MissTake, just imagine the joy you brought to the people who were there that day. Like a glorious ray of sunshine! 
Right? The worst part was that I had planned, after my question, to tell him that we appreciated the great risk that he and the other guys had taken in pioneering our exploration into space and have a nice memory of meeting him to tell my grandkids.
Then several years later when he went into space again on the space shuttle, I kept watching the coverage and beating myself up: “Dumbass. ‘Are you sure?’ Of course he was fucking sure. Idiot!”
But I guess it makes an even better story to tell the grandkids. 
ETA: Then again when he died a few years ago. Is he fucking sure? God, that was embarrassing.
I was at a lovely little festival in New Zealand, just a one day annual event, mostly locals, I’d only wound up there because I was staying with people involved in the organisation. There was just one stage which was basically a grassy arena, with grassy slopes going down to it, where everyone was sitting, and a flat patch in the middle. All very casual and friendly.
There was a big gap in the schedule, so everyone could stop and have lunch together, and a bunch of people, mixed ages from about 8 up, started a game of frisbee in the arena. Well, I’d already finished eating, and it was a lovely sunny day and I was in a good mood, so I figured I’d join in; I’d never thrown a frisbee before, but how hard could it be, right?
Frisbee comes round to me, I catch it OK, and go to throw it to the next person. Frisbee goes a wobbly three feet and flops to the ground. The other players laugh, good-naturedly, and tell me to have another go.
Frisbee goes a wobbly three feet, and flops to the ground, where it rolls a little.
Sniggers are heard from the crowd, quickly shushed, because everyone’s so nice.
One of the other players comes over and demonstrates how to hold it and throws it to someone else, who then throws it back to me, with a big smile. I fumble the catch and scramble to pick it up.
OK.
Frisbee goes about 5 feet and flops pathetically to the ground.
At this point I decide an audience of several hundred people maybe isn’t the optimum environment for anything other than humiliation right now, and sheepishly slink back into the crowd
I’ll have you know that I found this funny enough to read it out loud to my husband and I started laughing so hard I sounded like Muttley for multiple minutes and had it devolve into a coughing fit. Bravo!
Upon seeing this thread I immediately thought of Dan Aykroyd in DR DETROIT requesting that a lawyer exchange clothes with him, apologetically saying IIRC, “I don’t mean to humiliate you…” with the response, “You can’t humiliate me - I’m an attorney.” I was an applications and systems programmer before we were called Software Engineers. I have crudely mis-programmed 4-bit microcircuits with 256 bytes of RAM. I have been outsmarted by devices less intelligent than a gnat. I cannot be humiliated in any real way. I just smile sadly and shuffle off.
I had been dating a woman for a few weeks and offered to take her to a Grateful Dead show (at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View California). I had been seeing the Dead for about 5 years at that point and had seen them at Shoreline many times. As we drove there, I proudly bragged about how familiar I was with Shoreline and knew all the tricks for making it a good experience. One of which was parking at the movie theater a few blocks away rather than parking in the official Shoreline lot. This is because (a) the movie theater parking is free, unlike the Shoreline parking, and (b) getting out of the Shoreline lot can take forever (I’ve spent more than an hour in my car just creeping from my parking spot to the lot exit).
So we park at the movie theater, go to the show and have a great time. We walk back to the car, but oddly, it doesn’t seem to be where I parked it. We wandered around the lot for a while, then noticed a few other Deadheads doing the same thing. We all went up to the ticket counter, where we were informed that several cars had been towed.
The rest of the night was something of a nightmare. We got a ride in back of a pickup truck with a bunch of other Deadheads, to the junkyard where the car had been towed. We spent a good hour in a crowd of 20 or 30 other Deadheads at a locked gate, shouting at the junkyard guy, who was just loving the power he had over us. Finally I got my car back after forking over $200, and we drove home.
I felt like such a doofus for being responsible for this disaster. By the end of the night I was expecting that I’d never see her again, but she laughed it off and, in fact, we eventually married. We had a good story to tell anyway.
