It’s waiting there, lurking, and can strike at any moment…
I went with three of my warehouse co-workers to lunch at a nearby deli. Here are four literally blue-collar workers, muscular and hirsute in our sweat-stained uniforms with the little oval patch indicating our first names on the shirt. We order a hungry-man lunch and I get two large sandwiches for myself. Luke, referring to me, says, “Look at that plate of food Ex has. I can’t believe how much this guy eats.”
Big Bubba takes offense at what he perceives as a misdirected compliment. “I could eat twice as much as Ex,” he says.
Mac chimes in, “Why don’t Ex and Bubba have a contest.”
“Yeah,” says Bubba, then he squints at me, leans across the table and proudly exclaims, “I’ll eat you under the table!”
This morning at work I was talking with a co-worker about his kid’s science project which involved helium balloons and the loss of helium. We were having a discussion on the permeability of latex and how the helium gas can escape over time.
We met later in the day in the restroom, he at one urinal and me at the next one. We continued our converations based on some thoughts that I had while we did our business and left.
It wasn’t until later that I realized that we were standing in a public restroom, discussing the problems with latex being too porous to hold things in under pressure. It would explain the hasty retreat of some of the other patrons, anyways…
A friend of mine zinged me good one drunken evening. We were talking about the different types of cliques in high school that we had experienced. After revealing what kind of people we hung out with in HS, I jokingly said, “We used to eat guys like you for breakfast.”
My eighth grade religion teacher (parochial boys’ school) was going through the inevitable sex education course, and talking about the fact that some guys wake up in the morning with erections.
Father Jerry: If you find that this happens to you, it’s probably a good idea to sleep with the door closed.
Jimmy: Yeah, in case your little sister walks in.
Doug (in a little girl voice): Why don’t I have one of those?
Recently some professional golfers competed on network t.v. in what was called a “skills challenge”. They took turns attempting various shots to see who would be the most accurate. Greg Norman pitched a shot over a pond to within eight inches of the cup. The remaining contestants were waiting to hit as the announcer admiringly asserted “It’s going to be hard to beat Norman’s eight inches.”
We were discussing maturity and the use of nudity (set protocols, releases and the like) in filmmaking in an advanced film production class and something got us giggling. My professor responded “now now, we’re all adult filmmakers here”.
During my teaching phase, a female Maths teacher colleague told me this story:
She had finished the work for the day and had set the homework and was walking around the room, helping students who were having difficulty. One particular male student, frustrated at not being able to gain her assitance soon enough for his liking began to hit his ruler on his desk, hoping to attract her attention. Angered by the noise he was making, she rounded on him and shouted “There is no point in banging so hard, you are not going to make me come any faster!!”. Quite how she managed to live that one down, I’ll never know…
When I worked at OfficeMax we stored extra merchandise above the main shelves. To get to these areas we had to climb ladders which rolled around on wheels. Whenever we had a lot of stuff to put up there (or take down) it was best to have two people do it, as doing it yourself would mean going up and down the ladder a million times, making the job take much longer to do. One day a co-worker and I were getting ready to put some merchandise up there. Out loud, he said "Do you want to be on top or the bottom?. After I told him what that sounded like he changed the way he phrased this question.
I think I already told this story somewhere in another thread, but:
Back in the aesthetically challenged '70s, we were sitting down to dinner. My older brother was dressed up for a date, wearing a scarf as a tie. My mother, observing his table manners, advised him not to lean so far over his plate, “or you might get your Ascot in your dinner.”
We still drag that one out at family dinners…
(Speaking of the aesthetically challenged '70s, I took my daughter to see Apollo 13 back when it was in the theaters. She asked if the movie took place at Holloween. I had to explain to her that, no, that’s how the kids dressed back then. She didn’t believe me.)
My mom and I were at a restaurant the other day, and our waiter was really handsome and had long hair. After he took our order and walked away, my mom jokingly said, “I’d go out with him.”
I answered (thinking about his hair and how I’d prefer it shorter), "I’d like to give him a little trim."
My mom says, “Oh, that too!”
That’s when I understood what I had said. They nearly had to serve my dinner to me under the table.
In 6th grade, our P.E. coach always started off by having us line up in rows and leading us through some calisthenics (sp?). This usually consisted of jumping jacks and ‘windmills’, where you stand, feet apart, and alternate touching each foot with the opposite hand. Being the 6th grade, it often took a few minutes for everyone to quite down, take the proper stance, and pay attention. One particularly hot day, practically no one felt like moving around too much, and the poor guy tried for several minutes to get everyone in the proper postion to do our windmills, to no avail. Finally, frustration got the best of him, and he shouted, “Come on people! Spread your legs and make Coach happy!”
As you might guess, this did not succeed in bringing order to the class.
During a pep assembly in junior high our assistant vice principal was giving us a rundown of school sports so far that year. When it came to girl’s volleyball, this statement gave everyone the unstobbable giggles: “We appreciate all the girls that have tried out this year, but we’ve still got a lot of holes to fill.”
Assembly over.
This is the same guy that also said (in another year) that the assistant/studen teachers so far had been “really big assets”. I think he almost missed the “t” as he said “assets” and tried to work it in, but he was talking so hurridly we didn’t hear it anyway.
In court, when the judge is determining the voluntariness and understanding of a guilty plea, one of the standard questions is how much school the defendant has completed. I was in State Court (which only does misdemeanor cases) one day, and there are a lot of people there who plead guilty without an attorney.
One 18-yr-old girl, who was easily 8 3/4 months pregnant, waddled up to the microphone to enter a plea to shoplifting. The judge went through all of the questions he usually asks, then he got to "How far did you go in school?" She replied, "Heh. All the way!"
We had to take a 5-minute recess.
