Have you ever said the WRONG thing?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Tell me about a time you have said something terribly wrong by mistake. Something thoughtless or tactless that caused people to gasp in horror!

Here are my two examples:

  1. I once had a business lunch with a man with one arm. No big deal, I’ve seen people with amputated limbs before. He offered no explanation (and why would he?), so we just went about our meeting and lunch.

When the waitress came over to ask if we wanted more coffee, the guy said no. She then tried to persuade him in a friendly way, saying it was just brewed and was really good.

I don’t know what made me say this, but what tumbled out of my mouth was, “Don’t twist his arm.”

Everyone froze. The waitress looked at me with her mouth hanging open. People at other tables stopped and stared. I think the damn coffee she was pouring froze in mid-air. But the guy winked at me and said to the waitress, “Yeah - look what happened the LAST time somebody twisted my arm.”

So I got out of that one. But…

  1. A few hours ago I was at the supermarket with my GF. As we went to the cash registers I noticed there was a family of midgets on one of the lines buying their groceries. GF asked me which line I wanted to go on. I said, “I don’t know, which line do you think is shorter?”

They turned around and looked at me, maybe wondering if I had said it on purpose to make fun of them. I tried to act as if I wasn’t aware of what I’d said, then slinked over to another line feeling ahsolutely mortified and guilty.

Now let’s hear your stories!

2

Okay, in portuguese we have this expression “who died” that is used qhen you arrive somewhere and the air is heavy.

You can see where this is heading can’t you?
She had just been notified her father had died. Every single person in the damn room froze and stared except for my friend Pedro who grabbed my arm threw me out of the room and explained it to me.

Yeah, I am a tactless bastard.

3

Sorry if I’ve told this one before.

When my father died, the family took care of all the arrangements independent of a funeral home. My brother called me five days after our dad’s death, emotionally drained, to tell me that the cremation had still not been done, that the people at the cremation society weren’t being cooperative, and that he just couldn’t deal with it anymore. So I told him, “Don’t worry, I’ll call them up and see if I can light a fire under them.”

I do this stuff all the time.

4

Well, it was a friend who did this.

He was waiting to get into a club, and someone bumped him from behind. He heard a woman's voice say "Oh, is there a line?"

  Being a sarcastic sort, he said "No, it's a mirage" and turned around to see a woman he knows slightly. He does know her well enough to know Judy is blind.

   He said he felt about 2" tall, and just went home.
5

This doesn’t quite fit, but close enough. In my freshman year of college I was talking with an attractive woman whose intelligence I was undecided about. We start talking about papers (for english class, or whatever) we’d written. She mentions one she wrote in high school that was really great. So I ask to read it, thinking I’m going to be impressed… I mean, who brags about how good their papers are, unless it was really good?

I was horrified (it was reeeeaaalllly bad), and I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind: “You don’t read much, do you?” As soon as I said it, I felt horrible. It was an honest question and not meant as an insult, but if someone asked it of me, I’d be offended.

She didn’t know to be. All she said was, “No, why?” So, I knew all I needed to know about how sharp she was.

6

This thread is kind of related to this topic. Mine is in there (actually it was my sisters).

7

I was in Greece, one of the islands where NO ONE speaks English, right?
Anyway, sitting in a restaurant when a large and VERY sunburned lady walks in. She’s wearing a bright red dress.
My comment to my friend was, “I don’t know who that lady is but she sure matches the dress.” Whereupon, the large lady turns and says “I do, but I fail to see how that’s any of your business.”
I slunk out of the restaurant shortly thereafter.

Testy.

8

I have been lucky enough not to have an experience like this, but my friend once told a fairly un-PC joke, right when a parapelgic (is that the PC term?) entered the room. The joke went something like this:

What has a hundred legs but can’t walk?

The front row at Telemiracle.
Fortunetely for him, the person didn’t hear and continued on her buisness.

9

Hey, I put the -less in tactless.

Several years ago at work, I happened to walk into a co-worker’s office and found him all dressed up. This guy NEVER dressed up. I kind of stopped short, and popped out with, “Wow. Who bit the dust?”

He said, “My aunt.”

I merely turned 30 shades of crimson, mumbled something about “oh sorry” and hightailed it out of there.

I apologized later. He laughed about it and said he’d have probably done the same thing.

I still felt like a primo jackass.

10

This is sorta along these lines… when I was in high school, I was dating this guy who’s best friend had a girlfriend, Amy, in college. We went up to see her, and as we got to her room, she stopped before entering and said “There’s something I have to tell you about my roommate. You CAN’T say anything about it. She only has one arm. So don’t stare or make her feel weird, ok? Just act normal, like nothing’s wrong with her. And don’t say anything stupid.” (Amy was a piece of work. I’d been around people with various disabilities most of my life, and was somewhat… offended I guess, that she’d think I’d be rude to her roommate.)

So we go in and met her roommate. She was cool, we hung out for a while, and then she was getting ready to leave. She had a bunch of books with her, and some of them were behind me. I went to hand them to her, and said “Let me give you a hand with that.” No big deal, it’s a phrase, not an accusation, and I said it without forethought. No one blinked, except for Amy. Well, you would have thought I pointed, laughed, and said “OH MY GOD SHE ONLY HAS ONE ARM!” by the way Amy reacted. She started apologizing profusely to her roommate for my “immaturity”, and made me feel about 2 inches tall. Roommate levelled a wonderfully disdainful look at her and said “Maybe if you treated me as normally as they are, you wouldn’t be so upset.”

I had another good friend when I was in college that was blind from birth, who whenever I’d say “See you later”, he’d say “Bet I won’t see you first!”

