Yesterday, I walked down the street, and paused to spit out an enormous bloody looking wad of spit. What was the cause? Had I just been mugged? Is it due to internal bleeding? Were my gums bleeding, due to too many cigarettes?
No, I don’t even smoke. Instead, I had just finished eating a big piece of Red Velvet cake for breakfast and also had to deal with morning phlegm. If not for the cake, I would look like any other person. (Any other person who spits on the sidewalk, that is. ) However, should someone see me, they might have assumed I was in need of medical assistance.
Well, any one else feel like volunteering stories of how something perfectly harmless was mistaken for something horrifying? It can be something you did, something a friend did, or even something that your 3rd cousin, twice removed did.
Years ago, my mother gave me a pair of boxer shorts. They feature a wraparound Halloween scene set in a graveyard. They also glow in the dark. I decided they were too beautiful to wear and hung them on my wall. This worried my mother a bit. I enjoyed taking visiting kids into my room and letting them play with all my cool toys. This made some people suspicious. She was worried that my showing a child the glow in the dark boxers on the wall would be recounted as “Doc took me to his room, closed the door, turned off the light and showed me his underwear.”
A female friend once thought I was coming on to her when I she heard me say ‘monster in my pocket’. I was actually asking, she being a toy collector, if she remembered a toy line from the nineties. Monster In My Pocket was flexible monster figurines about two inches in height.
While sleeping over at that friend’s apartment, she repaid me the money she had borrowed last week. I held out the money to her room mate and said “Could you please put this in the right front pocket of my pants?”. The room mate was shocked and disgusted by my come on. I explained that I was still wearing the pajamas I had slept in. My pants were on a chair directly behind the room mate.
Many years back I was managing a small health food store. We had just recieved a delivery that day from a major supplier and the backroom was a maze of stacks of boxes waiting to be put away. Work had been put on hold for the lunch rush (we were in downtown Boston and were packed at from noon to 1PM). When the rush started to slow up, I sent two clerks into the back to start processing stock again.
A few minutes later a customer requested something that was out of stock on the shelf, but I knew some had just arrived that morning and was in the back room, so I went to go get it. I stepped into the back room and wove my way through the maze of boxes to the spot I remembered it being put. Rounding a tall stack of boxes I saw…
A short stack of boxes, just behind of which, with his back to me, was the 17 year old male clerk who was supposed to be processing boxes. I could only see his head and shoulders because of the boxes he was behind. But in front of him, slightly to one side and only half blocked by the boxes, was the 16 year old female clerk. She was on her knees facing him and I heard her say…
“Oh my god! I’ve never seen one so big. I never knew they could get that large!”
…
Me, stepping foward, throat clearing, loud voice… “Ahem. What is going on here?”
… Turns out he was moving boxes when a roach had crawled out of a box and he stepped on it, killing it. It was a monster NY City sized cockroach over 3" long., easily twice as big as any roach I had ever seen. He had called her over to look at it, just as I happened to walk upon the scene.
My niece saying to my sister “Mommy, give me a French kiss.” in public. My sister has taught her the accolade so often seen in French stereotypes, a quick peck on each cheek, and that was what she was asking for.
) However, should someone see me, they might have assumed I was in need of medical assistance.