I love this and may have to steal it at some point.
A typical example of a simple program that can be embedded on a “4-bit microcircuit” with logical gates is the game of Tic-Tac-Toe, wired up to a 3x3 grid of lights. I’ve even done this as a homework assignment type of project for a digital systems class in college in the late 1980s.
Which reminds me: about a dozen years before this college class, I faced off at Tic-Tac-Toe against a chicken in a booth in an arcade.
I now know, that the game should always end in a tie, and that a microprocessor-programmed series of lights is what prompts the trained chicken to peck at the right squares. Occasionally the chicken makes a typo of sorts (a pecko?) and it may then be possible to win… But it’s pretty rare.
At the time, I had a never-lose, sometimes-win record at the game with my elementary school peers, so I gave it a go. Two games in and dammit, the chicken kept holding me off with a tie. I decided to play more “aggressively” and try to fake it out to break the stalemate (whatever that meant, it made sense to a fifth grader, OK?), with the result that the chicken beat me. Which is when my mom came by to fetch me out of the arcade.
Fortunately there wasn’t some kind of light or bell for when a human lost at Tic-Tac-Toe to the chicken, and I got out of there with my defeat unremarked.
But there. I have lost at Tic-Tac-Toe to a chicken.
Kinda thought that story was gonna wind up being about chicken shit bingo:
That’s hilarious.
(also, hiya, Purp. Long time no see.)
I was working for a company that was owned by a guy who looked just like an ape. In fact everyone called him “The Ape.” So one evening, after everyone else went home, a coworker and I were working on a special project, and decided to take a break. So I got up onto a table and basically acted just like an ape, grunting some of the words and phrases that the owner often used. Until I looked at the doorway, and saw the owner standing there, not happy at all.
And then there was the wedding of my morbidly-obese cousin. I was one of the ushers and was standing up front, waiting for her to march down the aisle. She was wearing lots of veils, and I said to one of the other ushers “She looks just like Cousin Itt from the Addams Family.” I had underestimated how my voice carried in that venue, and half the congregation heard me. Some people started laughing, but most were not amused.
Yeah, what’s up with that? If I am in a crowded venue and want to lean over to a buddy or to my wife and say something insulting or off color about someone just to break the monotony or lighten the mood, about 1/4 of a second before I say it, everyone in the room decides to become silent as if they all became monks at the time and took a vow of silence.
Then for some reason my voice booms all over the venue like a secret mike was turned on inside my lapel.
First trip o/s since forever, parked my car in the Long Term carpark at the airport.
Two weeks later at our hotel and packing bags for our return to Aus and I couldn’t find my car keys. Panic ensued.
Didn’t have a local sim, so tried to get friends etc via FB to contact our departure airport Lost and Found. No luck.
Finally got onto my son who lived 70km away…no car…to go to my house, break in, retrieve a spare key and then to make his way to the airport, another 110km away, in lieu of our arrival.
We landed exhausted after an overnight flight, my son was there with the spare key, we made it to the carpark and lo…the car was unlocked with my keys sitting on the front seat.
Friends and family have never let me live it down.
Oh, and the icing on the cake? Had a flat battery, and the roadside assistance fella got lost in his attempt to locate my stupid car.
Another foot in the mouth one by my mother that I was witness to.
I was about 6 and my sister 10 and mom was taking us for a walk in a state park through a dense forest down a winding path with plenty of tight blind corners.
Sis and I decide to play “jungle explorer” and convince mom to let us forge ahead out of visual sight but within shouting distance.
We were just out of her sight when we came upon a very obese couple traveling the opposite way down the path. Sis and I make eye contact with them and smile when we hear mom, who’s in jungle explorer play mode, yell out “hey kids, look out for the elephants!”. We were both mortified and passed them quickly then stopped on the path till they were out of sight heading towards mom. A second later we hear her her follow up shaken voice yell “and the lions and tigers too!”.