11

well it happened a couple of years ago when i wuz in high school. Anyways it was with this friend of mine(i had a huge crush on her). So were like hanging as usual and i don’t remember exactly but we were arguing about something related to transplants and all of a sudden she goes…“You need a personality transplant.” in a joking way…anyways i replied…“You need a transplant too but i won’t mention what!”…This other guy burst out laughing…'cos i hadn’t really meant it but the chick wuz really flatchested and man…everyone got the joke except me!

12

I was at my local comic shop last night (you will probably notice many of “my” stories beginning with such a sentence) when this kid, I guess about ten years old, decided to get really, REALLY annoying.

I was standing at the counter where the owner keeps the used video games. Another young man was next to me. The owner was behind the counter.

The kid asks me, “Hey, do you want to hear a dirty joke?”

Thinking this is coming from a ten year old, I decided, “No.”

“You don’t want to hear a dirty joke?”

“It’s probably not dirty,” I said. “Just crude.”

The kid got this vacant look in his eyes, and turned to the owner. “Hey, you want to hear a dirty joke?”

The owner just stared at the kid, as if he was thinking ‘Are you going to get the hint?’

“How can you tell when a Mexican is dead?” The kid asks.

The owner winces, looks at myself and the young man next to me, and goes to get a soda from his refridgerator.

The kid repeats himself, shouting. “How can you tell when a Mexican is dead?”

At this point, the owner slips into the back room. He turns to me, instead. “How can you tell when a Mexican is dead?”

The young man next to me, a man with Mexican heritage, looks at me with this weird look best described as ‘This kid is an idiot.’

“I really don’t care.” I told the kid.

The kid turns to the young man, of all people. “How can you tell when a Mexican is dead?”

I’ll spare the punch line, as it was fairly crude and downright false. (It had to do with Mexican water, it’s effects, which the citizens themselves are actually immune to.) But the kid was lucky to get out of there unharmed.

13

Well, yes, of course I’ve done this. My nickname wasn’t Crash by accident.

My husband was (is I guess) in a fraternity, and after we had been dating for about three months, he invited me over to the house for dinner. I had met several of his brothers before and was learning their “lingo” and inside jokes and such.

One such joke was that when someone was being annoying or unfunny or just a dick in general, someone would say, “Hey, I think I hear your mom calling you,” and hilarity would ensue.

I decided to try it out when one guy started yammering on about something. So there was this lull in the convo and I said,

“Hey, I think I hear your mom calling you.” SILENCE… ABSOLUTE FUCKING SILENCE. Someone coughed, a cricket sound, a cock crowed…and my husband looked at me and whispered,

“His mom died last month.”

jarbaby

14

I don’t generaily say stupid thing, but I do stupid things, Dieket can atest to this one, can’t she? But I think this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever said.

I was at homecomming, and my BF was being neglective, and was complaining about it to my friends Laren and Ron, and I was like “I want to be like mad at him but I can’t because it’s not his fault, so I can’t be mad and I want to!” and then I felt this presence behind me and I turned around and he was standing there and all he said “I knew there was something wrong.” and needless to say I turned like five shades of red, and grovled and grovled for like half an hour. It was ok though, he was glad to find out what was bothering me.

15

Back in my youth, (it was during the war, the VIETNAM war!), I was out dancing with my friend Brett. Brett has been blind since birth. He inadvertently bumped into another person on the dance floor. The ‘bumpee’ wanted to take Brett outside for ‘some words’. In Brett’s defence, I blurted out “Can’t you see he’s blind???”

Military intelligence comes to mind…
and jumbo shrimp…

Most regretably, PMS hadn’t been discovered yet, and I had to plead ‘blonde’ on that one.

16

In 1991, I was living in London and dating a guy who ran a stall in Kensington Market. One May afternoon I went to visit my b/f and found five or six people I vaguely knew sitting in the stall in a circle, holding hands but not speaking, with the overhead lights off and a candle burning in the center of the room.
Before my b/f could say anything, I blurted out, “Looks like you’re having a seance here!”
B/f takes me by the shoulder, steers me out of the stall and around the corner, and informs me that the boyfriend of one of the people in the circle had just jumped out of a 5th story window to his death.
Ouch! Oooch! Ooie! Ouch! Boy, talk about daft!
But in my meager defense, that’s exactly what the scene looked like…

17

Not sure if this fits, exactly, but it’s funny.

My Godmother Carmella is a lovely woman but has a tendency to get a bit ditzy and nervous. Some years back, a friend of hers brought a new acquaintance by for coffee, first warning Carmella that “Beth” had just found out she had cancer, was very sensitive about it, and that Carmella should avoid mentioning it at all costs.

So Carmella is concentrating VERY HARD on not saying anything, anything at all, the least bit related to cancer. She was a wreck, though doing pretty well…

…until she poured the coffee, picked up the sugar bowl, and politely asked Beth “How many cancers would you like in your coffee?”

18

In July 1999, I went to see the Blair Witch Project, which at the time was the movie to see, so tickets were at a premium. Nonetheless, I snagged a ticked and arrived at the theatre well in advance of the start time when the auditorium was empty, to make sure I got a good seat. I sat and the seats filled up around me. Two teenaged girls sat down to my left. A man and his wife approached and asked if the seats to my right were taken. I said no, and the (hot) girl to my immediate left whispered that I should’ve said yes.

Regardless the movie began and the couple to my right talked incessantly, to the point where they caused me to miss some of the dialogue. It drove me nuts. Finally the movie ended and the house lights came up. I turned to the girl on my left and said, “You were right. I should’ve said those seats were taken.” She giggled, having heard them talking as well.

That’s when I noticed the white cane. The woman on my right was blind. Her husband was explaining what was going on onscreen. I felt like a total asshole.

19

JBirdman12
On the other side couldn’t they have respected the other moviegoers and waited for it to come out on tape?