Oops...I shouldn't have said that...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

OK, in the past two days I have made two very serious verbal mistakes…

The first occured while a friend and I were leaving a bar after having a few beers (No, I wasn’t drunk). As we were leaving, my friend paused to bid farewell to the lovely hostess, just as the manager of the establishment walked past me and went upstairs. As I opened the door, I yelled “Come on, ya tubby bastard” to my friend, since I love to piss him off by calling him fat when he is not. The only problem is, the manager that had just walked past me is a little on the heavy side. I didn’t realize it at the time, but immediately after I yelled my smartass remark, she replied “take care TheOtherOne, drive careful”. So now I’m scared to go back to the place, I really hope she didn’t think I was making fun of her…

The second mistake occured today at work. I run a paintball store/ skateboard shop, and we had a very busy day. About six months ago a father and son showed up to check out some guns. The son is deaf. I noticed it almost immediately, my first thought being “Maybe he has problems hearing”, this was confirmed when I noticed the father signing to his son.
I always try to get the sons attention (he is 14) by making some kind of gesture, and when I speak, I speak somewhat slow and tend to articulate a little more, so it is easier for him to read my lips.

So I see the kid come in to the shop today, I’m behind the counter, my boss and another employee are outside working on our truck, and I’m very busy. I watch as the kid leaves, and get back to work. Apparently , the kid just left for a second (to get his father, I presume) and he walked back into the shop without me noticing. So I’m working, and my boss gets a call, so I yell for him, and of course he doesn’t respond. I yell again, very loudly, and when he still doesn’t respond I spit out the well placed “What are you fucking deaf! Come get the damn phone!”.

The deaf kid was staring right at me. I didn’t notice until I looked over and saw him staring at me. I felt so bad I wanted to kick myself in the face. These are good customers, but whats more, they are very very nice people, and I feel bad for the kid anyway because of his disability to begin with, and then I go and make a dumbshit move like that. Whew…His father was there, and he didn’t say anything, but I’m sure he saw me turn red, so maybe he understands.
Anyway, just thought I’d get that off my chest, and if you’ve embarrassed yourself more, please share, make me feel better!

2

Oh man, I still, four years later, blush in extreme shame to recall this.

My friends and I, years ago, had this rude conversational habit of dissing each other’s mothers. It was juvenile, but one of those things you get started on and it becomes a sort of tribal ritual when you’re with The Guys.

SO…

I’m living in Iowa (away from the “your mother” friends). I’ve got some friends over. One of them is a guy we’ll call Dave. I was talking about some good-looking woman I’d seen or something like that; I don’t remember what I was talking about, exactly. Anyway, Dave has missed the first part of what I was saying. He says, “Who are you talking about?”

I instinctively retort, “Your mother, Dave.”

A horrible silence ensues. It lasts a long time. People are avoiding making eye contact with me. What did I say?

Scott, bless his heart, says something or other to change the subject. My girlfriend later informs me of something I hadn’t known about Dave: When he was 15 or so, his mother killed herself and he found her.

I still feel like a horrible person whenever I think about that.

3

This happened back when I was in the Air Force (I was in telecommunications maintenance). We had some Army guys visiting our shop doing some kind of inspection.

We had some communications down with the Army base about 10 miles away. I’d been working with them all day trying to get it fixed but they couldn’t seem to get anything right.

Finally, in frustration, I slam the phone down & say “Stupid fucking Army pukes”. I turn around & there’s one of the Army guys, a Senior NCO no less.

I immedately turn red and say “I’m sorry but those guys at Pyong Taek are so stupid”. (BTW, Pyong Taek is in Korea)

The Army guy kinda smiles and says “Yeah, I know. We just came from there and they are pretty stupid”

I still felt real bad though.

4

The Other One, may I suggest you don’t swear at work anymore? Not very professional to begin with. Oh, and speaking of which…

When I lived in Charleston SC working at a tv station my computer decided to up and blue screen of death on me. I was swamped, and it wasn’t the best of times to up and blue screen of death. So I growled at it and hissed, “You noxious piece of shit,” exactly as the general manager walked into my office. His eyebrows went up and I hastily pointed to my computer, gabbling an apology. He was pretty cool about it.

5

In high school, there was this kid in my class, we’ll call him Brian. One day, Brian got a really short haircut, and during an open mod, we were all talking about it. It’s a common little joke whenever someone notices a haircut in my family to say “Yeah, we just stuck his head under the lawn mower,” so I just posed him the same question. Suddenly, my friend Josh hits me, and he and Sam look at me with that wide-eyed “Dude, shut the fuck up!” look. Brian didn’t hear me, but due to that reaction, I didn’t feel like repeating myself.
I asked them later what their deal was, and they informed me that apparently, Brian’s dad worked in lawn care. One day, while on a riding mower, he ran over a bees hive and was attacked by the swarm. In all the flailing about, he fell over the front of the mower and was run over.

Damn, am I glad people hardly ever pay attention to me.

6

ivylass, that’s one of the reasons this situation was so interesting. Normally I am not foul-mouthed at all, but yesterday, well, I had just had a very long and frustrating day. My boss and I are friends, and we can say things like that to each other, but I won’t (heh) say it in front of customers.

7

Ugh. This just happened to me at work the other day.

My friends (the closest and most smartass ones) make lots of snarky comments. Well, in passing, someone mentioned that a “sign” of schizophrenia was the habit of making up your own words. (I haven’t researched it, I don’t know if it’s true.) So, whenever someone said a made-up word, instantly they became a candidate for schizophrenia.

