I hope this hasn’t been done before but I’ve just been thinking back to some of my most cringe-tastic “please let the world swallow me up now” moments. To make me feel better I’m hoping that there are some of you out there in Dopeland with a worse case of this disease than me. I’ll start the ball rolling…
My old science teacher at school was perhaps the most fiercesome individual I have ever met. She was seriously scary. One day while waiting for her to arrive for the lesson our class was queued up outside the lab. At that moment for a reason that still escapes me I decided to tell a joke: “What’s the difference between Mrs. X and a walrus - One’s got a moustache and smells of fish and the other’s a walrus”. Of course everyone thought this was hilarious and fell about the floor laughing but only for a split second as Mrs. X had walked around the corner with a look of absolute fury on her face…bugger. Subsequently I got what was (deservedly) coming to me (my school report for science that year has to be seen to be believed, despite the fact I came top in my year!).
This next one happened to a good friend of mine and I have never, ever, seen somebody look like they want the world to swallow them up so badly. A great example of foot-in-mouth disease…
A few friends and I were sitting in our local (pub) waiting for this friend to arrive. He had never met Mark, who was sitting to my right but had heard of his extreme talent for practical joking. On arriving my friend says to Mark (spotting the large bulge in his shirt and thinking he has spotted a practical joke), “what’s that you’re hiding down your shirt or are you just hideously deformed?”. I’m sure you can guess what happened next - Doh!
I was at the wedding of a friend’s sister. She and I graduated from school together. As my guests at the wedding were my then-girlfriend, Stacey, and Mage, who’s idea of whispering is akin to anyone else’s normal, conversational tone. I’m sitting on the aisle, Stacey right next to me, Mage on the other side of her. When Jenny, the bride, gets right at my left shoulder, Mage leans over Stacey and says, in HIS conversational tone, “A white dress? Who’s she trying to kid? She was a requirement for graduation, wasn’t she, Kev?”
Okay, I’m probably 14. I’m with my best friend who lives down the road. She’s the youngest of 5 kids. Her wild older sister and her sister’s friend come pick us up (can’t remember why) and take us over to their apartment they share with a gay couple. Nice guys, real friendly. Everyone is very nice, doesn’t care that we’re really kids.
Okay, onward. So everyone’s smoking pot (except for me and Billi) and we both pretty much had a contact high. She and I are sitting on the couch and one of the guys is going to show us a joke or something with a Q-tip. He kneels in front of me and starts to do the joke (which I cannot even remember) and is teasing me and poking at me, just being silly. And I burst out, not in a mad way, “Get away from me, you faggot!” The room was silent for a second and then they all burst out laughing. My face must’ve been red as a theatre curtain and I mumbled “Oh my god, I’m so sorry…” and was shamefaced the rest of the night. He gave me a hug and told me to think nothing of it. The whole rest of the night, someone would yell out “Get away from me, you faggot!” and they’d laugh like it was the funniest thing in the room.
Oooh, I can’t believe I did that. I’m still embarrassed about it to this day and feel bad that I used such a word.
Funny, at my reunion this past weekend, my friend Mandy did something almost like this (she thought it was funny, though she was temporarily embarrassed.)
In HS, she was very much the “band geek” and a bookworm, IOW, not noticed by the “popular” people. Physically, she’s changed…a lot. So, at the reunion, she is surrounded by all these former jocks and “popular” guys and they’re just pleased as punch to be talking to her. At one point, they are talking about one of the guys that couldn’t make it there and then, of course, about the HS glory days of football. Mandy pipes up “Hey, didn’t he shave his number into the hair on the back of his head? Man, that was totally gay!”
Half the guys laugh, the other half quietly slink away.
A few minutes later, the guys that laughed told Mandy that the other guys had had their numbers shaved in, too.
Hehe. i’ve done the “foot-in-mouth” thing many times, but luckily have been able to totally suppress the memories.
