I had a pair of pants in college that had a broken zipper that wouldn’t stay up. I have a bit of an absent-minded professor tendency, so I’d never noticed. The one guy who told me had a problem, where he didn’t know the volume of his own voice. (Other symptoms led me to believe he might have Asperger’s). He tried to tell me discretely when he passed me in an otherwise empty hallway, but I’m sure people in the classrooms could have heard him if they happened to be paying attention…
As for me, I usually don’t notice unless you happen to be a hot girl. And then I’m probably too tongue-tied from the hotness to tell you…
“Do you think you could stop staring at my special man-spot long enough to give me my messages?” - Butch Patterson, Private Dick
(I strongly recommend youtubing Butch Patterson, if you have nothing better to do this afternoon.) Oh yeah, the OP - yeah, I tell people. I couch it in fancy terms like, “Hey, your fly is unzipped.”
Short but perhaps helpful aside: I always remember the difference because discrete means something like separate and distinct, and the e’s are separated in the spelling.
I think it’s even more embarrassing to tell a stranger that you are interacting with that they have a booger hanging, or even worse, that they’ve had a feminine hygiene accident. I try to do that too though.
I was once at karaoke and this woman walked up to the stage to sing. As she passed me I saw that the entirety of her ass was sticking out because her skirt had sort of folded up on itself and, for some reason, she had decided that a mini-skirt obviously meant that she should go commando. I tried to get her attention to tell her that she was exposing herself but she just wouldn’t look in my direction so I wasn’t able to let her know. At the end of her song (which involved lots of dancing and spinning, exposing herself to everyone about 6 times) the DJ walked up behind her and pulled her skirt down for her. It was both the most embarrassing and most hilarious thing I had seen in a long time.
Anyone remember when Johnny Carson came out for his monologue on the old Tonight Show with his fly open?
As soon as the director realized it, he had the camera operator zoom in until the fly was no longer in the picture. This gave a rather unnatural view of Johnny (if you were a regular watcher) - and you could see Carson glancing over at the monitor several times, wondering why the picture was zoomed in?
After the firrst commercial break Carson and McMahon really had a good laugh over that.