Well, I work with a wonderful older lady. She just turned 74 on Thursday. We were all sitting around in the office, joking around about something and she flubbed up some word in her sentence. So of course, I say, “hey, you know making up your own words is a sign of schizophrenia!” The office came to a dead halt.

Completely unbeknownst to me, she has a son who has schizophrenia, who took off one day two years ago and never came back.

I’ve never felt like a bigger ass.

8

Are you sure your friends weren’t just having some fun with you? That situation sounds impossible to escape without major injury…

9

I think catastrophic injury was implied.

Elvis Do you know if Brian’s father survived?

10

You know, sometimes it seems as though life just sets you up to make remarks that in and of themselves might not be so bad, but you end up making them to the only person on earth who was the wrong person to MAKE them to.

My best friend (at the time), Lisa, had a “knack” for this. She is a wonderful, kind and loving person and would NEVER say anything hurtful to ANYONE if she could help it…but for some reason, it happened to her a LOT. I’ll just give you one example.

I (we, at the time) work in a dental office. Lisa (and me, too) has a “love affair” with trains. There was a train wreck in our town where two kids tried to outrun a train at a train crossing. The kids were drunk. The train hit the car and the kids were killed. It was a very tragic thing, and our community was devastated.

So a few weeks later, a long-time patient came in for a routine appointment, and Lisa was just making light conversation with her. Now, Lise STILL can’t figure out why she said this, it wasn’t something she would have normally said, it wasn’t really how she FELT…it just sort of popped out of her mouth.

“So, did you hear about that awful thing that happened to my train?” (Lise immediately realized that this wasn’t REALLY what she meant to say, or SHOULD have said. She felt bad right away, just about how she worded the comment itself.) The woman looked at her and said “One of my best friend’s children died in that wreck.”

Lise started to cry, the woman started to cry, Lise apologized profusely and tried to explain that she had NO idea why she worded it that way or even why she said ANYTHING about it…she came crying out to my office and I went back in to talk to the woman…who was gracious and understanding about the whole thing and seemed to understand.

Anyway, Lise still to this day talks about it…she cannot believe she said that ANYWAY, but to anyone else it wouldn’t have been anywhere NEAR so bad…

Sometimes it just seems like life is trying to teach us to keep our mouth shut about things we shouldn’t be saying by having us say it at the worst possible moment and to the worst person in the world that we could have chosen to SAY it to.

I’m quite sure this happens to all of us, me included…but this one was just so awful and so NOT intended that it sticks in my mind.

11

So I’m writing for the college newspaper and am interviewing the mother of a girl who had disappeared from campus the previous year. The girl hasn’t been seen since, and as it’s the one-year anniversary of her disappearance, it’s pretty well assumed she’s dead. Tough thing for a mother to go through.

I wanted to do a story about how she was holding up, knowing that her daughter was in all likelihood dead, but having no proof of the act –- no body, that is -– and therefore no closure. It was going to be a moving piece about a mother’s indomitable spirit and her ability to continue to hope against all hope.

So I start the interview talking about the weather, the school football team, and other banal stuff. Safe things to talk about before I start getting into something heavy like her missing and probably-dead daughter. I start edging the conversation in the direction I want to go and ask her how many children she has. “Six,” she replies. “Four girls and two boys.”

“Well, looks like it’s only five now.”
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OK, I actually managed to shut myself up before I said that. I turned it into something like, “Well, looks like it’s – um, quite a handful raising so many children.” I have absolutely no idea where such a stupid thing to say could have come from. None at all. To this day I still cringe at the insensitive thought that nearly made it to my mouth. That poor woman had enough to deal with without my flippant comment bringing it all crashing back down around her.

Sometimes, I swear there’s a part of my brain that really hates me…

12

This isnt really as bad as the others but it certainly made me feel stupid. When I was in school and we had to do a report on WWII any part of itso I chose the Holacaust, I really started to get interested in it and read way more books than I had to and everything. Now, i should tell you that I was in a gifted class so there were only like 10 kids in it and we were allowed to swear mildly.well one day something upset me ( I forget exactly what) and the first thing out of my mouth was " You Goddamn freakin German Nazi freak! now I dont exactly know why I said It like that but it turned out that the kid that heard was german and quite a few members of his family ( long ago that is) were nazi’s and he was pretty touchy about it. At the time i didnt really know what I did wrong until his friend told me about the nazi thing, then I just felt really really stupid.

13

Ah, yes. Those days when my mental editor is drunk on the job or hittin’ the crack pipe just a little too early in the day…

A few semesters back I was working as a lab assistant for an Anatomy instructor. He and I already had a good relationship, as I had been the best student in his Physical Anthropology class.

Anyway, one day he was complaining about the high cost of dating. (He never got much sympathy because he insists on dating women who expect him to pay for everything, but he complained anyway.) While he was complaining, we were also working on a system by which the other instructors could readily tell which cadaver was which without actually uncovering them. Often, the instructors are in such a hurry that they don’t bother to re-wrap the cadavers, which leads to tissue damage from exposure.

I had the idea to attach tags to the tarps, with a brief notation describing the cadaver. One of them was a cadaver that the Cross-Sectional Anatomy class was dissecting, and my boss told me to write “Work In Progress” on the tag.

Him: “Wait, just write W.I.P., I’ll know what that means.”
Me: “OK.”
Him: “Yeah, we can just call this one “wip”, after all, that’s my nickname.”
Me: “No wonder your dates are so expensive.”

Outch!