[sub]Also, no offense to the homosexual population here, but you get the drift as these were former jocks, “manly-men” (yeah, right) being called gay.[/sub]
This just happened on Sunday, and I am still going bright red thinking about it.
Met a guy at the pub - a friend of a friend of a friend. We spent several hours drinking, chatting, having a great time. I found him quite attractive and at closing, as we were leaving, I somehow (this is AMAZING for me) got the nerve to say “Here’s my phone number, call me sometime”. He seemed happy enough with that and as we parted he gave me a hug and said “Lovely to meet you”. I tried to say “Lovely to meet you to” but in my semi-drunk, semi-awed state the words came out of my mouth as “Love you too!” I have never soooo wished for the floor to open up and swallow me up instantly …
High School math class, Our teacher, who wasn’t real fond of me anyway, had been out for two funerals in the past two weeks. She anounces to the class that she will be out on friday for yet another funeral.
I blurt out “is your whole family on death row or something?”
The look she gave me…the looks my classmates gave me…it just cant be described.
Oh, god in heaven. I must be the queen of these moments - at least, I know I’ll be sitting there, innocently staring off into space at a stoplight or something, and suddenly a hideous, horrible memory of this type will burst into my brain. Sometimes when this happens I cannot suppress an actual, out-loud squealing noise.
So, the first one that came to mind when I read this thread:
I was, oh, 13. I’d been invited by a friend to her church youth group’s all night pizza and bowling party. (Yes, really.) The youth group leader was going from table to table in the pizza parlor (before we headed over to the bowling place), chatting with people, meeting the newbies. He got to our table and asked if anyone had heard any good jokes lately. Well, I never, ever can think of a joke - especially when someone asks - but this time, I had just heard one earlier that day and it had somehow stuck in my mind - a true rarity. I thought, with glee, “I can tell a JOKE! Yay!” Unfortunately, I did not pause to reflect on situational appropriateness. This was the joke I told to the assembled youth group folks and the leader from this very fundamentalist church:
“What do the female deer do when the male deer are on vacation? Go out and blow a few bucks.”
Frozen silence was the result. And I still had to spend all night with those people. Oh, help.
Some people from my LO’s graduate school were having a party - the host was, well, let us call him David. One of the other grad students - we will call him George - brought his lover, Eric, to the party. First time anyone had met Eric. So David had been doing cutesy introductions all night, you know, introducing so-and-so’s girlfriend as “John’s lovely little headache” and so on. Friendly insults. George introduced Eric to David, and David took him around to introduce him to everyone else. This was how David chose to introduce Eric:
“Guys, this is Eric, George’s pain in the ass.”
The expression on (and color of) David’s face, the moment of silence, the howls of laughter, and all the subsequent jokes (which lasted until they graduated) I will leave you to imagine.
Ooh, deepblue, you reminded me of one of mine. In high school, for reasons that still evade me, I became involved in Young Life, the quasi-non-denominational Christian youth organization. Part of this was an 8-day mountain-climbing excursion in the wilds of British Columbia. The trip up took most of a night, with the group arriving very early in the morning. On top of that, I was jet-lagged for the first time, tired, cranky.
I started walking along with a girl I’ll call M. M was recently Born Again, and still in the throes of vigorous Christianity. I tred to describe how this windsurfing lesson I’d taken had been instructed by a guy who looked like Arnold Schwartzenager. She just didn’t get it. I repeated his name a bunch of times and finally, in frustration, blurted out, “Jesus Christ, M!”
It could not have been more inappropriate. More than one person gasped. And it took place in the 2nd hour of the first day of the trip.
This happened a few years ago…
I was driving some friends home after school one day. I went to drop one of them off who happened to live one street away from me. The day before I had noticed a dead cat in her neighbor’s yard, but I didn’t say anything. That day I decided to say, “gross, look at that dead cat in that yard.” She looked over and immediately started crying. She said, “Skippy!!” and ran out of my car. I was thinking, damn that’s sad.
