I would, but that would be the story of my whole life.
Even though it wasn’t me, I’ll share this story. My husband and son agree it’s a funny one.
So, I was sitting in the garage watching my husband and son (referenced above) build a speaker box for son’s truck. They were being careful, sanding and gluing and painting pieces and what not. The box was looking good. Just as they are getting ready to glue in the last piece, I cleared my throat and said “Guys, don’t you think that actually putting the speaker inside the box before you glue it shut would be a good idea”?
They were both very embarrassed and no they have not ever lived it down…thank you very much!
The girl had to point this out to them…he he he.
Boyfriend and I were standing outside the movie theater chatting and trying to decide what to do with the rest of our night. A car pulled up very near us and the guy in the driver’s seat started waving. He looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place him, so I half-heartedly waved, figuring it was someone I knew. This went on for a few minutes, with me awkwardly waving and trying to figure out why he was staring at me. Only then did my boyfriend realize we were standing in front of the board that had all the movie times and the guy was trying to see it. :smack:
You guys are making me feel much better.
Yumblie: I make mistakes teaching all the time. A few weeks ago I went an entire day without making any mistakes in lecture (that I know of, ha ha), and I was like, wow! That doesn’t happen very often!
Yesterday I got most of the way through a Newton’s 2nd law problem on the blackboard before I realized I’d forgotten to add in the vertical component of one of the forces. Brilliant.
When I was 15 and knew everything in the universe, I was having my argument du jour with my 25 year old brother, who decidedly knew everything in the universe.
It was pretty heated, our yelling back and forth about god knows what.
I finally yelled at him, " Your not om-ni-po-tent."
He burst out laughing and said, " It’s Om-nip-eh-tent, you dweeb."
I’m pretty risk-averse about the sort of thing — I’m (unfortunately) on rather constant guard to avoid looking stupid. That doesn’t always stop me, though.
Much of my kitchen-related knowledge came from the Food Network, which at point in my life I watched far too often. (I got better.) Not having prior knowledge of convection ovens, I somehow got the idea that they were used in baking desserts — and called “confection ovens”. Can’t recall how it came up in conversation with my SO, but she thought it was hilarious; years later she still teases me.
(Happily I have a retort: the time she told me that two people she knew slept together. Literally.)
must have been a bandpass box.
I’m not a serious golfer meaning I’m not all that good because I don’t really put in enough playing time to be any good (but I do okay as I played long enough). In my earlier golfing days there were times when my balls were pre-programed to hit any body of water nearby; I kept and used a lots of crappy balls if I see water anywhere because they were more than likely going in there anyway.
Once a friend of ours got some of us (they are all fair to very good golfers) into a well known private course through his company connection. It’s a really nice course you see pros and serious players and not quite like a public clubs. At one hole my ball ended up in the rough of an adjacent fairway. When I went to my ball and there was this guy looking for his ball and he said, “Is this your ball?” I said, “I think so.” Then he said, “Are you playing a range ball???” as one of my friend came by to help me find my ball.
Apparently I didn’t bother to swap to a better ball after I survived the last hole with water hazard. My friends still tease me.
I’ve done this sort of thing a couple times, but this one came to mind immediately.
I was on a mall-dinner-movie date with my high school boyfriend when I was around 16 – this would have been around 1986 or so. A guy I had gone to school with walked by wearing his varsity football jacket. I noted the number on the sleeve – 82 – and turned to my BF and said, “Man, I hate it when jocks wear their varsity jackets years after they graduate.”
BF: :dubious:
Dogzilla: Oh wait. That’s his football number, isn’t it?
He at least gave me credit for recognizing that I’d said something idiotic before he had to call me on it.
I was 17 years old working in a hat shop in Gatlinburg when I noticed a woman using an umbrella on a beautiful sunny July day. I was standing outside the store chatting to a friend and made a comment to him about how it wasn’t raining and why she had her umbrella up. She heard me, and turned and said, “If you had skin cancer like I do you would be using an umbrella too.” I felt like an absolute moron.
Ok, 2 stories that spring to mind:
I was staying in a backpacker’s in rural Australia, I’d been there a few weeks, and the manager had taken to only calling in every few days, rather than being on site constantly (partly because of his very cute 3 week old baby)- and now the big group that had been there for a few days had left, I was the only person staying. So, I decided have a nice hot shower, and relax in my pyjamas. And locked my key and phone in my bedroom.
In the end, I wound up going to the local phone box in my boots (conveniently left outside) and PJs, and phoning the only number I could remember that might be able to help- the police emergency number.
They weren’t very amused, but they did manage to call the manager and get him to come round and let me back in…
Another embarrassing one, on the same trip, was when a friend I was staying with lent me his car to drive into town, while he was away. It was a beat-up old banger, and on the way back, it was just going sooo slowly, and sounded terrible if I tried to speed up at all. So I was crawling along, when a car pulled over in front of me, and the friend’s housemate got out- I explained what the problem was, and he cheerfully got in, and started it up to see if he could work it out.
Then he took it out of first gear.
My only feeble defence was that the previous car I’d driven was my cousin’s automatic- but my car was manual, as was every single one I’d driven before!
Driving through town at night we get a blackout. All the lights are out. I stop at the traffic lights until my friend says “Boo, you are not waiting for the lights, right?” Who? Me?
