I remember as a kid being with my mom trying to buy some jeans at Sears. The jeans were originally $14 but were on a 50% off rack. The girl rang them up for $14 and my mom told her they should be half off. The girl said “So that would make them…???” my mom blinks audibly and patiently says “Seven dollars.” and the girl turns back to the register, then stops and says “Wait. The price is $7 or it’s $7 off?”
One of my pet peeves when I worked at a theater was people who would pick up film buzzwords or terms and throw them around without even bothering to find out what they mean. I had no problem explaining to someone what it meant when a film was being shown in 70mm format (the film itself is 70mm wide, twice as wide as the 35mm that films are usually shown at so that the projected image is twice as clear because there is half as much enlargement. Think of blowing a wallet size picture into an 8x10 and then blowing a 5x7 into an 8x10…the one from the 5x7 will be far less grainier.) Anyways, some dork called up once wanting to know if a certain film was being shown on our 70mm screen! I laughed and told him, “No!” When he wanted to know why not I told him that 70mm refers to the film size, not the screen size; a 70mm screen would be about as big as a Post-it note. He told me “If you don’t know what I’m talking about just say so!” and slammed down the phone, lol!
"Hi, I’m Troy McClure! You may remember me from such medical films as “Alice Doesn’t Live Anymore” and “Mommy, What’s Wrong with That Man’s Face?”
Parents to Children:
Do you want to get slapped?
Look at me when I’m talking to you…don’t look at me like that!
Do you think I’m made of money?
Who do you think you are?
Act your age!
Where did you lose it?
I heard this one on the radio:
A woman approached the checker at a local supermarket and proceeded to offload her groceries onto the belt. As she and the checker went over her receipt, she noticed that one of her items had not been discounted: a box of Tampax. The checker got on the overhead and said, “Price check on Tampax, aisle 7.”
As the line grew, the haggard clerk finally appeared at the counter, leaning over behind the checker and asked breathlessly “Do you want the kind you hammer in, or just the ones you push in with your thumb?”
The woman, the checker, and the first couple of patrons in line stared, agog.
“You did say, thumbtacks, right?”
An acquaintance of mine earnestly commented on another friend of Korean descent who’d just left, ‘I wonder if they have a harder time seeing…’
My ex had these friends that he grew up with down east and the guy’s wife gave new meaning to … is anybody home?.. we were all camping one weekend and i was cooking, she was flicking specks of dirt off her white sweatshirt and telling us about her new ice packs, a topic which immediately made the rest of us raise an eyebrow.
She said that she had gone into Canadian Tire to get them and they didnt come with instructions (these are the ones that you throw in the freezer). She asked a clerk at the store who told her that yes, these ones hadnt but he head heard that the ones at London Drugs came with instructions. She drove half way across the city to the London Drugs to get those ones and they didnt have instructions either.
The three of us were laughing so hard, I thought I was gonna bust. She truly did think she needed instructions for these silly things.
We are, each of us angels with only one wing,and we can only fly by embracing one another
The only question that really, really gets me has to be when I’m at work, standing behind the counter, dressed nice, wearing a name tag, and having someone walk up to me and ask, “Do you work here?”
A friend of mine and I were in a bar trying to figure out the puzzle where you have 12 identical looking coins, but one is counterfeit and it weighs either more or less than the other coins. Using 3 weighings on a balance scale, determine the fake coin. The waitress wanted to help solve the problem too. Her first question… “Well, what denomination are the coins?”
I once worked at an stadium in the concessions. There, I had many interesting exchanges, such as:
Guy: “Do you have chap-stick?”
Me: “No, just food and drinks”
Guy: “No, I don’t mean to buy it, I mean, do you have any I can use?”
Me: “Eeuwww! No!”
Guy: “Well, can you check in the back? maybe someone working at the grill has some”
Me: “No, but you should go to the men’s room. You’ll find the chap stick right next to the public toothbrush on a string”
He actually scurried off towards the men’s room.
Drunks, however, provided the most stupidity.
One night at an AC/DC concert, we weren’t serving any alcohol so people would presumably be less wild and riot-prone. This drunk (trust me, everybody arrived drunk and stoned anyways) comes up to me and orders a beer.
Me: Sorry, no beer tonight. Wer’e not serving alcohol.
Drunk: Oh, that’s cool. I’ll have a Jack Daniels instead.
We also had to wear these cheesy badges with our name on it, which had to be worn on the right side of your chest. Great. This drunk pervert comes up and stares at the badge for a minute, then asks “So what’s the other one called?”
Man, that was the hardest minimum wage I’ve EVER earned!
One of my buddies recently asked me “Why do you go unconcious when somebody hits you in the head? And WHY is it when you hold your breath for too long you go unconcious?”
Oh good LORD that’s funny! The very idea! (I wish I could think like that on my feet.)
Trust me, this is about one of two or three times in my life that I said anything remotely clever on my feet. The sucky thing is, nobody I knew was there to hear my wit.
