My wife does that jokingly some times. “Why did you drive into that lake?!”
One of my colleagues asked who they would recommend help them with a particular problem. I told him: “Joe, from maintenance.”
Now we had two maintenance guys, one black, one white. My colleague asked “Which one’s Joe?” I replied; “Joe’s the black man.”
One of my other colleagues was offended because I used race as a reference. That was several years ago, but I still think she was being over sensitive to the race issue.
Mom and Grandma; they’ve done it to pretty much everybody. A friend of Mom’s does it too.
Oh, you’re kidding!
One of my favorite jokes is about the obviously wealthy Southerner who asks the stewardess for a piece of ice.
About getting mad over stuff in a dream- I do, at myself.
I work in retail & every day, my job involves cleaning out the registers & turning in the bags of money to the office. Every once in a while, I’ll dream that somehow, I’ll either pocket or carry out a huge amount of money, discover it when I get home & try to figure out how to get it back to the store. Then I’ll wake up all flustered & have to reassure myself that I left all the money at the store & did not take any with me.
“You’re right, ma’am I could not possibly understand. In fact, ever since I lost both legs above the knee trying to save a child who ran onto a busy highway, I haven’t needed ANY leg room at all.”
Please to explain?
I’m guessing that once the guy said a few other words, he was able to adjust to the accent and understand the original question.
After doing something life-saving at work, my boss told me he owed me one. So I told him he could get me a nice 16-year old.
So I’m taken aside the next day and given a speech about off-colour jokes about sex in the lab. It took a while for me to figure out what I’d said that was so bad. So I sat there thinking for 20 seconds then come up with “Scotch! I meant a nice bottle of 16 year-old scotch!”
It was true, too.
I still don’t get it. Is Beeman’s an actual brand of gum? If so, what did Dave Hartwick think he was saying?
I’m pretty sure the nearly-cancelled vacation because of a braided afghan edges was another poster. Dinsdale, I think.
Yes, it is. It’s kind of rare to see it nowadays.
Too much wood and not enough screws, I’m guessing. 
I work in retail and I get that all the time. I say hello to everyone and some people say “NO!”, as if I am badgering them into buying something.
But did he think he was saying something else, or just didn’t understand the question? I’m trying and failing to make “Beeman’s Gum” into something dirty. 
Beware of Doug, that was some unexpected food for thought. You’re always so eloquent.
Last April my Uncle died, very unexpectedly, at just 30 years old. He had two young kids, one of which already didn’t really have a Mom, so it was a very tragic situation. My uncle was sort of like a jackass older brother to me–we never got along, but we grew up together, like siblings. It follows, then, that his mother, my grandmother, is like a second mother to me, and his kids like nieces and nephews. My first thought when she broke the news was that as a part of the family, I wanted to be there, supporting her and helping her with my four young cousins in any way that I could. She said she would love my company. I later saw my grandfather, and made him aware that I intended to stay for the week and help out however necessary. My mother was present and witnessed this. We were all okay.
My grandmother is disabled and the chaos of taking care of her four young grandchildren results in the their household being a total disaster area. She has fibromyalgia and often gets confused very easily, stops tasks in the middle of them and never goes back to finish. She was in particularly bad shape the week her son died. Complicating matters was my young bereaved cousin’s drug-addicted mother appearing out of nowhere and deciding she was going to stay with my grandmother, who loathes her. My grandmother asked me to clean out my dead uncle’s room and remove all prescription drugs and any court-related documents so this crazy woman wouldn’t steal them.
So all of this fallout hit me a lot harder than I thought. Seeing my grandmother and young cousins in so much pain was very hard. I ended up calling my Aunt (the stepsister of my uncle, though they are not close) for support. She lived halfway across the country but felt it necessary to come and help me help the rest of the family out. I told my grandparents this was the plan, they said that would be fine. My Aunt drove 12 hours straight by herself in order to come and be a support to the family.
Cut to the next morning, she calls from my other grandmother’s house and asks if we’re ready for her.
When I asked my grandparents if this would be okay, my grandpa says rather unexpectedly that he wants to wait before my Aunt comes over, because he’d like to clean first. I told him the point of my Aunt coming over WAS to clean, and he said that it really wasn’t our responsibility. When I relayed this message to my Aunt, she was confused, and asked to speak to my grandmother. My grandmother chats with her, gives a friendly little laugh and tells her she’s welcome to head right over.
