “pics or it didn’t happen” joke. He was SO MAD AT ME. He told me to never speak so disrespectfully of his family again, and I don’t think he ever really forgave me.
I was really astonished (and still don’t really get it) - maybe it wasn’t all that funny, but I certainly didn’t mean to upset him. He did bring in pictures a couple days later, and she was cute as pie. I’ll always wonder why he didn’t bring them earlier, and why he was so mad.
A friend was talking about people “realizing” that they were gay late in life. I was much younger and arrogant at the time, and I lit into that argument: “That’s bullshit! Being gay is fine, but if you don’t know who you are by the time you’re an adult, you’re naive and repressed! And if you go and get married and start a family, then you are totally betraying them by hiding your real self!”
After about 20 minutes of me spouting off like an ass, he revealed: His own mother had come to terms with being lesbian when he was in his teens. His parents divorced. He was still on good terms with both of them, but man I felt like a jerk-ass heel. As well I should.
A couple of people in my family have come out as gay since then. I still cringe when I remember myself arguing vehemently, “IF YOU’RE X, YOU’RE X AND YOU KNOW IT FROM BIRTH! ADMIT IT IMMEDIATELY! THERE ARE NO SOCIAL PRESSURES THAT MIGHT MAKE YOU HIDE OR DELUDE YOURSELF FROM ADMITTING X!”
Even as a gay man myself, who DID manage to come to terms with it early in life and let my immediately family know, I still sometimes find myself getting a little bit annoyed when I hear about people waiting until they are in their 30’s or 40’s to come out as gay. It’s puzzling even to me, in a way. Obviously I can understand why it happens, and it doesn’t really make me vehemently angry like it did to you, but I have this deep rooted core belief that if everybody came out as early as possible, the world would be a better place.
Remembered something specific, and I did mention this before in another thread. I swear this is a true story. It was back in West Texas, and I had just returned from a trip to Mexico. I was sitting in my regular bar, when this lady of my acquaintance said hello and mentioned she hadn’t seen me for a while. I said I’d been in Mexico. She said, in all seriousness as I was soon to learn: “Where’s that?” I laughed at what I thought was her little joke, but it hurt her feelings enormously. She said in a hurtful tone of voice: “Well, I’m not smart like you.” Turns out she honestly did not know where Mexico was despite having been born and raised in Texas. Granted, she was not the smartest bulb in the bunch at the best of times, and I don’t think she had finished high school – she’d left to pursue a, um, professional career – but I was flummoxed by that revelation and felt bad to boot. She was not kidding, you had to know her.
I’m pretty good at avoiding these situations. I generally avoid talking about politics, religion, pregnancies, etc. with people who I don’t already know their opinions.
I do have a tendency to intentionally offend people though.
I was having a religious argument with a coworker about why a god would be so narcissistic as to condemn someone to hell for disbelieving when I said it’s not like they murdered somebody and actually deserve to burn in hell. Then I remembered his daughter had recently been sent up for murder. The hurt look on his face made me want to crawl under a rock.
'Gee asshole, that sucks. Maybe you could try not putting people on speakerphone without asking if it’s ok first." would have been my response. I refuse to feel bad for choices others make.
I’m sure I’ve unintentionally offended someone at some point but none come to mind immediately.
“Ever unintentionally offend someone?”
what kind of dumbass retard asks a question like this?
oh wait
yeah at least weekly probably considerably more often than that. people who know me come to me for the brutally honest answer.
Apparently, I have mortally offended one of my teachers.
September was a bad month - depression-wise, health-wise, crap going on with my family-wise. In said class, the teacher had stressed that we did not need to attend in person and were more than welcome to simply do the work online. I was relieved, because thanks to the depression, my sleep patterns were so disrupted, I wasn’t falling asleep until a couple of hours before the class started anyways.
I did not get the assignments turned in on time. The syllabus specifically states: ‘no late work accepted’. The teacher had said in class ‘well, I’ll take maybe one late assignment, but no more!’
I finally pulled my brain together last Thursday and emailed the teacher saying “I know the syllabus says this. I am asking a huge, huge favor. I am dealing with this illness, this learning disability, and this family stuff, and I would be hugely grateful if you would consider taking these assignments late. Pretty please. Sugar. Kiss your toes. Thank you humbly for reading this.” And I turned in all but two of the missing assignments without waiting to hear back from her, just to show her I was serious.
Apparently, I am a whining, entitled, hostile bully who is trying to turn this into a legal matter. How dare I use my illness and learning disability to make excuses for what is clearly a character flaw? I may withdraw with a WF or fail the class, and that it all the consideration I deserve.
Still trying to figure out how exactly I managed to piss her off that much.
I’ve done it a lot because I’m a smartass. When people know you’re sarcastic, they expect you to say rude things. Doesn’t help that I mumble.
The time I’m thinking of, though, was online, back in the BBS days. I was just getting into UseNet or whatever the thing was called and there was a Rush Limbaugh group. Somebody suggested that crime could be pretty much eradicated by using the death penalty for all felonies.
I posted that the idea was genocidal because convicted felons in the US are mostly black, or at least disproportionate to population. I annoyed just about everybody on that saw my response, except, for some reason, the person I replied to. I think some of them would’ve happily tarred and feathered me.
I did something very similar, but worse. My best friend from school was round my house and we were for some reason talking about Tiger Balm. He said that in some Asian countries people put a touch of it on each other’s genitals it as an aphrodisiac/sex toy.
To which I replied “That’s why you’ve got some in your house - I bet your mother rubs it all over the huge pile of condoms she has by her bed.” He went white and very quiet.
His father had died barely a week before.
It wasn’t like I didn’t know this: I’d been at the hospital just after he died of cancer, and stayed over in their house for a few days cooking for them and doing errands and chores while they grieved, as well as being the ‘messenger of death’, calling up and visiting friends to let them know the awful news.
But in the course of one of the first ‘normal’ conversations we’d had since the death, the adolescent ‘yo mama’ part of my brain kicked in and overrode all of those circumstances. I blame evolution.
I might have, and I can only pray that the person didn’t hear me.
I was joking with some co-workers about why I’m never having kids. I said “I tell my husband that at my age I’ll end up with a kid who has Autism, Down’s Syndrome and colic put together!”
…while standing outside the cubicle of a dear co-worker who’s son is Autistic.
I felt like CRAP but I never said anything to him and he never let on that he was mad at me or anything, so I can only hope that he wasn’t paying attention and didn’t hear my foot launch firmly into my mouth.