…but it’s really funny now.
Actually we have done this before. I started the thread. But I’m not bitter. Don’t worry about me…
So recently I went to the supermarket with my girlfriend. We had grabbed our beer and snacks, and were ready to get on line. We stood for a moment to observe the checkout lines, and I saw there was a family of midgets at one of the registers.
OK, so there’s midgets. Whatever.
Girlfriend hasn’t noticed them. She’s still scanning the lines, and asks me, “Which line do you want to go on?”
I say, “Whichever one is shorter.” I guess I said it loudly, because they turned around and glared at me.
I program a mainframe computer for a living. To access the mainframe, we use a PC that’s part of a LAN (local area network) and the LAN is hooked into the mainframe. When the LAN goes down due to hardware failure the mainframe programmers are unable to access the mainframe and we basically stand around with nothing to do.
On one such occassion I was standing around with some other programmers just generally complaining about the LAN group and how our group would not be allowed to let the mainframe go down for such an extended time. We were jokingly suggesting things we could do to ‘encourage’ the LAN group to get on the ball. One of the lead programmers was walking by and heard us. I had worked with this lead and was very fortunate to have done so. He is highly skilled and still patient enough to teach younger programmers and make things seem simple; simply put I admire this guy for his technical and people skills. As an aside, he happens to be missing a thumb, for reasons I’ve never learned (it was never an issue as far as I was concerned).
He stops by our conversation and he says “You know what we should do to enourage the LAN group to fix this problem?” Without missing a beat or even thinking about what I was gonna say I blurted out “We should start chopping their fingers off one by one.” The whole group got awkwardly silent but the lead didn’t bat an eye and just went on with what he was going to say. He’s a great guy and I felt like the putz of the century.
This is what happened to me a couple of weeks of go. I felt so bad, as bad as I’d felt in decades, and I’m only 26.
This guy who works providing care for elderly people is bringing one home with him. He has the man sitting down while he goes to get the elevator for our building. His keys are in the call box holding the elevator opened and he’s heading back towards the old man. This is when I walk in. He says to me in a polite tone “This guy’s going upstairs, let him go.” I mumble something and rush right by him into the elevator and press my floor but the door doesn’t close. I lean out to put my key in the call box to jiggle it. We’ve had some problems that would cause the door to remain open, and that was the temporary fix. As I do so he pleads with me about the difficulty he’s having getting the old man into the elevator due to his crippling condition. I nod absent mindedly and spot his keys in the call box, turn them so the door will close. He says in a really hurt voice “Those are my keys.” I mumble something again get back in the elevator and take off.
Ok, that’s what he saw, this is the way I saw it, for exactly 30 minutes after the episode.
I walk into the lobby this guy says to another man sitting on the bench “This guy’s going up, let him go.” I think how nice, they wont try to follow me up, I mumble thanks and hurry into the elevator since the door is open. I want to get there before it closes. I get in push my button and lean to check the call box. The guy then says something really insulting to the old man, but through me. Now I think oh man they’re having a fight, get out before it get’s ugly. So now I’m a little nervous when I see his key in the call box it doesn’t dawn on me that he’s called it. I turn it and go up thinking whew.
I felt soooooo bad, I was up till 4am tossing in bed cursing myself for not seeing what was happening quicker. The guy must think I’m such an asshole. Sadly I haven’t seen him seince to apologize.
Oh, I’ve just remembered another one. Each Christmas our neighbours pop round briefly for a few drinks and last year was no exception. Irene (our neighbour) was telling us how her elderly uncle had just had a mild stroke whilst he was at a party two weeks ago. As luck would have it there were several doctors in attendance and he was cared for quickly. Upon hearing this my Mum says “Blimey, that was a stroke of luck”. The room went quiet as my Mum realised what she had said, my Dad and I had to strain ourselves to breaking point to stop laughing. All was quickly forgiven though as Irene doubled up in laughter.
