There were police cars at the neighbors house this morning. Our daughter plays with there’s daily, and we were very concerned. We went over and learned what happened.
The daughter had a hermit crab. It’s name was Mimi. She found it dead in the cage this morning and was inconsolable. Her mom tried to comfort her, but to no avail. She wanted to talk to her dad. Mom was cooking breakfast so the daughter went in the other room to call Dad for some fatherly words.
The daughter said, blubbering, “Mimi is dead. She is just laying there. She won’t move.”
The dad says, “WHAT?! Mommy is dead?”
Daughter, “Yes, she is just laying there and she won’t move when I talk to her.”
The dad of course drops everything at work, calls 911 and races home.
He was almost there when he got a call from his wife and they unraveled what happened. A happy ending (unless you are a hermit crab), but can you imagine?
When I was a newlywed, VWife’s grandmother had a German Shepard named Mitzi. Mitzi was old, and as old dogs do, died overnight.
I guess you had to be there. VWife called me at work, in tears and not talking clearly. I understood her call at first to be “Lindsay has died”, Lindsay being her then 5 year old cousin…
Second, :eek: I’ll do my best to persuade my future children to give their pets/blankets/stuffed animals names that can’t be confused with a parent or other relative.
My cousin had a fenderbender when he was a teen. He lived near a small town and the accident happened in front of the funeral home. So that’s where he and the cop on the scene went to escape the heat while doing the report. While there, the guy who owned the funeral home called my uncle to ask him to get his son.
“Hello?”
“Ronnie?”
“Yeah?”
“Hey, this is Joe. Listen, your boy had a car accident here in town and we’ve got him down here in the funeral home. You need to come get him…”
CLICK! VROOOOM!
My uncle was shaking head to toe as he stumbled into the funeral home. Joe greeted him in a friendly way and said, “Hey Ronnie! You looking for John? He’s over in side room.” Uncle just about collapsed in relief when he walked in there and saw his son sitting on the bench with his head in his lap saying, “Daddy’s gonna kill me!”
A few weeks after my son was born I went back to work. My wife was a nervous first-time mother and would call me several times during the day to give me updates and ask for advice.
As it happened my wife was reading a novel that I’d finished a few weeks before. Near the end there was a very sad part where a baby died. It hit my wife really hard, having a new baby herself. And she was annoyed with me for not having warned her about it in advance.
So she called me at work to express her displeasure. When I answered the phone, the first thing she said, in a teary voice, was:
“The baby DIED!”
Oh, my. I don’t ever want to relive that feeling again. It felt like all my insides dropped out and smashed on the floor. It only took me a few seconds to sort out what she really meant, but it was a very, very nasty few seconds.
On behalf of newcrasher’s entire family, I’d like to thank you for bringing this to our attention and for setting him straight on this crucial grammatical issue.
Though we’ve seen no evidence that **Mr. crasher **doesn’t actually know the difference between “there’s” and “theirs,” we have taken immediate and drastic corrective actions. The **crasher **family has a strict zero-tolerance policy on homophone abuse. Such errors are monitored and recorded, and subsequent violations will not be tolerated. If this happens again, Mr. crasher will have to repeat grammar school.
Not a misunderstanding about death, but close to it (mine!):
My best friend from childhood has been married for almost twenty years, and has a teenage daughter. I’ll call him Bob, and his wife Liz. We grew apart in adulthood, so we don’t see each other much - maybe once a year - so I’m not always up to date on what’s going on with him and his family. Our parents are still good friends, though.
A couple of years ago, Bob’s mom tried to set me up with a young lady of her acquaintance, whose name is also Liz. It never really went anywhere, and I haven’t had any contact with that Liz since.
So a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Bob’s mom. At the end, with no preamble, she wrote “just to let you know…” followed by a short tale about how Liz moved to New York, found a boyfriend, got knocked up, when the boyfriend found out he took off, and now Liz has moved back home with her new baby.
As I’m reading this, I’m about having a heart attack - I thought she was talking about Bob’s wife. I’m sitting there going “WHAT… THE… FUCK… oh, shit, that Liz. Whew!”