This was back when I was in elementary school. Around when I was 10. It was snowing here in surburban Washington, so they closed school.
At around 11am, my friend calls me and asks, “Did they close school, today?” (he wasn’t kidding)
My mom wished that I had told him, “No, the teacher’s wondering where on earth are you?”
I wish I had said, “I hope you weren’t sitting in class for three hours by yourself, before you decided to call.”
When I was a lass in about 3rd grade, attending Our Lady Of Perpetual Guilt Elementary School, I noticed Sr. Michael Francis ( her name, really) wearing a plain gold wedding band. This bothered me for some time, finally, I raised my hand and asked a totally non-relavant question to whatever it was she was teaching.
“Umm, How come you are wearing a wedding band?”
The sister responded, " To show that I am married to Jesus."
Me, after a long pause, " But so is Sr. Annunciata and Sr. Herman Goerring."
“Yes,they are married to Christ as well.”
Me, “Isn’t that bigamy?”
(I use to tell this saying, " Isn’t that illegal." because that is how I learned what the word meant, but it is much funnier this way.)
Naturally, this kind of independant thinking put me on the fast track for the rest of my formal education to have the religion teachers to fail me anyways, on moral princepal, that it would save time at the end of the semester.
WallyM7: When the teacher erases the blackboard, each particle of chalk experiences a rapid, localized entropy gain, such that its local axis of time is no longer determinable from outside the dust cloud’s event horizon.
Fortunately for the numbers, this does not matter; they persist as interference patterns in the minds of the beholders.
My favorite stupid situation - contemplating the objective nature of reality while being inferfered with by other people who hold opinions similar to the following, about objects they happen not to be standing close to (items quoted without permission):
Democritus, to reality: “One of these days, I’m going to CUT YOU INTO LITTLE PIECES!”
Reality, to particle physicist: “Oh, you were expecting an ELECTRON there? Sorry, my mistake.”
Then there’s the one about two cosmologists standing outside at night and wondering whereabouts in the Universe it might be the case that light becomes so heavy it can’t escape the pull of gravity.
The mapping between these jokes is left as an exercise for the reader.
I had been having difficulties with a man who delivers pine straw to us in the summer and fall…he calls me last week and asks me what our phone number is…I wanted to say SO bad, ‘it’s unlisted’. I refrained and repeated the number…he thanked me and hung up.
I got the pine straw later the same day, he told me he’d call again before he arrived. I watched him put the straw in the garden, the phone rings and I go to answer, it’s him, saying he is in the front yard…oh my…
At the health club my friend Judi and I belong to, they have these pigeonhole-type shelves outside the locker rooms in which people can put their locker keys while exercising. One day after finishing her workout, Judi went to get her key, but it wasn’t in the pigeonhole where she’d left it. Thinking it might have been knocked onto the floor or something, she went up to the front desk to see if someone had turned it in. She got to the desk just in time to hear a woman say to the receptionist, “Um, I have a problem. Somebody moved my key to a different pigeonhole, and now it doesn’t work in my lock.” Judi said to her, “I think you must have picked up my key by mistake.” The woman just looked at her blankly, and Judi had to explain to her that the key she was holding didn’t work in her lock not because it had been moved, but because it wasn’t her key. Judi told me later that the woman never really seemed to understand what had happened.
Classics from the tour guides at the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa:
“How much do these buildings weigh?”
(Usually towards the end of the guided tour): “What is the name of this church again?”
(From (English) Canadians, upon being shown the House of Commons Chamber): “Where does the President sit?” (This question would be legitimate in French, since président is the translation for “Speaker”.)
Dee da dee da dee dee do do / Dee ba ditty doh / Deedle dooby doo ba dee um bee ooby / Be doodle oodle doodle dee dohhttp://members.xoom.com/labradorian/
Common question from tourists (American) in Alaska:
Do you speak English?
Do you take American money?
What is your national anthem?
Why are your flying so many American flags? (Actually, this in usually more of a comment–“I think it’s wonderful that you fly the American flag to welcome us”).
I want to know what I did with my other shoe…long story, < giggle > I had it on at one point, next thing I know it’s all off, then I get home and can’t find one shoe…dayum his Corvette was a difficult ummmmmmmm car to ummmmmmmmmmmm you know, but he lives in Denver I lives in C Springs…spose I must drive up and retrieve my other shoe ROFL.
Okay, so once I accidentally went to see the movie Titanic and I got to sit in front of the Stupid People. The first stupid thing they did was order their children to close their eyes during the Kate Winslet Breast Scene.
The second stupid thing was after some of the women have been evacuated, and the Unsinkable Molly Brown (did I remember her name right?) take a look at the slowly sinking liner, and says, “There’s something you don’t see every day.”
Mrs. Stupid asks, “So what was it that she saw, anyway?”
Any similarity in the above text to an English word or phrase is purely coincidental.