When I first started using the speech-to-text function on my phone I was curious as to what words it would recognize. Eventually, I got curious about curse words. Would it recognize them at all? If so, would it edit them by inserting an asterisk or typing “bleep” or some such?
I opened a text message box to one of my friends, hit the microphone icon and proceeded to turn the air blue with a string of every curse word I could imagine. The software recognized every one, and they appeared on the screen exactly as I had said them, no editing. Understand, I rarely curse here or IRL. This friend had probably never heard me say much more than “hell”. I smiled to myself and hit “send”.
He called me fairly shortly thereafter concerned that I was exceedingly drunk and may need help, which is also pretty funny because I don’t drink very often and haven’t been drunk in the 10 or so years he’s known me. The cursing was so out of character, though, that he thought anything was possible.
I once texted my gf, “we have to talk”. When she got home she looked all somber, took my hand, and said let’s talk. I said, “how was your day?” Yeah, I jsut wanted to chat and we’d both been very busy that week. I felt bad seeing her tears of relief.
I’ve mentioned before how, out of boredom, I texted dozens of my contacts: “WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU???”
People assumed they’d stood me up. I got replies apologizing and offering to come get me. No, I repeatedly explained, I’m just curious where you are.
The friend in question is my sister. We were silly teenagers, but I think I may have been a little bit sillier.
Just for gits and shiggles, I forced myself to start chuckling. I was pretty convincing, I think. I guess it was technically a fake laugh, but it was pretty good.
She hears me across the room and looks at me funny, but smiles a bit. Because laughter is contagious, right?
Her reaction feeds my mood. The fake chuckle becomes authentic, which makes her start to chuckle, which makes me laugh in earnest, which makes her start to laugh along, which makes me start to howl in the most powerful laughter I’ve ever had, before or since, which makes her do the same.
After about 3 minutes of genuine no-kidding ROFL laughter, she does the inevitable and (amidst gales of laughter) asks what we’re laughing about.
Well, there was the time I went with a friend who was buying a new bookshelf stereo with a CD player.
We went back to his place with it, and he unpacked the unit, very excited, and plugged it in. So he’s fussing with the controls and I looked in the box and spotted the remote control, which he had overlooked. You can probably guess the rest.
I put the battery in, and when he tried to operate his new toy I did everything possible to frustrate him. He’d hit play, I’d hit stop. He’d try to switch to radio, I’d turn the whole thing off. He’d try the CD again and I’d skip tracks or turn on the radio feature, or eject the CD.
Now, Bubba wasn’t a guy with an excess of patience, and he was getting redder and angrier by the second. I was able to stop him just as he picked up the thing to smash it on the floor. He was very unhappy with me, to say the least.
I’m about as straight as they come; but love to make people react.
My best friend and I were at a conference (with both our wives), and saw each other across the common area of the hotel. I shouted “DARLING” at the top of my lungs and proceeded to run, in slow motion, across the room towards him.
Our wives were walking in front of him and without looking up, split apart so we could run, in slow motion, into each other’s arms.
The looks we got for the rest of the weekend were awesome!
In university, I had a steady GF (now my wife). I also knew another woman very well, who was good friends with both of us. She was Indian by ancestry, and I had no romantic interest in her whatsoever.
One day, I met up with both of them, and was chatting, when another old friend of mine happened to run into us. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. As we chatted, the two women picked up that he was obviously trying to work out what the relationship between the two women and myself was - and by some sort of telepathy, they decided to prank him (or rather, one started it, and the other went along) - by pretending they were both going out with me - simultaneously.
The joke got more elaborate as it went on. The Indian woman pretended that we were part of a Hari Krishna like cult, and I was a sort of Guru. Then my GF offhand mentioned that we were planning a group wedding, with a couple of other brides … my old friend, who was pretty conservative, clearly bought it hook, line and sinker. Of course I went along with it too.
It was sorta cruel, as the poor guy had done nothing whatsoever to deserve pranking, but the look of befuddlement on the guy’s face was hilarious - none of us spilled the beans, and when he finally went on his way we stayed silent until he was out of earshot and then laughed until tears rolled down our faces. Oddly enough, I ran into him again a couple of years later, and he didn’t bring it up, and I had no heart to tell him.
[Of course this was twenty years at least before shows like “sister brides” made it clear that people like that actually exist in some places, and so maybe our joke wasn’t as absurd as we thought]
I was with my GF. We were on our way to a concert. We had to stop and pick up a friend of hers. When we get there, her friend isn’t ready and needs about thirty minutes (Rude).
So we decided to go grab a quick bite to eat. As we pulled away from her friend’s apartment, my GF says to me very sternly: “REMEMBER WHERE THIS PLACE IS AT. I DON’T WANT US GETTING TURNED AROUND AGAIN.” (There was some trouble finbing her friends home)
So we found a Sonic, ate, and as I was pulling out of Sonic on my way back to her friends house, I turned to my GF and said: “Where’s your friend’s place at again?”
If looks could kill, I’d be one dead MF-er right now! Lucky for me I knew exactly where to go.
A good friend of mine has a rather adversarial relationship with machines. They break, injure him, or otherwise engage in shenanigans when he interacts with them, sometimes for no apparent reason. The poor guy just has a murphyonic field. I seem to have the opposite effect, though it might just be contrast–from his perspective, it looks like machines cooperate with me when they won’t work for anyone else.
Naturally, I abuse this perception for my own entertainment.
On one particular occasion, I was repairing a CD changer (yes, a long time ago) when he walked in. I made a point of pressing a button to make it clear that the machine wasn’t working. I laid both hands flat on the exposed workings for a moment, then took them away and pressed the button again. It worked perfectly–the machine was “healed”. (In reality, I had used the base of my thumb to push a displaced gear into the proper position.) He stared for a moment, then turned and walked back out, pinching the bridge of his nose like he had a headache. Whatever he’d come into the shop for was completely forgotten.
At a previous job I had a 20-something designer working for me. I’d just finished a bag of chips or snack cookies when he came to my desk. We started a conversation and I spotted a random crumb lying on my desk, stuck my finger to it, and put it in my mouth. I looked up and he was staring; “Did you just pick something up off your desk and EAT it??”, uh…yeah, “You do that a lot??”, uh…sometimes… Took him about 5 minutes to get back on track with what he came to ask about. Gotta try that again sometime with the right person…
I’ve also had good results with occasionally eating starch “popcorn” used as a packing material.
In high school I hacked into a friend’s AOL account and browsed the web signing him up for mailing lists. In the act his mother sent rapid fire IMs saying “shouldn’t you be at school?” “What are you doing at home?” “Why are you online?” “Did you sleep in this morning?” “ANSWER ME!” “You’re in big trouble!” “What are you doing?” I remembered it has been his brother’s birthday party the weekend before so I responded “masturbating and eating leftover birthday cake” and after a long silence “hey, YOU asked” and logged out.
Last Saturday my girlfriend and I upgraded our phones to Galaxy S7s. Girlfriend realized that she could assign specific notification sounds to texts from specific individuals, so she assigned a screaming goat to her daughter.
On Monday, Daughter waited until Girlfriend was at work, then started texting her left and right. Girlfriend’s co-workers thought it was hysterical. But when she was on the phone with a client and suddenly the screaming goat went off, she had to silence her phone.
Gotta try that again sometime with the right person…