The Dave Barry column Vestal Blue quoted in this thread brings back a memory that has nothing to do with relationships.
I used to have a friend named Michael. He is no longer my friend, for various reasons, not the least of which is that I saw him change from a well-spoken, knowledgeable person to a know-it-all, stubborn jerk. He once showed me this column on his computer when I was at his house, but he didn’t mention what the source was. He also wasn’t showing it for humorous effect, but rather to illustrate his theory on why I’d gotten fired from a job. :rolleyes: Anyway, he brought it up on the computer, and I started reading. By the time I’d gotten to Roger thinking “Six months”, I let go the mouse and said abruptly, “There’s no knight, no horse did Elaine ever own a horse. It’s a Dave Barry column.”
Boy, was he pissed. But for once, I got the last word on him. I once rushed to e-mail him when I found out that the phrase “Nature abhors a vacuum” wasn’t originated by a scientist, as I had thought. He slammed back this long-winded declamation about how obvious it should have been to me that the phrase was philosophical, not scientific, then asked, “Or did you already know that and were you having me on?”
I’d been too mindful of his delicate feelings to say, “No, I did not know that, but is it not enough that I know what the phrase means and can use it in context? And before your next question, I also did not think Spock was the first to say it.” So the Dave Barry moment was my triumph.
I know y’all must have gotten the last word on someone at least once. Tell!
No, kniz, I’m not. A person can remember an incident like that without bearing any ill will. I just had a Pavlovian reaction when I saw Vestal’s thread.
Still like to hear from others! Actually, I believe there are a few last-word anecdotes scattered among various threads; I’d just like to see them all assembled.
I’ve been getting the last word with my dad and my brother a lot lately. A little over 20 years ago, we built a house. Soon after, my 'rents divorced and mom ended up selling the house. Last March, my brother moved back into it on a lease-purchase from the current owner. It really needed a lot of work because the owner between my mother and the current guy really screwed a lot of things up. Like allowing the basement (which has three bedrooms, is fully carpeted, and has some expensive built-in wood cabinets) to flood so badly (their horses crushed the French drains around the house and it ran in through the basement windows) that water backed from the septic tank through the strategically placed floor drains until it was six inches deep.
Anyway, we’ve been trying to finish repairs so that it is fully livable again. I’ve gotten the last word on such things as the location of the septic tank (by literally jumping up and down on the grassed-over steel plate that covered the trap hole while Dad insisted that it was over 50 yards from where I was standing) and other more esoteric facts like the depth of the water well (I dropped a small rock and timed the splash with a stopwatch), routing of water pipes, locations of the aforementioned floor drains which had been carpeted over, proving my point with a icepick :D, and so forth. He contracted the construction of the house himself and we did a lot of the work on our own, so he really has no excuse. It was his “dream home” and he planned every detail himself (our blueprints were literally a stack of napkins and other scraps of paper).