Sometimes I wonder how other people make it through the world without a keeper. .
Today I had a person call me to ask for a set of documents. I get a lot of document requests, but this person needed the documents ASAP. So I said, “Fax me the request and I’ll see if I can get it done today. But my company gets hundreds of faxes a day, so make sure the cover sheet says ‘Jodi Lastname’ prominently on it.”
This afternoon, I received the request by fax – To: Jodi Lastname Prominently.
It’s been my laugh of the day. Feel free to post your own examples of benign stupidity in your fellow men and women.
I worked at a Subway one summer, and had a customer ask me how long a footlong sub was. I motioned with my hands; “It’s about this big.” with a straight face. I think people have a lot of brain farts.
At my job we receive various government publications. One of them comes on CD. There was a mistake on one of the discs, so they sent us a new one. They also included an errata slip that stated the following:
“The disc you received labeled August 5, 2008 contained erroneously data.”
(bolding mine)
:smack:
Way to go, USPTO.
I was hoping we would get an errata slip for the errata slip, but no such luck.
When I’m drafting revisions to a contract, I do it by hand and our admin types it into the document. There is boilerplate language that gets entered the same way every time. A number of times, I wanted to add the same boilerplate language to one paragraph that I had added to a previous section where it had been deleted.
And sure enough, the admin would type it in exactly as I had written it, as opposed to typing in what I instructed. :smack::smack::smack: This happened on numerous occasions.
I had a client last week who called to say she was unable to get the diarrhea medicine into her cat. The receptionist told her she could bring the cat and medication in and a technician would demonstrate proper administration.
Turns out she had been trying to insert the medication rectally. When the technician pointed out the label directions specifically stated “orally” she said that she thought that meant in the bum.
Back when I was 16, me and a couple of other friends decided to skip school one day as my parents were out of town. In order to avoid getting in trouble we came up with the idea of calling the school and pretending to be our fathers letting them know we were sick.
I called first; “This is Mr B4tes - G1lly won’t be in school today because he has a cold”
It worked. The others called and did the same. The last guy, Gary, called and said “Gary won’t be in school today 'cause he’s sick”. The school secretary replied “Ok, who is this?”
I thought of that, actually. But she was a very earnest young minion of some (alleged) big-wig, and I gathered the tardiness was her fault and she was trying to remove her ass from the wringer. So I kind of doubt she was teasing me, though +1 to her if she was.
Year ago, I worked for a company that had a particularly anal President. He got on this “transactional accuracy” kick, and wanted to impress everyone with how important being 100% correct was. One day, a memo came out of his office. Soon afterward, the same memo came out, with a note on it about how there was a mistake on the first memo, and with the transactional accuracy thing, they needed to correct it, blah, blah, blah. So, everyone stopped what they were doing, and compared the two memos. No one could see any difference. People were going around the building asking if it was a joke, or a quiz. No work got done for quite a while. Eventually, someone noticed that there was a single punctuation mark misplaced. Whatever it was didn’t change the mean of the memo in any significant way. I’m sure that this impressed everyone with his skills as a manager…
My wife and I were watching Mad Men the other night, and there was a brief scene showing a black elevator operator, with another black fella remarking that the service elevator wasn’t working and asking if it was okay if he used the “regular” elevator.
My wife: “I’m so glad that Kennedy freed the slaves.”
(She’s as bright as a new penny, but history isn’t her strong suit.)
A friend of mine’s brother was trying to get the following Tuesday off work - this was on a Thursday or Friday IIRC. He said he would need that day off for his granny’s funeral, and his boss was puzzled that the funeral was days away rather than the 2 it usually would be. Well, friend’s bro said musingly, Granny’s pretty sick…
My own dear SO. He was watching “The Birdcage”, spellbound. He’s a huge Nathan Lane fan, BTW. The scene with Nathan’s character being coached by Robin Williams’ character on how to Be Butch “Men schmearrr their toast!!!” caused the SO to exclaim “Nathan Lane is such a great actor! He’s so convincing playing a gay man!!”
I had to point out to him that his screen idol, was in fact; gay.
My poor, poor SO put his head in his hands and wailed “**NATHAN LANE **is GAY???”
