Yesterday was my niece’s first birthday. The family gathered at my mother’s house, along with a few of my sister’s friends.
One of the friends arrived late. Without a word to any of us, the girl marched through the living room, and up the stairs. My sister was up there changing the baby, so none of us gave it a second thought. (Beyond, of course, the immediate thought of how rude it was not to greet your hostess.)
There were a lot of people there, so we sort of lost track of people coming and going. My sister came back down stairs, and we all gathered round for cake and gifts.
After a while, my mother frowned and said, “Do you hear something?” She got up, and went upstairs. She came down a few minutes later. The expression on her face was a mixture of surprise, and vague amusement. She pulled me aside and whispered in my ear.
“That girl who went upstairs earlier? You won’t believe it, but *she’s in the shower!” *
“No!” I gasped. She was right: I *couldn’t * believe it. I edged my way over to my sister and asked her about the girl. “She’s Amy’s friend,” she told me. “I invited Amy, but I didn’t know she was bringing someone.”
The icing on the cake was the condition in which the girl left the bathroom. When my mother went up there later, she reported that the girl had left wet towels all over the floor. She had also apparently helped herself to my sister’s toothbrush, because it was suspiciously damp, and had taken all of the toiletries out of the cabinet in search of ones she wanted to use.
Everyone had gone when we finally discovered this. There was nothing to do but sit down and laugh. The unmitigated gall it takes to “make yourself at home” in such an overt manner stirs something akin to a grudging admiration in me. That girl is as bold as brass, as my grandma would say.
Ever had a situation like this, in which someone’s rudeness was so over-the-top that you were waffling between awe and amusement?
I can’t honestly say I’ve ever come across anything that compares in any real sense to that amazing tale.
I have a friend with a legendary lack of propriety, who’s very much a “make yourself at home” kind of guy like that. You either get used to it or isolate him completely – a surprisingly large number of people tolerate it because he’s a very good-looking and talented fellow.
One night I took him & his girlfriend out for dinner at an Indian restaurant, and for some reason he took it into his head that he wanted a strawberry margarita. Naturally, it was not featured on the drinks menu, but neither this, or the pleading from myself & his girlfriend could dissuade him from trying to convince the waiter to bring him one – all night!
“You’ve got strawberries, right? Because you’ve got strawberry lassi. And you must have a blender back there, because you need to puree the daal. It doesn’t have to be the right type of glass, as long as there’s salt on the rim.” “We have no tequila, sir.” “Could you get some?” :smack:
Not really much of a comparison, but it still makes me giggle.
About 14 years ago someone knocked on the door, my mom answered it. It was someone who was looking for our neighbors.
My mom invited them in while she called the neighbors. ( it was the middle of winter) The neighbors were not home. She was just about to see them out the door when she looks and see a kid getting in to our refrigerator helping herself to a glass of milk.
She never did say anything to the woman or the child.
Damn, talk about brass balls. No one thought to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing? I’d have dragged her butt wet and shaking out of the shower and tossed her right out the door.
Why would you have to throw out eyeliner? Couldn’t you just wipe off the lipstick, too? Sorry, I don’t know make-up manners. As far as guys go, if there’s no hair on the soap, it’s all good.
You know, my mother was so shocked by what she had seen that I doubt she was thinking clearly.
As she told it to me, she heard the shower running, and that sound just didn’t compute. She could think of no reason why it should be. Somehow, it must have turned on accidently, or there may have been a plumbing problem . . .
She opened the door. The girl poked her head around the shower curtian, and just looked at her. Mom blurted, “Oh! Excuse me,” and backed out, closing the door behind her.
She said later that she should have at least said, “What the hell are you doing?” but at the moment, she was just so flabberghasted that all she did was walk back downstairs.
Nothing in your repitoir of manners prepares you for such a moment.
Using anyone else’s eyeliner, or any eye makeup, is a big no-no. You risk eye infections, like pink eye, and god knows what else. Eye-liner is considered a very personal item, much like using someone else’s toothbrush.
Wiping off the lipstick woldn’t have removed all traces of saliva. I’m only vaguely germ-phobic myself, but the idea of using someone else’s lipstick disgusts me. (That’s why I’ve consistently been astonished by women using the sample tube of lipstick in department stores. I was always taught that you tested the color on the back of your hand, but I’ve seen women paint their entire mouths with the germy things.)
Considering this girl needed grab any chance to shower, I have serious doubts about her personal hygiene. We weren’t taking any chances.
Thanks for clearing it up. I never thought of makeup as more than an accessory. I didn’t realize women viewed it as much more personal. Your explanation makes perfect sense. I didn’t consider the pink eye or cold sore factor.
Back in the summer of 1986, I had just moved into an apartment in Uptown, Minneapolis. A ‘gentrified’ neighborhood filled with young people.
We were on the second floor, with a stairs down to the front entry where our front door was. It was one of those mostly glass units. There was a third floor (illegal) unit, with an entry around the back.
One day I hear a knock on the door and go to answer. As I get to the turn in the stairs where I can see the front door, I see this 50-ish woman, who has now decided to throw her shoulder repeatedly into the door, jerking around the door knob, frantic to get in.
I, being a fairly big and intimidating guy, scream “what the hell do you think you are doing?” as I come racing down the stairs. She backs off, surprised, but doesn’t answer.
I get down there and open the door - just a crack - so that I can talk to her. She attempts to shove the door open and bodily push her way through me. Her @120 pounds vs. my @200 pounds, wedged in the doorway. I gave her about 2 seconds of this, then I shoved her backwards onto the porch.