Aunt comes over. She assesses the state of the house and decides that the most important thing will be to tidy up the kitchen in case people unexpectedly drop by after the funeral. My Aunt and I proceed to spend 8 hours cleaning my grandparents house. To give you an idea how bad it was, after 8 hours we got the front breezeway/kitchen looking presentable but by no means clean. We spend the day living and loving as best we can, sharing memories of my uncle, keeping the kids occupied, and finally my grandma decides she’s going to take us out for Chinese.
Unbeknownst to me or my Aunt, my grandfather is irate that we are cleaning his house. He’s so mad that he storms into the garage and calls my mother* on the phone and rants something to the effect of he can take this kind of behavior from his grandchildren (me) but he absolutely cannot tolerate it in his own children (my Aunt.) He then disappeared for the next several hours without saying a word to any of us about how he felt. Honestly he did not give a single clue that he was upset, or hurt, or anything.
*Know how to make a family situation worse? Involve my mother.
My mother calls my other grandmother and bitches to her about how disrespectful me and my Aunt apparently are for coming over and cleaning without asking my grandfather’s permission. My other grandmother calls my Aunt, informs her of the situation, and thus I realize my grandpa is really upset about this.
My grandpa might be a bit rigid, but we love the hell out of each other. I seek him out and when we have a moment alone I apologize to him for any hurt we may have caused. I explain that we just want to make things easier and not worse. My grandfather says he doesn’t understand why everyone is so upset about my uncle’s death, but he knows he’s not like the rest of us, he doesn’t get emotional about things, so he is just taking care of the practical stuff and trusts that me and my Aunt will be a support to my grandmother. In other words, he’s not mad anymore, and kinda glad we’re there.
I wish I could say everything was fine, then, and we spent the rest of the week in peaceful mourning, but no. My Mother turned the day of the funeral into a complete shitstorm of misery on top of the misery that already existed. Prior to the event she berated my Aunt for disrespecting Her Father, to the point that I had to talk my tearful Aunt out of leaving the state and never returning. Following the funeral, Mom turned her Fiery Rage of Judgment upon me, in which she basically invented her own version of events where I just showed up at their doorstep with no warning. It took me about three hours to get her to understand my Aunt and I were not complete selfish assholes. Mom claims that we all ‘‘put her in the middle’’ of this.
Thus is the story about how someone became offended that I cleaned her father’s house.
I wish I could really say it was the stress of my uncle’s death. But the truth is, this is my family at its best. I mean hell, at least we were all in one place! For a whole day!
At my old church there was a girl who was on crutches or in a wheelchair almost all the time, maybe all the time. So when her crutch was out of reach and we were all leaving, I scooted over and got it for her. Apparently I implied she was unable to do things for herself. At least that’s what I got from the huffy expression. I guess that one goes back to the dilemma of “oh, thank for being so nice” vs “I can open the darn door on my own!”
The one I used to be involved in all the time was people telling me how young I looked. I think the women especially thought they were being complimentary, but for a guy it comes close to “I would assume you are relatively inadequate.” I had a real problem with that.
Kiwis in bars are always fun.
I had a friend in grad school who was from New Zealand. He was a big, cheerful, gregarious guy who always wore shorts and flip flops even in the middle of winter.
A bunch of us were sitting around in a booth in this off-campus dive drinking cheap beer and complaining about the sorry life of a grad student. Sitting behind us was a group of undergrads, including this British chick who was really drunk and really obnoxious. Worse, she kept kicking the back of the booth for some reason, which got really annoying after awhile. So Mark the Kiwi leaned around and asked her to stop.
Oh. My. Fucking. God. The screaming! How dare he speak to her like that! How dare he make fun of how she talked! Fucking Yank bastard, she should slap his fucking face for insulting her like that!
Mark thought it was hilarious. I don’t think she ever figured out it was his natural accent.
I’ve done the same thing, but fortunately I managed to realize it was a dream before I started yelling at him. The weird thing was, even though I was aware it was a dream, and that he didn’t actually do anything wrong, I was still really pissed at him for a while. I ended up telling him “I’m sorry, you didn’t do anything, but you should probably not talk to me for a while.” I went and sat my myself until I calmed down, then I explained to him about the dream. It was such a weird felling being so angry at someone while at the same time knowing I had no good reason to be.
Some women I know would have resolved that dilemma by deciding that he must have done something, she just hasn’t yet decided what.
Cardinal – just ask first if something like that comes up again. You meant well but unasked-for help can come off as patronizing. Not that she couldn’t have told you that herself, but there it is.