After weeks of suggesting that I take my top off to help a friend transport his washing machine I finally figure out I should be suggesting to take the top off MY JEEP. Two addled brains are required for this one. The only way he could make sense of my bizarre offer was that I would be flashing my tits to passing pickup drivers in some sort of desperate get-this-machine-out-of-here scenario.
More power cuts: No problem, I’ll just flop down on the couch and turn on the fan.
After a college friend and I moved on with our lives in separate parts of the country, we stayed in touch and kept the friendship going. Several times a year, she would fly into my city and ask me to pick her up at the airport and drive her to different relatives’ homes, where weddings, showers, and other family get-togethers were taking place. I wasn’t invited; didn’t expect to be. Most of our catching up was on these drives. Occasionally we’d stop at a restaurant, if there was time.
I lived near the airport, and her family was in the opposite suburb, so often each trip would be 50 to 100 miles. I didn’t mind. She was a good friend and I figured she’d do the same if/when I came to her city.
(sorry for that long lead in)
So one time, she was flying in from one coast and her father was flying in from the other. I’m in the Midwest. After much phoning and planning, I picked her dad up at one gate, then her at another. All of us were in my car, late in the evening, driving about 50 miles to an aunt’s house, when her dad said from my back seat: “Here, let me give you some money.” Like an idiot, I assumed he was talking to me. I say “Oh, that’s OK…you don’t need to do that.”
I was wrong.
He was giving money to his daughter, my friend. They ignored my comment and let me be embarrassed in peace. Later on, though, I felt like a different kind of idiot.
A few months after this experience, I was in her city, on a business trip. My boss drove our rental car to the airport for his return trip and I was to fly home the next day. My friend had invited me to stay overnight at her place. She and her husband were on vacation and we had a nice evening. I bought their dinner.
The next morning, her husband dropped me off at a nearby hotel so I could take a shuttle to the airport. It never occurred to either of them to drive me to the airport. After that, whenever they (or she) called for me to pick them up at the airport in my city, I said I was busy.
Probably “Weimaraners are birding dogs” isn’t common enough knowledge among non-dog people to count as stupid, but I sure felt like an idiot.
Is it weird that that made me smile?
A few years ago, I was sitting in the middle of a meeting with our tech group, our marketing group and product development. We were discussing the best way to market electronically to our target audience. We decided to do an e-mail pilot and I hadn’t really been paying a whole lot of attention. We were throwing around ideas on how to track its success when I just had to pipe up and ask, “Well, would it make it easier to include a self-addressed stamped envelope? I mean, they’d have no reason not to respond then.” :smack:
Everyone stared at me (justifiably) like I’d grown an extra head. I kind of wish that’d been the case. At least I wouldn’t have felt quite so stupid, or would’ve had something to distract them.
Just a moment ago, while reading this thread. 
Felt like making a quick cup of instant soup. Got the soup packet out of my [del]food stash[/del] desk drawer. Put the packet on my desk. Got up and walked to the break room, got a bowl and then thought: Hmm. When making soup it helps to have the soup with you.
I have a funny story about a word whose definition I was wrong about for years.
I read an Agatha Christie novel when I was 8 or 9 about a guy who got drowned in a galvanized bucket. The bucket was described as wider around the bottom than the top, which prevented him from tipping it over (like this). So for like 6 years I thought that “galvanized” meant “bigger on bottom than on top.” I had a loud argument with my mom over the definition of that word when I was about 14. At a flea market. I was very embarrassed when I looked it up in the dictionary that night. She used to tease me about it all the time (because I was hardly ever wrong with that kind of severity, lol).
She even brought it up at our senior honors dinner in front of the teacher I had chosen to escort me… my AP English teacher D:
I have tons of these sorts of things…
I used to think that the ~ key on a keyboard was called “the melon key” and that the ~ itself was called a “melon.” I relayed this bit of info to many people and surprisingly no one called me out on it because I guess computers were new and nobody really knew what that key was anyway. I only thought it was melon because on a url once I saw /~melon/, and my brain put the two things together…
I used to think the word facade was pronounced “Fake-Aid” and that it was an entirely different word from the spoken version of facade (the figure of speech). I knew what facade meant when speaking (a deceptive front), but whenever I saw it written I always thought it literally meant the front of a building, even when it didn’t make sense in the written context. I never connected the two words together until years later.
One summer I went to a department store wearing a sundress and panties (and shoes). Walking down an aisle, I became aware panty elastic had finally given out and they were slipping down around my knees. Grabbed the nearest shirt, ducked into the dressing room, removed defective undies, rolled them up in a ball, stuck them in my purse. Left the store, stuffed them into the trash can outside. Got in my car, realized I really, really couldn’t go through my day panty-less. Went back in, bought a package. Went back out planning to put on a pair in the car when OMG I don’t believe it, I ran into a school friend of my daughter’s who asked if I would give him a ride home because his car wouldn’t start. Told him sure, hop in, I forgot to get something in the department store and would be right out… Opened the trunk of my car, surreptitiously took out a pair of panties, stuck them in my purse, went back in the store - shirt - dressing room - put them on - back out to car. Drove school friend home. Feeling like a proper idiot all the way. (and I hate the word panties!)