My mom who had me when she was 40 had some odd idea that a credit card not going through or being declined was the most embarrassing thing in the world.
She would act like such a fainting flower she would often call the credit card company before just letting the employee rerun it, and she would do it at the register loud enough for everyone to hear that yes it was the credit card companies mistake not her fault.
She told me it is a great horrible shame to have a credit card declined, as if anyone cares.
Once she called the CC company and got it cleared up, they had frozen the account for some silly reason, and she told them she wanted compensation for the embarrassment they caused her in public in front of strangers.:smack:
Unless my dad was bullshitting me, and I could usually tell when he was, this happened to my grandmother in full view of the family. She was washing up after dinner when the house was struck by lightning, and it apparently jumped out of the faucet and zapped her. The way I remember him telling it, she blinked a few times, wandered away from the sink, said “I think I’m going to lie down,” and slept for 20 hours.
I doubt it. Shortly after I moved into my current house, lightning hit a telephone pole near us. One of our phones rebooted itself, and a computer modem was fried, never to work again. Two doors down, the neighbor lost a telephone and a tv. The next-door neighbor’s house got the largest shock. They needed to replace their burglar alarm system, and three phones, and one of their tv’s exploded. (Or probably imploded, tv tubes contained vacuum and were fragile.) The burglar alarm failed in “alarm on” mode, and it made quite the racket, although the thunder crack a few yards from our bedroom had already awoken us.
I’m glad I wasn’t holding a corded phone at the time.
Oh, electronics could totally be destroyed by a lightning strike. In fact when I got my new HVAC system installed they sold me a super awesome surge protector, and then last year they had a huge storm in the north part of town where those things got tried out and it turns out they just got popped off the wall, and the company didn’t back them up. So in my most recent quarterly maintenance they replaced it with old fashioned fuses and credited my account for the price of the fancy ass surge protector. Good company.
But that still doesn’t mean you’d get electrocuted for talking on the phone.
IIRC it used be a real danger in Australia in the 1950’s/60’s due to many phone lines not being earthed where they connected to the dwelling. A change in regulations fixed the problem in the 70’s but they still recommend you don’t use a phone in a thunderstorm.
My mother always had a thing about being sick and taking a shower. Anytime one of us kids had any kind of illness she would insist on knocking on the bathroom door and checking on us to make sure we hadn’t 'gotten dizzy and slipped on the wet floor". It didn’t matter what the ailment was - cold, cough, headache, nosebleed or broken finger we always had to be careful we didn’t pass-out in the shower.
How anyone could raise a child and believe this is beyond me. Anyone who’s seen the faces my little ten-and-a-half-month-old niece makes when she gets a tiny speck of sharp cheese would know instantly that she’s not only the cutest little being on the face of the Earth, but has fully-functional taste buds.
Now that most copper phone lines have been replaced with glass, I suppose the phone is no more dangerous than any other appliance that is attached to the electricity. And that usually is grounded… But there are still some copper wires attached to corded phones around.
I’m pretty sure there is no such regulation in the US.
People are sometimes killed by lightening, but not always. It’s pretty common for people to survive being hit by lightening, especially if there’s someone else around to administer CPR. I once read about some park ranger somewhere who’d been hit by lightening multiple times. So would you be electrocuted? I dunno. I would still prefer not to be holding something attached to a wire that was hit by lightening. That’s not an old wive’s tale, that’s a small-but-real risk of something very unpleasant happening.
I can’t think of anything especially weird my elder relatives believed, but my husband’s uncle used to aggressively hit on attractive waitresses. It was very embarrassing. And of course, being old, then he’d grossly undertip. I used to linger fussing with something random at the table so I could slip some extra cash onto the table.
My cousin’s wall mounted phone exploded and showered her kitchen in shards of plastic when lightning struck the lines outside her house. There was a very real risk of injury, even if electrocution didn’t occur. It wasn’t even in the bad old days - this was in 2008.
I recently spent a week at my parent’s house, what an interesting time that was, there are all sorts of special rules and interesting bits that have developed since I left home 30+ years ago.
[ul]
[li]Toasters must be unplugged when not in use.[/li][li]Don’t use the clothes dryer on high heat, this is because it will get hot.[/li][li]Never load the washer and run it when you are out of the house.[/li][li]82 is the best setting for the thermostat.[/li][li]Orange juice is required to prevent scurvy.[/li][li]When driving, slow down when there is a car approaching.[/li][li]Driving too fast will cause you to “break an axel.”[/li][li]When changing bed sheets never lay them on the floor, “the floor is dirty.”[/li][li]It is OK to put pillows on the floor.[/li][/ul]
I was very happy to return home when that visit was done.
Oh, I just thought of a really obnoxious one - old ladies at my parents’ senior living facility have got to chill out about hats and socks on my baby. Seriously, bitches, claws off the tootsies! He’s fine! If he were cold I, his mother, would put some socks on him or a hat on him! Woman stopped us in the hallway last night, didn’t say a word to ME, just told him all about how his feet must be cold and pulled his pant cuffs down around them.
I’ve had a couple of driers that slowly died, going through a “doesn’t regulate temperature well, gets too hot” phase on the way out. They may currently have such a drier. (I do. We’ve decided to replace it, but it might take us a while to actually do so.) And I bet they had a bad experience with a washer leaking and causing problems because they weren’t home to react to it.
As for the driving, ones, as people get old their reflexes slow, and driving gets harder. Slowing down when a car is approaching is probably a sign that the relative speed of cars approaching each other is getting too fast for them to handle. That probably means they are approaching the time when they need to stop driving, but this might be a sort of barely acceptable accomodation for a little while longer.
I’m curious if it’s okay to put pillows on the floor after they have clean pillowcasse on them, or only before that happens. That is, is there any consistency to these rules?
Ooh – my grandmother used to do that – to me. She was always cold, so therefore, the rest of us must all be cold. And she was happy to dress us in extra stuff well after the age when we could dress ourselves or complain if we were cold.
The slowing down when driving has been long in development, we’d like them to move to the city and live where there are some amenities but they seem pretty stubborn.
The dryer thing is completely unrelated to any malfunction or lack of efficiency or poor maintenance. They are good about cleaning and maintaining, they just have a fear of heat.
I know where the unplugging of the toaster comes from, the house was hit by lightning back in the 80’s.
There is no basis to the washing machine thing, it’s just an old age oddity that drives me bonkers. It might also be due to excessive reading of warnings in women’s magazines or morning new broadcasts.
Like most people as they get advanced in age their world is shrinking.
That is, is there any consistency to these rules?