At this the wild eyed confusion seemed to subside slightly and she asked where so-and-so was. “Sorry, she doesn’t live here.” “Yes, she does! WHERE IS SHE!” “No, Lady, she doesn’t. Go away. NOW.”
She started towards me again, so I said, low and slow “Don’t make me hurt you”.
She became increasingly frantic and demanded to know where so-and-so was. In what was verging on gibberish, the words “third floor” spilled out. I stopped her, told her that this was MY entrance, and that the third floor entrance was around back.
“Oh”
Later that day I had a brief chat with the third floor tenant about her psycho mother and how stupid that was of her to try to physically push past me into an unknown apartment. The girl laughed and said “yeah, my mom is nuts”.
There was the time my future sister in law decided she was going to be the Matron of Honor at my wedding. She decided this while I was changing into my wedding dress, and getting ready to walk down the aisle. Without telling me!
Then there was the time… actually it was the same day…
My sister in law’s brother, (who was NOT at the wedding), came to my wedding dinner ( along with his trashy girlfriend). This was a private dinner after the reception, just me and hubby, his parents, his 2 brothers and their wives. My sister and her family were supposed to be there, but my Mother in law *forgot * to invite them.
My husband has a friend, that whenever he’s at somebody’s house, he turns on the tv to watch whatever game is on. If there’s too much going on in the tv room, like a party, he’ll find another room with a tv, and make himself at home.
At my son’s 6th birthday everyone was having a great time. Lots of activities. Pin the tail on Nemo. Pinata. Ice cream cake. Kids running all over the house, playing and having fun.
Then one of the kid’s moms asked me, “Can we let Joshua watch a movie? He usually watches some TV at about this time and wants to now.”
WTF???
The only TV we have is in the middle of the living room, where there are dozens of kids actually interacting with each other. If I turned the TV, it would be a huge distraction and put a damper on all the great activities that were going on.
I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I was probably too polite in telling her NO.
If you’re son needs TV so badly that he can’t even enjoy a birthday party, then take him home!
Ooh! Ooh! I just remembered an egregiously rude anecdote.
When I moved into the (rental) house that I currently reside in, the previous tenants, a hippy-dippy couple, had left a bunch of their junk behind. Quite a bit-- not the least of which was an (as far as I know, non-functional,) deep-freeze in the basement, and several shabby sticks of furniture.
The least offensive-looking of these items was a full sized cherry wardrobe left in a recessed area in the room that I had selected as my bedroom. It had a note taped to the mirror on the door:
Okaaaay. Not too bad so far, if a bit of a pain-in-the-ass.
The thing is, arranging to have the guy come by and pick it up proves to be no simple task. I was working 9-5 at the time, as well as doing lights and projected visuals for a couple of local bands at night. Three times, I arranged it in the narrowly convenient time available to me. The first time that it was convenient for them was over a week and a half after I’d moved in. I told them I’d have it out on the porch for them. This was met with indignation from the woman: “We told you not to move it!! We’ll get someone to come in and move it for you.” I explained to them that I was quite capable of safely moving furniture and reminded them that while they may have grown used to thinking of the house as their own, the locus in which they had presumptiously stored their property for over a week was, after all, my bedroom, and I had no intention of letting any strangers past the threshold of the front door, much less into such a personal area. Besides this, I had moved the wardrobe as close as possible to the front door a couple of days after moving in, when I set about repainting the house to more closely suit my tastes, which didn’t happen to run to teal baseboards and diapered blue walls with purple stencils of cats, tulips, and handprints.
The first three attempts to coordinate the pick-up were pretty much identical: A call from Jeremy (at work) indicated they had someone with a truck who could come by that night. That night, I would wait as long as I could for them to show up, during which calls to Jeremy went to his answering machine. No answer, weak excuse the next day. I’d be late for my night-gig, and have to pay for a cab instead of getting a ride and help moving my gear like I usually did.
The first two times, I left the wardrobe on the porch on the off chance they came by. I got yelled at for that, though: (By the harpie wife. Jeremy was always apologetic and deferential.) “That’s a valuable antique! Don’t let it sit out at night!” This was ridiculous for several reasons:[ol][li]The way this house is insulated, there’s very little difference between the inside and the outside.[]If they’d merely come by and pick it up when they’d said they would, it wouldn’t be sitting out at night, would it?[]While it may have been a valuable antique at some point in its existence, the addition of six extra pressboard shelves, (each held in place by four nut-and-bolt assemblies which protruded a half-inch on either side of the exterior of the cabinet,) had done far more to devalue it than anything I could possibly inflict on it.[/ol]Anyway, after the third no-show I started to think they maybe were up to something weird. Was this an elaborate way of appraising my schedule to facilitate a future burglary? From casual conversation they knew I had quite a bit of gear. Locks were re-keyed.[/li]
The fourth attempt was a full month after I’d been living with this stupid wardrobe in my livingroom. To my astonishment, someone actually showed up. Hallelujah! Although he did have a truck, as he approached the house I was glad that I had another able-bodied friend around, because he was an elderly asian fellow and his daughter, who didn’t look like she’d last long in the removal business.
After he made it up the stairs, however, he simply looked the Home Depot-savaged cabinet over and said, “No, I don’t think I’ll buy it. She said it was in good condition.”
When Jeremy called back a couple of days later to reschedule, I told him that it had been taken away by the same people that I paid to cart off the rest of their crap.
Why would you have to throw out eyeliner? Couldn’t you just wipe off the lipstick, too? Sorry, I don’t know make-up manners. As far as guys go, if there’s no hair on the soap, it’s all good.